It may be no more than an ironic coincidence that I had just finished reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a moving narrative woven around a family of Chinese musicians by Madeleine Thien—a compelling fictional critique of the Cultural Revolution, with its crude and class-reductionist understanding of ‘culture’, its indiscreet rejection of everything considered either ‘feudal’ or ‘foreign’, its near-absurd attitude to art and beauty and its unimaginably horrendous and violent attack on some of the best artists of China—when Outlook asked me to write a piece on the radical cultural uprising in Kerala in the 1970s led by the Janakeeya Samskarikavedi (People’s Cultural Forum), linked to the Marxist-Leninist movement. I am by no means making a comparison here; nothing of the sort that happened in China happened in Kerala, though the Cultural Revolution, which later turned out to be little more than a power struggle between two factions of the Chinese Communist Party, was seen with a lot of...
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