Standing on the summit of the 2,-foot-high Stok Kangri, the highest peak in Ladakh, a few months past their seventieth birthdays, Aruna and her husband Sandeep reflect on their past dreams and aspirations and whether they achieved what they had wanted to or not. Their story is filled with many stirring events and encounters, extending from the London of the swinging sixties to India during the Emergency of the mid-197s and the troubled times that followed. Along the way, they are influenced by Marxist theory and some Maoist activists they meet, and try to join the working-class revolution by befriending a group of disaffected Sikh factory workers in London. Back in India, the couple settle down in Chandigarh, the ‘City Beautiful’, where they come into contact with slum dwellers and discover the extent of destitution and discrimination that disenfranchised communities struggle with—a realization further reinforced by their travels to the hinterlands of Bihar. Inevitably, the couple are drawn towards the Naxalite movement—only to learn that betrayal, sexual exploitation and corruption have no class barriers. Narrated in an unhurried, expansive style, Neena Nehru’s immersive novel revisits the idealism and disillusionment, the heady conviction and slow loss of faith that marked the lives of a section of India’s youth in the sixties and seventies, trying to reconcile their own privilege with the harsh lives of a vast majority of their fellow citizens. An extraordinarily sensitive, engaging novel, The Revolutionaries is also a rare slice of modern Indian history.
