Standing on the summit of the 20,000-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-1970s 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.
