There’s Gunpowder in the Air / Manoranjan Byapari / trans. Arunava Sinha / Eka / 2018
The first time I went to El Salvador I was 18. I tasted my first anona. Met tios y primas I never knew existed. Milked a cow. Got stung by zancudos. Rode a horse. One of the most beautiful and jarring aspects of El Salvador, however, was my mother.
Montefresco, Summer 2011
At 18, little about my mother made much sense to me. I still didn’t have a good understanding of the history of El Salvador and while I admired her strength, faith, and charity, there was a lot about my mother that I thought I understood, but didn’t. One of the reasons that first trip to El Salvador was so remarkable is I saw my mother in a context where it felt she belonged. I had only really seen my mom as a foreigner. In the US, it would not be out of the ordinary for me to help my mom navigate somewhere, reading signs and such. In El Salvador, our dynamic switched. I was the outsider, reliant on her to understand how I should behave in spaces. It’s as if I had never seen a fish in water before. Suddenly, aspects of my mother’s personality made much more sense to me.
I am starting to more intentionally read Indian literature, partly because my partner is Bengali. While we have shared an extraordinary four years together—watching one another grow and stagger, fall and blossom—part of me is anxious because I have yet to see her in her home country. I know how much I don’t know yet. On top of that, my knowledge of Indian history is dismal. I’ve picked up a generous bit from my conversations with her, her roommate, and from my university studies. But my knowledge is clumsy at best.
It’s with this shaky footing I stepped into Manoranjan Byapari’s There’s Gunpowder in the Air. A slick and energetic novel, translated magnificently by Arunava Sinha, TGITA captures an attempt prison break by five Naxals. Naxals are members of the Naxalbari Movement, a violent revolutionary group in India that rattled the country’s core for brief but fiery years in the late sixties and early seventies. (Want to read more, look here). My brief excursions into Indian literature and history has taught me that the Naxalbari Movement is complicated historical wound that many sectors of the country are still very much processing. The Naxalbari movement was viciously repressed with as much, if not more violence than they wreaked—which is really saying something, because they were a militant bunch. The movement had sharp ideals, but often evokes complicated feelings from the Indians I know, as feels appropriate for the amount of murder involved.
The novel is told in shifting perspectives, a move that really helps bring the bustling, overcrowded prison to life. We get the perspective of jailers, guards, Naxals, and moles alike, all with inebriating range and depth. One of my favorite novelistic techniques is a writer’s ability to dive in and out of side plots and characters to really breathe life into a community. Here, Byapari does so with the ease and muscle of someone who shared jailtime with the Naxals he narrates in this novel. Fair warning, the novel is chockful of heartbreaking, traumatizing subplots, grisly if casual descriptions of state brutality and degradation, and equally grisly if casual descriptions of poverty. The heaviness of it might crush you for a bit, and I definitely had to put down the book several times, because the lengths at which human beings will go to humiliate and harm one another is dizzying even to someone as disillusioned and cynical as I am. The shifting perspectives, however, does make this book easy to pick up again after putting it down for a few weeks, as I had.
One thing I appreciate about literature revolving the Naxalbari movement is its ethical wrestling. Social justice movements have a tendency to idealize themselves, to sometimes pit themselves unequivocally as victims. It is near impossible to view the Naxalbari movement through the rainbow-colored glasses of a social justice warrior. This book thrusts you into the moral wrestle of the jailers, deputies, Naxals, and prisoners, faced with a failing system. There are many disappointments throughout, but also moments that will make your cheeks buckle with hope.
I recommend this book for anyone studying social justice, postcolonial literature, or prison studies. I also recommend it for creative writers studying perspective.