Gita Ramaswamy’s Land Guns Caste Woman review: The voice of a revolutionary

In her political memoir, Gita Ramaswamy pulls no punches as she critiques the Indian Left, observes what ails the judiciary and explains why the poor cannot get justice

Gita Ramaswamy’s  Land Guns Caste Woman is a book like no other. It is the story of a Tamil Brahmin woman who tries hard to shed the privileges of her caste and rebels against its oppressiveness throughout her life. It is the story of an educated middle-class intellectual who is absorbed into the Naxalite movement during the Emergency, only to eventually discover that the “possibility of democratic functioning in a party so deeply hierarchical was bleak.”

It is the story of an empowered woman deeply uncomfortable with 1980s feminist groups’ blinkered, Anglo-centric approaches; a liberated woman witness and victim to a group of feminists descending on her house to assault her husband violently. And at the core of the book is the most important story of them all: her decade-long association with the historic and successful wage struggle led by the landless Dalits of Ibrahimpatnam.

She braves threats to her life and wrongful litigation, but the efforts of the Ibrahimpatnam Taluka Vyavasaya Coolie Sangam succeed in reclaiming 14,000 acres of land for the Dalits and result in the abolition of bonded labour and the release of thousands with all dues paid. Most of all, the Sangam succeeds in fostering fraternity among the Dalit Bahujan castes.

It takes an incredibly brave woman to call her extended Brahmin families “cesspools of inequality, hidebound tradition, and intolerance.” Her mother’s admonitions to her in childhood are abridged and distilled versions of the  Manusmriti: “My mother’s daily injunction to all five of us was: ‘Don’t trust any man, don’t even trust your own father. If you sit next to a boy, you’ll get pregnant.’”

Gita chronicles how she constantly debrahminises herself and this forms the bedrock of her self-transformation: she is almost surgical in this process, and a reader is compelled to applaud her. The Naxalite sections of the book have very Anuradha Ghandy vibes, but lacking comparable conviction, insight, and intellectual rigour, they smack of adventurism and discontent. Sometimes, the self-flagellation is painful to watch. Whatever you end up feeling about this, the book itself is a treat to read. Throughout the book, the ultimate saving grace is the self-awareness and rare honesty exercised by the author.

She parachutes into Ibrahimpatnam as a revolutionary and remembers how she “often suggested beating up landlords. I suggested burning their haystacks, cutting their phone connections, throwing their motors into wells, and several such minor violent acts. This was not simply due to my Naxalite background... I could think of no other reaction. People never agreed.” It would have been easier for her to come out as a constantly politically correct person by suppressing and glossing over the many slip-ups. Instead, we have been offered a refreshingly, unflinchingly genuine book.

Gita’s memoir inadvertently opens Pandora’s Box of mental health issues among the fraternity of activists. In her own candid admissions, there is an uneasy equation of social work with an antidote to mental illness. She writes how starting the Hyderabad Book Trust was “a drug against my depression”, and how “the balmiki saved me from a complete collapse with their affection and demands on my time and energy.”