The Recurrence of an Indian Dream, Magic Seeds

Year 2021, Volume: 27 Issue: 106, 489 - 502, 07.05.2021

Timuçin Buğra Edan Hasan Boynukara Hacer Gözen

Abstract

Magic Seeds is a work of fiction, but it also serves as a reflection of the real world,
the history of India, where value judgments in a society return to their starting
point only by reforming in accordance with the reconstruction of a given society.
Willie, who is in search of identity and a home, finds the remedy in joining the
guerrilla order. However, here, he fights through the shadow of the past, which he
can never escape. The shadow of the past is the hierarchy itself, and this article
explores the never-ending transformation of hierarchy, anarchism, and the search
for order through the novel Magic Seeds. This article is a comparative study of the
novel Magic Seeds, and history, the Naxalite movement in India from the 1960s
until the early 2000s. Through the historical revolutionary Naxalite movement and
a political association of the Marxist–Leninist Communist Party of India in West
Bengal in 1960s, this study also reveals why an anarchic movement apparently
returns to its starting point, and legs behind the decolonization or reconstruction
of a society due to the deep-rooted and pre-structured hierarchy in a society by
considering the terms humanization, dehumanization, hierarchy, cast system,
anarchism, transformation and reconstruction.

Keywords

Magic Seed, hierarchy, anarchism, transformation

References

• Bhabha, H. K. (1990). Nation and narration. NY: Routledge Publishing.
• D’Mello, B. (2018). India after Naxalbari: Unfinished history. New York: NYU.
• Elst, K. (2005). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. India: Rupa.
• Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth. (Translated from the French by R. Philcox with commentary by J.-P. Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha) NY: Grove.
• Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (Translated by M. B. Ramos with an introduction by D. Macedo) NY: The Continuum International.
• Guérin, D. (1970). Anarchism: From theory to practice. (M. Klopper, Trans.), (N. Chomsky, Introduction) NY: Monthly Review.
• Gupta, D. K. (2007, August). The Naxalites and the Maoist movement in India: Birth, demise, and reincarnation. Democracy and Security, 3, 157–188.
• Jawaid, S. (1978, September). The Naxalite movement in India: Origin and failure of the Maoist revolutionary strategy in West Bengal 1967 – 1971. A thesis of Master of Arts, Brock University. Karagöz, C. and Bay, S. (2020). V. S. Naipaul’un Magic Seeds adlı romanında madunların sessizliği. Social Sciences Studies Journal, 6 (71), 4449-4459.
• King, B. (2003). V. S. Naipaul. (2nd Ed.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Kropotkin, P. (2002). Anarchism: A collection of revolutionary writings. New York: Dover.
• Memmi, A. (1991). The colonizer and the colonized. (Introduction, J-P. Sartre; Afterword, S. G. Miller) Beacon.
• Naipaul, V. S. (2004). Magic Seeds. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Ramnath, M. (2012). Decolonizing anarchism: An anti-authoritarian history of India’s Liberation Struggle. Edinburgh: AK.
• Salvadori, M. (Editor). (1968). Modern socialism. UK: Macmillan.
• Samaddar, R. (Ed.). (2018). From popular movements to rebellion: The Naxalite decade. NY: Routledge.
• Thiong’o, N. (1981). Decolonising the mind. The Politics of language in African literature. Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Publishing House.
• Ward, Colin. (2004). Anarchism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University.
• Zahiri, A. (2014). Submerged idealism in V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds: An ambivalent Evolution? South Asian Review, 35(2), 163-175.
• Electronik resources: Mambrol, N. (2016, April 10). Mimicry in postcolonial theory. Literary Theory and Criticism. Retrived on 20/12/2020 from https://literariness.org/2016/04/10/mimicry-in-postcolonial-theory.