Communist Party of India (Marxist)

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), is presented as a left-wing political current whose differences with other communist factions reverberate through the novel’s community of Delhi magicians. Namboodiripad’s manifesto gives one group of performers a political home, while the colony’s quarrels show how national ideological divisions are reproduced in everyday communal life.

Political identity and setting

On February 23, 1973, Saleem Sinai returns to the magicians’ colony beneath the Friday Mosque after abandoning hopes of advancement in public service. He finds a community whose members are almost all communists, and describes his own turn away from Businessism toward a more revolutionary understanding of his mission to save the country. The colony is not merely a refuge for entertainers: political commitments shape its internal alliances and disputes.

The CPI(M) is identified through Namboodiripad’s manifesto, which offers a position distinct from both the Moscow-aligned official Communist Party of India and the guerrilla politics of the Naxalites. The novel does not present these ideological labels as abstract doctrine alone. They become affiliations taken up by particular kinds of performers, giving the colony’s divided population a legible political map.

Divisions within the magicians’ colony

The colony’s conflicts are described as a miniature of the divisions afflicting the communist movement across India. Prestidigitators and rabbit-pullers align themselves with Mr. Dange’s Moscow-line official party, which supports Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency. Contortionists lean instead toward the left and the Chinese-oriented wing. Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers applaud Naxalite guerrilla tactics, while mesmerists and walkers on hot coals support Namboodiripad’s position, neither Moscow-aligned nor pro-Beijing, and deplore Naxalite violence.

The CPI(M)-associated performers are thus one faction among several, not a unified voice that settles the colony’s disagreements. Even within a community where religious and regional bigotry are absent, old patterns of political fragmentation recur in new forms. Picture Singh, the colony’s patriarch, remains above these alignments: the shade of his enormous umbrella can briefly restore harmony, but the disputes brought beneath it grow increasingly bitter.

Political conflict made physical

The factional tensions have consequences beyond argument. Picture Singh recounts a bizarre murder during the 1971 general election, born of a quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer. The conjurer tries to draw a pistol from his magic hat; when it appears, a supporter of Ho Chi Minh scorches him to death in a burst of flame. The episode makes ideological conflict bodily and fatal, while placing competing communist positions inside the performers’ own specialized arts.

The CPI(M)’s place in this crowded political field is defined partly by what it rejects: it is neither the Moscow line nor the Naxalites’ violent tactics. Its distinct position nevertheless belongs to a colony marked by persistent dissension, where political allegiances do not dissolve simply because its members share a marginal social world.

Narrative significance

By translating national political divisions into rival groups of magicians, the novel makes ideology visible through the colony’s work, alliances, and confrontations. Its performers can bend reality in the service of their arts, yet, as Saleem observes, they do not forget what reality is. That tension gives the political miniature its force: performance may rearrange appearances, but it cannot keep factional conflict from entering communal life.

The CPI(M) therefore appears less as an institution described from the outside than as one recognizable position within a fractured collective. Namboodiripad’s current helps complete the colony’s political spectrum, while the widening bitterness among its factions shows how divisions at the national level are carried into the daily relations of people living at the edge of public power.