Freedom and its enemies: The politics of transition in West Bengal, 1947–1949*

Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar

doi:10.1080/00856400600550799

Cited by 3 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Partition and its memories of 1947 in West Bengal are thus chronicled with empathy in contemporary historiography and similar texts (Chakrabarti 1999;Chatterji 2001;Chakrabarty 1995;Sengupta 2003). By June 1948, there were about 1.1 million refugees in West Bengal (Bandyopadhyay 2006). Only due to the fact that they had accommodation in Calcutta did the families of my parents not land up in a squatter or refugee colony.…”

Section: Partition and Displacement: Militancy Beyond Domesticmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Her memory of the members of the party as essentially educated, middle class, and coming from elitist (banedi/abhijata) backgrounds corroborates the narratives of historical documents. The communist party in Bengal started with a predominantly educated middle class or bhadralok (respectable/well-mannered/ decent folk) base (Bandyopadhyay 2006) with elitism at least in terms of its leadership (Franda 1971). Never being openly antagonistic to the Congress (Sen 1972), trying and failing to unite the Congress and the Muslim League before and after the communal riots of 1946 (Mahajan 2000), voting against and failing to resist the partition (Lahiri 2001), the party began to organize the villages by raising demands for abolition of the zamindary system without compensation, redistribution of land, fair wages for agricultural laborers, and of course the demand for tebhaga for the sharecroppers.…”

Section: Partition and Displacement: Militancy Beyond Domesticmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Historicizing the Lived Masculinities in a Postpartitioned Metropolis

Das

2017

Men and Masculinities

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The autoethnographic narrative seeks to historicize the major political episodes of Calcutta/Kolkata metropolis as the meeting point of personal and public contexts of meaning since India’s independence. This juxtaposition has emerged to be even more significant due to the partition of Bengal, India. The middle-class majority framework of everyday life in the city shifted from the closed class hegemony of the bhadralok masculinity to the postpartitioned position of open and inclusive masculinity, which encountered unprecedented challenges in terms of caste, gender, and class. For theorizing such masculinities (e.g., feudal, radical, coercive, conjugated, and pragmatic) in these periods, the personal is found to be related to the public, the subaltern is found to be related to the hegemonic, and the political enters critically the continuum of the domestic and the public. Despite the growing autonomy of women since the colonial period (until it reached the scope of accepted practice in the postcolonial period), the deeply embedded patriarchy at the level of the family privileged masculinity as the only legitimate manifestation of hegemonic power in the public practices of any order of society. Bengalis could not come out of this masculine fold in spite of a militancy invoked for survival, encounters with radical movements, political turbulence, and the pragmatic governance of the populace for a long period.

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Section: Partition and Displacement: Militancy Beyond Domesticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Partition and Displacement: Militancy Beyond Domesticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicizing the Lived Masculinities in a Postpartitioned Metropolis

Das

2017

Men and Masculinities

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“…Through their unions and in their workplaces they continued to battle against retrenchment, restrictive labour policy, and enforced arbitration throughout the period of independence. 24 The immediate aftermath of the Second World War saw the most intense spell of strike action Indian industry had ever known. Increasing food prices, the scarcity of basic commodities, and a fall in real wages fed stories of corruption, black marketing, and hoarding across the country.…”

Section: O P P O S I T I O N I N T H E F I R S T Y E a R O F T H E C mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Yeh azaadi jhooti hai!’: The shaping of the opposition in the first year of the Congress raj

Sharma

2013

Mod. Asian Stud.

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Within a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place.

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“…When the Hindu Mahasabha started a campaign for the partition of Bengal in early 1947 , they opposed it, but could not actively resist it. The two communist leaders in the Bengal Legislative Assembly-Jyoti Basu and Ratanlal Brahman-voted against the Partition resolution, but that did not count for anything (Bandyopadhyay 2001). When 'freedom' came with Partition, the communists were hardly in a mood to rejoice, as the veteran communist leader Abani Lahiri (2001) told us in an interview with historian Ranajit Dasgupta.…”

Section: Communism In Bengalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And an oppressive procurement policy followed by the new government, desperately trying to handle urban food shortages, put the peasant producers in a tight position, as most of them were hardly producing any surpluses beyond their subsistence needs. It was this situation that the CPI leadership interpreted as the revolutionary potential and sought to capitalise on these grievances of the people which the Congress government failed to deal with because of their inefficiency and wrong policies (for details, see Bandyopadhyay 2006).…”

Section: The Working Class and Peasant Militancymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Story of an Aborted Revolution

Bandyopadhyay

2008

Journal of South Asian Development

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In the early days of independence the province of West Bengal witnessed a violent communist upsurge in 1948–50. In many ways the events of this period foreshadowed what happened in this province during the Naxalite experiment of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This paper, using recently declassified IB records, seeks to reconstruct this less-known episode in the history of the communist movement in India. It was apparently an attempt to revive the Tebhaga movement, which was left half way in 1946. But in areas it touched on a variety of issues affecting marginal peasants and industrial workers in the early years of independence. In the end it appeared that the mass support for this attempted ‘people's democratic revolution’ was sporadic, localised and issue-based. In 1950, following an intense internal ideological debate within the party, the Communist Party of India (CPI) decided to abandon its revolutionary line and decided to participate in the forthcoming general elections. This paper unravels this process of transformation of the communist movement in India from a revolutionary to a constitutional movement operating within the perimeters of mass electoral politics.

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Freedom and its enemies: The politics of transition in West Bengal, 1947–1949*

Abstract: South Asia: Journal of South Asian StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Historicizing the Lived Masculinities in a Postpartitioned Metropolis

Historicizing the Lived Masculinities in a Postpartitioned Metropolis

‘Yeh azaadi jhooti hai!’: The shaping of the opposition in the first year of the Congress raj

The Story of an Aborted Revolution

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