University Research Papers

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University research outputs made available publicly on the ResearchArchive. These are non-thesis outputs.

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The Communists in Post-Colonial Bengal, 1948-52: The Untold Story of 'Second' Tebhaga
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2006) Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar
West Bengal is a province of India where a communist party - the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - in coalition with some other leftist parties, has been continuously in power for nearly three decades now. It has been elected to and has held on to power within a democratic constitutional framework. But in the past the communists in Bengal have also used violent revolutionary methods to secure power. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s this part of the communist movement became known as the Naxalite movement and a significant literature already exists on this. But what is less known is that the events of the 1960s-70s had a historical precedent in 1948-49 in the early days of independence. It is this less known aspect of the long and chequered history of the communist movement in Bengal that this paper seeks to unravel. This story has remained untold for various reasons - the first being the problem of sources. During the period there were regular newspaper reports of unrest, but the newspapers did not either know or did not report everything that was happening, or in other words, the real extent of the communist insurgency that started in West Bengal from the middle of 1948 remained unknown to the general public. The communists themselves have not told this story until recently, because this was another failed attempt at what later came to be condemned as 'left adventurism'. The government knew through its intelligence network what was actually happening, but kept a veil of secrecy. The professional historians have not written about it because the archives were closed and there were no other sources. The recent release of the IB (Intelligence Branch) records at the West Bengal State Archives has broken that impasse, and these records can now help us reconstruct this story in some details, for the first time, albeit remain the dangers of trying to write the history of insurgency from the texts of counter-insurgency.
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Freedom and its Enemies: The Politics of Transition in West Bengal, 1947-1949
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2006) Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar
The fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence became an occasion for the publication of a huge body of literature on post-colonial India. Understandably, the discussion of 1947 in this literature is largely focussed on Partition - its memories and its long-term effects on the nation. Earlier studies on Partition looked at the 'event' as a part of the grand narrative of the formation of two nation-states in the subcontinent; but in recent times the historians' gaze has shifted to what Gyanendra Pandey has described as 'a history of the lives and experiences of the people who lived through that time'. So far as Bengal is concerned, such experiences have been analysed in two subsets, i.e., the experience of the borderland, and the experience of the refugees. As the surgical knife of Sir Cyril Ratcliffe was hastily and erratically drawn across Bengal, it created an international boundary that was seriously flawed and which brutally disrupted the life and livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, many of whom suddenly found themselves living in what they conceived of as 'enemy' territory. Even those who ended up on the 'right' side of the border, like the Hindus in Murshidabad and Nadia, were apprehensive that they might be sacrificed and exchanged for the Hindus in Khulna who were caught up on the wrong side and vehemently demanded to cross over. And of course, eventually, millions did migrate in a bid to find security among their co-religionists. By June 1948, there were about 1.1 million refugees in West Bengal. But almost all who lived on the borderlands, whether they fled or stayed, suffered dislocation of one sort or another - to family and kinship ties, jobs, trading connections - in other words, to almost every aspect of their everyday lives. The traumas of displacement, the bloodshed, the arduous journeys of the refugees to Calcutta's Sealdah Station, and from there to government camps or squatter colonies, the rapid politicisation of the displaced, and their emotional remembering of the villages they left behind, have all been chronicled with empathy in recent years. Partition and its memories thus dominate the contemporary historiography of 1947 in West Bengal.
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Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945-47
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2000) Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar
Ever since its beginning, organized dalit politics under the leadership of Dr B. R. Ambedkar had been consistently moving away from the Indian National Congress and the Gandhian politics of integration. It was drifting towards an assertion of separate political identity of its own, which in the end was enshrined formally in the new constitution of the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, established in 1942. A textual discursive representation of this sense of alienation may be found in Ambedkar's book, 'What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables', published in 1945. Yet, within two years, in July 1947, we find Ambedkar accepting Congress nomination for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. A few months later he was inducted into the first Nehru Cabinet of free India, ostensibly on the basis of a recommendation from Gandhi himself. In January 1950, speaking at a general public meeting in Bombay, organized by the All India Scheduled Castes Federation, he advised the dalits to cooperate with the Congress and to think of their country first, before considering their sectarian interests. But then within a few months again, this alliance broke down over his differences with Congress stalwarts, who, among other things, refused to support him on the Hindu Code Bill. He resigned from the Cabinet in 1951 and in the subsequent general election in 1952, he was defeated in the Bombay parliamentary constituency by a political nonentity, whose only advantage was that he contested on a Congress ticket. Ambedkar's chief election agent, Kamalakant Chitre described this electoral debacle as nothing but a `crisis'.

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