Browsing by Author "Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Restricted
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.
Restricted
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.
Restricted
An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2015) Kingsbury, Benjamin; Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar; Keating, Pauline
The Bengal cyclone of 1876 was the worst cyclone disaster anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century. On the night of 31 October, around one million people in the south-eastern districts of Bakarganj, Noakhali, and Chittagong woke to the violence of its wind and rain. Then came a series of storm-waves, which reached a height of 30 feet in some parts. The waves rushed over the ripening crops, swept away cattle, destroyed homesteads and other property, and drowned at least 100,000 people. Nearly as many died in the cholera epidemic and food scarcity that followed. This thesis argues that cyclone disasters, at first glance owing their existence solely to natural causes, are also socially produced. It aims to rethink the Bengal cyclone as an ‘imperial disaster’ – as an event that was shaped, and in some sense created, by the unequal power relations characteristic of British imperialism in India. The thesis begins by setting the cyclone in the context of long-term social, economic, and environmental change in the affected districts. The focus here is on explaining how vulnerability to disaster is created. Particular emphasis is given to the consequences of the imperial land revenue system. The government encouraged the ‘reclamation’ of forest and newly-formed alluvial land, on the coast and along the rivers, so cultivation could be extended and the land revenue maximised. In the hundred or so years before the cyclone, the number of people exposed to disaster grew significantly. And revenue policy was closely related to the land tenure system, which also helped to increase vulnerability. In eastern Bengal the landowner, occupying the highest level of the tenure-chain, was separated by a great number of intermediaries from the actual cultivators on the lowest level. While those towards the top of the chain prospered through ‘reclamation’, the economic pressures imposed on those at the bottom seriously restricted their ability to manage risk. The second part of the thesis focuses on the calamity itself, and its immediate, mid-term, and long-term consequences. An examination of the impact of the cyclone along lines of class, gender, caste, and religion demonstrates that different social groups were affected in very different ways, challenging the notion that disasters are socially neutral. A further challenge to the idea of disaster as a purely natural phenomenon is based on an analysis of the government’s relief policy, which was mainly concerned with restoring the power and influence of the state in the affected districts, leaving the actual relief of the population to the market. The ineffectiveness of this policy, the thesis argues, contributed to the severity of the subsequent cholera epidemic, and also had longer-term consequences, including a food scarcity and an increase in crime. This thesis, then, seeks to rethink the Bengal cyclone of 1876 as a problem of deep-seated political, economic, and social inequality, and not just an unfortunate but entirely natural episode in the history of British rule in India.
Open Access
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'.