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    Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement
    Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement
    Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement
    Ebook500 pages7 hours

    Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement

    By Kavita Panjabi

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd
    Release dateJan 1, 2016
    ISBN9789385932502
    Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement

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      Book preview

      Unclaimed Harvest - Kavita Panjabi

      it.

      Introduction

      THERE IS A powerful prehistory of women’s political activism in South Asia that has never found acknowledgement as a women’s movement in the pages of history. Overwhelmed by nationalism and the coming of independence, which occupied centre stage in the Indian subcontinent, mainstream historiography elided the other theatres of liberation being waged on the sidelines. The largest ever participation of women in peasant struggle in Bengal was couched in one such crusade for liberation from below, the Tebhaga movement. An estimated 50,000 women—urban and rural—entered the fields of political activism in the course of this insurrection and played a prominent role in shaping it. Some left histories did proudly document not only Tebhaga but also the extensive contribution of women to the struggle; yet, they too fell short of recognizing that there was actually a unique women’s movement, sculpting it firmly from within and infusing it quietly with an indomitable spirit.

      The legacy of this women’s movement did not shape ours because of the ruptures of history—the partition, the armed revolution of the Communist Party (CP) and the violent crackdown of the state; even the very knowledge of it did not come down to us. The exigencies as well as the politics of writing history are such that some histories never get written, while others get marginalized; and the irremediable absence of a history of the Tebhaga women’s movement would have signalled a critical loss for the history of this subcontinent, as well as for our women’s movements. Thus it was in 1996 when I began to grapple with the resources we still had available to us in the present for approaching a lived past fast slipping out of our reach.

      The Tebhaga movement was launched during the harvest of 1946, three years after the Bengal famine, by severely exploited sharecroppers. It was led by the Communist Party of India (CPI) and spread across the vast span of undivided Bengal. In 1947, after independence, it was temporarily withdrawn. Despite the divisions resulting from partition, it picked up again in some districts of West Bengal and East Pakistan, and then entered a deeply contentious phase of armed struggle in 1948 that gradually ushered in its end by 1951. The movement was founded on a collective demand of landless tillers of the soil against feudal landowners for a greater share of the crop, and it grew to involve large numbers of urban men and women too in a powerful left solidarity with the peasants.

      A spiralling in women’s political activism had already taken place in India in the nationalist movement, especially in response to Gandhi’s leadership, and in Bengal in retaliation against threats of sexual violence posed by the entry of the US and British soldiers during World War II, as well as the attacks by the Japanese. Even more compelling a reason in Bengal was the devastating impact of the ‘man-made’ famine of 1943, which led to a massive coming together of women across divides of class and caste, village and city. For peasant women, the experience of the period had included witnessing the starvation of their families, sexual exploitation by rich farmers and sometimes even being sold by their own husbands for food. Urban women, moved by the sight of emaciated peasants flooding the cities and dying before their very eyes, and by their own experience of the marauding soldiers targeting women in the cities, had come together with rural women to mobilize solidarity, resistance and survival. They did this through the organization of self-defence committees, initiating hunger marches demanding food and clothing, and working in the langarkhanas or soup kitchens for the famine stricken in the war and famine years. In the course of events, they continued with their activism into the Tebhaga movement, forging solidarities across the rural–urban divide. Only a small percentage of the women who participated in Tebhaga were from urban contexts, largely activists, of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (originally the Women’s Self-Defence League) of the Communist Party (CP), who, politicized during the famine work, had ventured out further to set up and work with women’s groups or mahila samitis in the villages. The majority were peasant women, largely from the middle and lower castes, leading movements for crops, protesting against sexual exploitation by the zamindars and jotedars, and taking on the leadership of entire villages when the men were

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