The history department at the University of Connecticut welcomed Tithi Bhattacharya to the Homer Babbidge Library, to give a talk on April 15 about women’s roles in revolutionary organizations in colonial India. Bhattacharya is an associate professor of history at Purdue University, who mainly focuses on south Asian history.
Firstly, Bhattacharya outlined three main tropes of women who took up revolutionary roles in political movements during the early 20th century. There is crossdressing, as women would dress as men to assassinate their targets and escape authorities.
Next is leveraging their gender. Bhattacharya used the example of Algerian women sneaking bombs in bread baskets past the wandering eyes of airport security, as the French security overlooked these women due to the stereotype of Muslim women being docile.
The last trope was ritualizing, or memorialization, Bhattacharya talked about Kashmiri women who would camp outside army grounds and mourn the deaths of their lost sons as an example of memorialization.
Bhattacharya also shared two tidbits of history important for understanding the role of anti-colonial female activists in India. One is that some women were quite young when they first entered revolutionist politics. You had 14 to 15-year-olds assassinating British officials back in the 1920s and ‘30’s. And in India, a lot of first-generation nationalists and communists came from this revolutionary terrorism background.
With this background information, Bhattacharya outlined the main thesis of her seminar: the relationship between gender and political organization. She discussed a fourth trope to prove her point, which was that in most cases, these women are written about more as activists than theorists. Men come up with the theory behind revolutionary ideals while women act on it.
Bhattacharya hopes to disprove this concept and prove that these women did carry motives behind their actions, because “if there is no theory, there is no pattern.” She also discussed how these female activists made conscious choices based on their resources and that a women’s labor in these revolutionary terrorism activities was highly gendered.
The first woman Bhattacharya talked about was Lila Majumdar, born Lila Sengupta, she was the only daughter of a doctor in rural India. Majumdar’s father was heavily involved in the politics in his area and would often invite nationalist figures into his home for meals. Spurred on by her early exposure to nationalist politics, Majumdar took her first forays into the revolutionary movements.
Majumdar taught in schools run by communist/revolutionary organizations. This pedagogical project was devised to counter British colonial education and create children who would grow up to fight for India’s independence, a line of thinking shared by the early Soviet Union.
Vladimir Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya created educational reform that helped children understand the importance of activity and intellectual labor. When the U.S. sent educationists to learn more about this Bolshevik education, they were surprised.
According to Bhattacharya, one of the educationists exclaimed, “You are letting the children play all the time!” This anecdote helped give Majumdar’s work a global context, and proved her belief that “children are the seeds of the future,” according to Bhattacharya.
After her stint as a teacher, Lila Majumdar also helped form the Mahila Atmaraksha Simiti (MARS), a women’s self-defense committee. This was also her first foray into communism as MARS was linked to the Communist Party of India.
MARS helped women learn self-defense, ran food banks and schools and had milk centers for mothers. It also had a monthly journal, the two ideas driving the journal being that only women could write in it and only MARS members can sell it.
Bhattacharya moved on to the Tebhaga movement in 1946, a peasant uprising where peasants argued for ‘tebhaga’ (sharecroppers’ right) and reducing the landlords share of the crop yield from one-half to one-third. This movement proved popular with the people of Bengal, most of whom suffered through the 1943 Bengal famine, where four million of their compatriots died.
Over time, North Bengal would become a center point for the Tebhaga movement, and the CPI also became deeply involved in the movement, as they distributed food to the starving. Bhattacharya noted that women played a central role in the Tebhaga movement as well.
In response, the colonial officials brutally quelled the movement. Landlords brought in private armies and “turned the [rice] paddy fields crimson red,” said Bhattacharya. The CPI received a lot of backlash over the leadership — or lack of — that they brought to the movement, as much of the movement was spearheaded by poor, rural women.
Another criticism of the CPI’s involvement is that they didn’t spread the movement into the urban areas, rounding up factory workers in support of the peasant uprising.
One man, Charu Majumdar (Lila Majumdar’s husband) argued that if the CPI were armed, the uprising would have been more successful. He got to test his theory in the ‘60s, as he spearheaded the nascent Naxalite movement. Curiously, his wife Lila didn’t join him in this movement, nor the new Marxist-Leninist faction he created within the CPI.
There is little recorded information on why, but Bhattacharya argues that after seeing how the state responded to those who spoke out against it in Tebhaga and being the primary caregiver to three children and her father-in-law, Lila had more reason not to join the CPIML than to join it.
Bhattacharya next discussed how the CPI held — or rather didn’t — after Partition. The leading Indian National Congress party had a vendetta against communists, so Prime Minister Jawaharhal Nehru wanted them gone from parliament. This was odd considering there were INC congressmen and activists with similar platforms to CPI activists. Regardless, following this threat from INC, the CPI created a new party line, forbidding collaboration with INC activists.
This proved to be the death blow for the CPI as a political party. They were cut off from mass organizations, and thus centers of power. The CPI and MARS were considered illegal under a public safety act. And the INC began wiping out communists state by state. As a result, CPI and MARS membership fell drastically.
From 1948 to1950, CPI membership fell 90%. In 1943 there were 43,000 total members of MARS. In 1952, it was only 8,000. For Lila Majumdar, she was arrested twice for her connections with the CPI.
With this information in hand, Bhattacharya asked two questions: Are the effects of state violence gendered? And should extra care be taken by activists when up against state violence?
Bhattacharya made a few arguments on these questions. The first is that party work carries different risks for men and women, especially mothers. These women, along with their efforts in the CPI, must still serve their domestic duties at home, especially those of lower classes.
This created an uneasy alliance between party and housework. To Bhattacharya, “Ultra-left adventurism” required the bravery of the few, mostly men who had little to lose while collective mass action requires the bravery of the many, and if women get involved mass action soon becomes emancipatory action for both men and women.
History will remember Lila Majumdar as the wife of Charu, described by Bhattacharya as the “Malcolm X of India,” erasing her contributions with the CPI and MARS. To Bhattacharya, she is much more than that, for she married Majumdar’s son and spent years with her mother-in-law’s son, and they spent many nights waiting together for Majumdar’s son to come home.
Bhattacharya tried desperately to interview Majumdar, who would smile and change the subject. But Bhattacharya could see in her eyes that the past was a “swirling, bubbling maelstrom with Lila-di, coiled and ready, waiting to spring out and effect the present.”