Paper short abstract:

This paper tries to interrogate the historical tendency of the Marxist Cultural Movement in India, especially IPTA tradition in Bengal in 1940-50s to ideate the congenital contradiction between the middle class and the folk and traditional cultural practices within its organizational paradigm.

Paper long abstract:

Marxist cultural movement presumably advocates the ideology of liberation of the toiling masses through their participation and leadership. But, its history in India shows that it was mostly governed by the cultural elitism of urban intellectuals. I want to discuss this particular factor considering the early history of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), a mass-cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. Numerous writings on IPTA reveals that though a large number of artists from the downtrodden sections were assembled beneath its organizational canopy, but the but main actors in formulating the decisions were mostly the middle class people. I wish to discuss about two folk artists from Bengal in this context: Gurudas Pal and Nibaran Pandit. Originally, Pal was a bidi-worker and Pandit was a sharecropper. Both were hailed from the remote parts of the province.

Can it be claimed that these artists coming from the marginal and oppressed sections of the society were largely 'used' by the middle class leaders of the organization? Also, there were debates regarding the form of protest between these two tendencies: folk and urban. But, was there any serious attempt to clinch it? Is it not the ubiquitous hegemony of the middle class leadership in left politics that had attenuated the possibility of unfolding a people's cultural practice in India? To address these questions, I would like to mostly engage with the cultural history of the left movement in Bengal in consequence of the genesis of a politically progressive middle class.