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- Convenors:
-
Sanjukta Sunderason
(Leiden University)
Uditi Sen (Hampshire College)
- Location:
- 21F70
- Start time:
- 23 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel explores discourses of the popular that emerged as the cornerstone of left-wing politics in late and post-colonial Bengal. It traces the productions (and repression) of new vocabularies, ideals and ethics of political action that impacted political mobilisation and cultural resistance.
Long Abstract:
The ubiquity of personality cults in the politics of West Bengal and Bangladesh obscures a longer history that privileged the plebeian praja (peasant) as the ideal subject of popular politics.
This panel foregrounds left-wing discourses of popular politics which emerged in late and post-colonial Bengal across the fault-line of partition. Under particular focus is the idea of the popular that developed as cornerstone of left-wing politics since late-1930s, spreading into spheres of anti-colonial movements, refugee politics, activism and cultural resistance. The panel will explore productions of new vocabularies, ideals and ethics of political and culture action crafted by the Left under the rubric of 'popularisation'. It will probe mechanisms of circulation, continuities and ruptures that accompanied this, and foreground a comparative analysis of the growth and/or repression of left ideologies and parties in East and West Bengal during the transitional decades of decolonsiation. The panel will aim cross-disciplinary dialogues around the role played by migration, refugees, communist party workers and left-wing intellectuals in the production of discourses around the popular, and rethink the emergence and myriad iterations of the Left in Bengal, in terms of its social alliances, ideological nuances and the production of its intellectual hegemony.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sanjukta Sunderason (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will foreground the vocabularies, agendas and anxieties that constituted the field of left-wing cultural discourse in late-colonial and early-postcolonial Bengal, concentrating in particular on fluid art critical categories of the progressive, the organic and the popular.
Paper long abstract:
My paper will discuss the agency of visual imagery in rethinking and deconstructing the history of the left-wing cultural radicalism in India in the mid-twentieth century, retrospectively idealised as the 'Marxist Cultural Movement'. Consolidated in literature and performance through platforms like the Progressive Writers' Association (1936) and the Indian People's Theatre Association (1943), this radical aesthetic, however, had sparse affiliations in visual arts, without dedicated platforms, manifestoes or journals. Even when the notion of the 'progressive' came to be associated with artist collectives in post-war period, most notably, the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, it's signature was unstable, with member artists actively questioning its ideological baggage. A closer observation of visual resources and art discourse during the 1930s-40s, as this paper will elaborate, reveals a more dispersed domain of discursive nuances layering a negotiated terrain of socio-cultural interactions that constituted left-wing cultural production in these decade, and configured the dialogues between aesthetics and ideology, art and politics, realism and modernism.
Uditi Sen (Hampshire College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores government response to the rising influence of Left political parties amongst East Bengali refugees in post-partition West Bengal. Using colonial systems of surveillance, ‘left’ politics was constructed as anti-national and refugees were constructed as dangerous citizens.
Paper long abstract:
In the aftermath of partition in West Bengal as the question of rehabilitation became increasingly politicised, the left opposition parties stepped in to champion the cause of refugees denied rehabilitation by the Congress government. While historians of the partition of Bengal have largely focused on this radicalisation of refugees and its impact on the politics of West Bengal, this paper will attempt to understand government response to the rising influence of the Socialist and Marxist political parties amongst East Bengali refugees. The Government of West Bengal identified refugee colonies as hot-beds of undesirable political agitation and employed an elaborate system of spying and surveillance inherited from its colonial predecessors against refugees. Officers of the Special Branch and the Information Branch of the police routinely attended public meetings of refugees, marked the 'ring-leaders', followed suspects and wrote copious reports of their activities. Letters from suspects were routinely intercepted at the post office and copied. While none of these strategies were new, employing colonial tactics of surveillance designed to countered revolutionary terrorism against political dissent in a democracy necessitated the evolution of a new language of politics. Through surveillance, certain forms of political activity were marked out as anti-national and refugees were constructed as dangerous citizens. More importantly, state surveillance marked out illegitimate political activity from legitimate ventures, thus radically polarising the sphere of politics in post-colonial West Bengal.
Annu Jalais (National University of Singapore)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I intend to look at popular debates around the Bengali language in Bangladesh and West Bengal, especially in relation to questions of identity and religion.
Paper long abstract:
The most important rallying call for the creation of independent Bangladesh was the Bengali language. International Mother Language Day honoured on the 21st of February originated in recognition of the Language Movement, which started in Bangladesh in 1952; during that time a number of Dhaka university students were killed by the Pakistani armed forces in Dhaka. In this socio-cultural scenario, how have popular discourses around the Bengali language and Bengali "culture" reflected the idea(s) of being Bengali/Bangali Muslim?
Anwesha Sengupta (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group)
Paper short abstract:
This paper study the politics of the left parties in West Bengal regarding the scheme of ‘dispersal’, focusing on the modes of mobilization and the impact of these left parties among the refugees, their confrontations with the party in power, and their changing attitude towards the refugees.
Paper long abstract:
In their attempt to rehabilitate millions of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan in 1950s and 60s, one of the policies adopted by the government was the policy of 'dispersal'. Arguably, the most controversial of all the rehabilitation schemes, 'dispersal' meant sending off the refugees outside West Bengal to other parts of the country like the Andaman Islands, Dandakaranya area and so on - areas that were sparsely populated and under-developed . The government argued that 'dispersal' was necessary as it was impossible to rehabilitate all the refugees within the limits of West Bengal. This scheme faced massive opposition from the left parties. They argued that if the available waste lands were brought under cultivation, more refugees could be accommodated within the province. They opposed the attempts of the government to forcefully send off the refugees and actively mobilized the refugees against this scheme. Through their sustained campaign against 'dispersal' they received much sympathy from the refugees and that paid well electorally. However, as the Left Front came to power their attitude altered drastically. This paper studies the politics of the left parties vis-à-vis the rehabilitation scheme, especially the scheme of dispersal. Their modes of mobilization, the impact of these left parties among the refugees, their confrontations with the party in power, and their changing attitude towards the refugees are the prime issues that this paper addresses.
Nusrat Chowdhury (Amherst College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that an ethnographic reading of the Shahbag Movement reveals the existing potential and paradoxes of left politics in Bangladesh.
Paper long abstract:
"#shahbag is nothing but a twitter tag now," tweeted a Bangladeshi man in a Che beret on March 25, 2013, a lament voiced after a month and a half of vibrant protests that had centered at a busy crossroads in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The repeated invocations of death in the conversations that I had in and around Shahbag since its eruption in early February is telling particularly because of the movement's core demand of capital punishment for the alleged war criminals on the 1971 war of independence. In many ways, it captures some of the biopolitical pressures of popular politics that a movement such as Shahbag, and the counter-revolutionary forces that it has unleashed in its wake, bring to the surface, in Bangladesh as elsewhere. Tracking what Eric Santner has called, "the vicissitudes of the flesh," the paper explores the many paradoxes that liberal publicity and so-called illiberal politics raise for an anthropological understanding of popular sovereignty in Bangladesh. The paper is based on interviews with a few young activists, particularly left-leaning ones, who have been involved with the movement in various capacities. The tensions around Shabagh, its framing within the Islamist-secular opposition, and the actual performance of its protests bring up some of the tensions within the emerging left. I argue that an ethnographic encounter with Shahbag reveals the existing potential and paradoxes of left politics in Bangladesh.