The Identity Crisis of Bengali Dalit Refugees in Manoranjan Byapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life

Manoranjan Byapari is a famous Bengali Dalit writer whose family migrated from East Pakistan and took shelter in a refugee camp in West Bengal. In his autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life, Byapari has given an account of Bengali Dalits’ victimization on the basis of caste in the pre-Partition Bengal and post-Partition West Bengal. In colonial Bengal, Dalits were known as Chandal or Untouchables. In 1911, their identity was recognized as Namashudras. After migrating to West Bengal, they were identified as Bangal and Dalit refugee. West Bengal and central governments did not warmly welcome the Namashudra refugees. They were sent to refugee camps which were crowded, unhygienic and did not provide adequate dole. Later they were sent to Andaman, Dandakaranya and other parts of India for their rehabilitation. In this dire situation, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) appeared as the Messiah to the Dalits and protested against the rehabilitation policy of the ruling government. The fake sympathy of the communist party had been revealed when they came in power in 1977 in West Bengal. Most of the communist leaders were upper-caste Hindus. In 1979, communist government secretly massacred the Namashudra refugees who were settled on the Marichjhapi Island. The state sponsored murder of Dalits remained undiscovered for many years. This study will examine the impacts of the Partition of Bengal on Dalits. It will further address how the state government provided different treatment to the Namashudra refugees for their lower caste identity.

An Incongruous Coalition

This chapter illustrates the unusual allies of the Congress who made authoritarian rule possible. These include the political partners of the Congress like the Communist Party of India, the Republican Party of India and the Shiv Sena, all of which have completely different ideologies. The regime was also aided by some sections of the media, the business community, the bourgeoisie and the trade unions. Industrialists were the biggest beneficiaries of the regime’s policies and, therefore, supported it in return. The bureaucracy which suffered from a colonial hangover was primed for survival and thus adapted to the circumstances. The chapter also analyses the intersection between the interests of the elites and the Emergency. It examines the resilience of long-standing social and cultural values and attitudes, including a deep-rooted sense of hierarchy and respect for authority.

Alliances from Above and Below

This chapter concerns the campaigning of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its attempt to recruit British workers in solidarity with the Indian anti-imperialist struggle in the 1920s and 1930s. It begins by distinguishing three possible obstacles to a mass anti-imperialism in Britain: compromising interests, low salience, and poor political articulation. It argues that the first two were largely indeterminate – they had no single, directional implication for anti-imperialism – and that the weight of explanation must fall on the third, which was more determinate. It then examines the inter-relationships between four groups of political actors: the Communist International, the Indian émigré revolutionary groups directed – or in rivalry with – the Bengali revolutionary M.N. Roy to whom Comintern initially assigned its Indian work; the Communist Party of India (CPI) founded by Roy in October 1920, and the CPGB itself which was given first informal and from 1925 to 1934 formal responsibility for communist work in India. In each case it explores the strengths and weaknesses of their political work. It identifies the relationships between Indian and non-Indian actors as the key explanation, and the main difficulty in these relationships as the tension between communist internationalism and Indian nationalism’s commitment to self-directed and self-reliant national struggle. Terms such as sympathy, help and solidarity, the chapter argues, are not neutral: they define distinct, uneven relationships between those who act and those who benefit which are sometimes (not always) problematic.

Communal Violence in Twenty-first Century India: Moving Beyond the Hindi Heartland

Using communal violence data between 2006 and 2017, this study challenges the idea that communal violence is primarily an issue in the Hindi Heartland. The data demonstrates how Karnataka and West Bengal are also witnessing rising levels of communal violence. The study goes on to take a closer look at the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Karnataka and West Bengal. It demonstrates how a combination of factors ranging from localized narratives of Hindu nationalism, caste coalitions, alliances with regional parties and the decline of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) in West Bengal and the Janata Party (JP)/Dal in Karnataka have been crucial factors for BJP’s rise in these two states.

Interrogating the Maoists and the Indian State: A Study of Salwa Judum in Bastar

Salwa Judum was a unique tribal-peasant movement that arose against the specific agenda of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) 1 (henceforth Maoists) in its full intensity in 2005 in the sub-region of Bastar ( baanstari, a Halbi word meaning the bed of or the land of bamboos) in Chhattisgarh. The movement began since January across different villages of non-Abujh Maad (the unknown hills of Madia/Koya tribes) sub-region that initially galvanised approximately 20,000 tribals. It was spontaneous and non-political (Prasad, 2012, p. 329). It was unique as the movement was against a ‘revolutionary’ group of Maoists and not against the state or against the zamindari system as most peasant movements in rural India were in the past. Its build-up was the culmination of suppressed anger of the tribals that had developed over decades against the Maoists also called ‘Naxalites’. It was a new and different phenomenon.

Kerala: The Dilemmas of Equality in Higher Education

The system of higher education in the state of Kerala, on India's southwest coast, has developed under unique social and political circumstances. Kerala is by most educationally measures the most advanced state in India. Its current government is a coalition dominated by the Marxist Communist Party of India. The state's higher education future is complex but practical. Careful attention needs to be given to the organization of the higher education system.

Muslim Modernism and Trans-regional Consciousness in Bengal, 1911–1925

Histories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth century, this article examines how Muslim activists imagined their identity outside of and beyond normative frameworks such as nation or religious community. This article specifically analyses Samyabadi, a left-oriented journal published in Calcutta from 1922 to 1925, in the larger context of communist developments in Bengal and throughout India. The findings offer exciting support for new research approaches to regional and religious identity in late colonial South Asia.