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Communist Prints: Sidenotes to the Asian Women’s Conference of 1949

The paper caught my attention. The pictures slipped into my fingers from the archive file. The paper was fine and strong, with a subtle texture and sheen. It felt as if it were made of silk. Three of the brightly colored woodblock prints shared the same paper. All featured peasant women were reveling in the benefits of communism. The images suffered from mild water damage. This blurred the writing and spread a pink wash of watercolor paint over parts of the image. The stories they tell, however[...]

The Fight Against Sexual Harassment: A Call for the Long Road rather than the Short Cut

We want to start with extending our deepest solidarities to the survivors of sexual harassment that runs rampant in the academy and beyond. We acknowledge that sexual harassment, in all its forms, is far too widespread. That senior and serial offenders have operated with impunity and survivors have been maligned and blamed for the assault. One of us is a woman and having handled enquiries with the GSCASH in JNU, has experienced and fought alongside the complainants for justice if the accused is [...]

Facing odds still moving ahead: Kulgam (Jammu & Kashmir)

Very few people know that the red flag of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPIM, staunchly defends the people’s rights against the police and military excesses here and also is a beacon to combat the designs of secessionist elements in Kashmir valley. In the state, the CPIM is a small party, which has only one MLA - Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami from Kulgam. Nonetheless, the party has faced great violence here, which is little known outside the state. Nearly fifty comrades have been killed b[...]

Adani, Jay Amit Shah & the Ruling Ideas of the Ruling Class

George Orwell’s 1984 echoes with the slogan – Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. The State, Orwell wrote, attempts to manage ‘knowledge,' to produce discourses that change according to its own interests and its agendas. The State attempts to ‘manufacture’ knowledge to achieve its ends, using all the power of its institutions to drive its project. The class that controls the State defines what is ‘correct’ in its time. As Marx and[...]

Adi Cooper and her research on the Tebhaga and Tanka Movements (1946-50)

Elisabeth B. Armstrong Adrienne’s Book In 1988, K. P. Bagchi of Kolkata published Adrienne Cooper’s Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal, 1930-1950. A Bengali version of the book was published in Bangladesh, but this version tells only the economic history not the political history of rural people’s lives. In Economic and Political Weekly, Ranajit Das Gupta reviewed the English edition favourably. To tell the story of the 1946-47 Tebhaga movement in Bengal, Das Gupta wr[...]