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Call for Artists from LeftWord Books

In recent times, India has witnessed lakhs of student protestors braving all odds to hit the streets – from Himachal to Kerala and from Pune to Assam. Since 2014, the attack on students and higher education has been relentless. From intensified neoliberal onslaught in terms of massive fee hikes and scraping students’ fellowships to politically-motivated appointments of incompetent administrators, Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder, saffronization of education, attempts to delegitimize [...]

Michael Carritt in the Archives by Suchetana Chattopadhyay

Michael Carritt (1906-1990) secretly helped the Communist Party of India in the late colonial inter-war era while serving in the Indian Civil Service. The British intelligence file on him, which I found and read among Indian Political Intelligence files of the India Office Collection, contain the following: Carritt’s pension was withdrawn in 1940 after his retirement for his political conviction termed as 'grave misconduct'. In 1940, some documents were found in a trunk at Berkshire, buried [...]

The Impersonator and 'Comrade Schmidt'

Suchetana Chattopadhyay ‘I forget his name Mr. Dange. In fact I forgot your address too.’ A forgotten moment in Bomabay’s history is recorded in the dossiers. In late 1923, when S. A. Dange was in jail awaiting trial in what became known as Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case (1924), a police Inspector of the city's (anti-)Bolshevik Branch impersonated him. The aim of this masquerade was to meet one ‘Comrade Schmidt’. Claiming to represent the Communist International, he was a sailor an[...]

The Photo of Nalini Gupta

101 years ago on the evening of Saturday 12 June 1920, Nalini Bhushan Dasgupta, a former student of the school at Bolpur was singing ‘the Santiniketan song’ at the London YMCA in honour of Rabindranath. A reception had been organised by Bengalis living in England at the time to celebrate the poet's visit. Nalini later landed in Moscow via Berlin during the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921) and became a trusted helper of M. N. Roy, volunteering to travel to India on behalf of the émigrÃ[...]

Mythily Sivaraman (1939-2021).

LeftWord Books pays tribute to Mythily Sivaraman (1939-2021), author of Haunted by Fire: Essays on Caste, Class, Exploitation and Emancipation. On Tamil Nadu’s western border with Kerala lies the town of Valparai, where the plantation workers went on strike in May 1972. Meenakshi, a worker in her forties, worked at the Periakarumalai Tea & Produce Company. When the police attacked the striking workers, Meenakshi was arrested by them and severely beaten up in the police van. As the po[...]