Unclaimed Harvest
An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement
1943: As the British Empire draws to a close, the state of Bengal is just emerging from the grip of famine. Exploited mercilessly by feudal landlords, landless peasants rise in protest and launch a movement in 1946 to retain two-thirds of the grain they harvest - Tebhaga.
More than 50,000 women participated in this movement: one whose history and tragic end - in the crossfire between state violence and revolutionary armed struggle - became a legend in its time. Yet in the written history of Tebhaga, the full-fledged women's movement that they forged has never featured.
In this authoritative study, based on interviews and women's memories, Kavita Panjabi sets the balance right with rare sensitivity and grace. Using critical insights garnered from oral history and memory studies, Panjabi raises questions that neither social history nor left historiography ask. In doing so, she claims the past for a feminist vision of radical social change. This account of the transformation of the struggle is unique in feminist scholarship movements.
About the Author
Kavita Panjabi is Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-ordinator of the Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Jadavpur University, and has been an activist in the Indian women's movement and the Pakistan India peace movement for over two decades. She has edited Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation ; jointly edited Women Contesting Culture: Changing Frames of Gender Politics in India and Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas ; and is currently editor of the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature . Her 'partition diary' Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition , evolved in the context of peace activism and family history across the borders.
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First published by Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd 2017 in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla
Copyright Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla 2017
Copyright Foreword V. Geetha 2017
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To my mother Sushil
whose life now shows me
why to cherish the worth of memory.
Contents
V. Geetha
'-The Rolling of the Wick:
The Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti and the Women's Movement in Tebhaga
The 'Retroactive Force of Interiority':
The Conscience of Oral History
'-Mother Give Me Some Rice Water:
The 'Man-Made' Famine and Women's Responses to Hunger
'-The Persistence of the Past:
The Santals and the Times of Revolution
'-In Search of the Terrain of Love:
Alienation in a Politics of Violence
Foreword
Histories of Our Own
V. GEETHA
IT IS HARD as well as gratifying, embarrassing as well as pleasurable to write a foreword to a book that Ive waited for avidly and read along the way. If, in the process, I am able to point to some directions that it opens up for us, I would have repaid the faith that Kavita Panjabi, the author, and Urvashi Butalia, the publisher, have both reposed in me.
I would like to begin with a short note on history and history writing.
Since the 1970s, a decade that witnessed the emergence of womens groups across the country, feminists have asked questions about their own practice. Such questioning involved two distinct groups of women, the first being those who had founded womens groups or forums in cities and towns, and the second comprising those who worked with mass organizations, including trade unions, peasant groups and Dalit forums, and were active in struggles concerning land and environment. These groups were not hermetically sealed off from each other and there existed constant traffic between the two. But their concerns were different. On the one hand, both groups were acutely aware of the womens question, as an earlier usage would have it. Both asserted the importance of attending to what women had to say about their concerns, anxieties, needs and rights. Both acknowledged the fact that womens political expectations centred as much around their role in the family and included issues like alcoholism, violence at home and childcare.
Where the two groups differed was on the question of who and what constituted the feminist subject of politics: the articulate, emancipated woman who could speak her mind about a range of issues that had seldom been spoken about or considered pertinent, belonging to the realm of the personal, sexual and the familial, or all those other women, peasants, agricultural labourers, Adivasi mine workers, fishers and Dalits, who struggled at home and outside, in their workplaces and within communities for survival, fair livelihood practices and dignity. This was an issue that did not admit any easy resolution. Some, particularly feminists in urban contexts, sought to mark their difference by proclaiming that women were oppressed as much by patriarchy as by feudalism and capitalism. Feminists working with mass movements and sometimes women from these movements wondered if feminist practice, centring on family, sexuality, culture and religion was relevant to all women, and if women ought to indeed insist on the salience of gender amidst the clamour of those who foregrounded class, caste and tribe.
Not all of these thoughts and misgivings, such as they might have been, were voiced aloud. And when they were, in public debates and conversations, they did not appear polarized, as they do in written descriptions of them. Eventually, these latter found their way into books and essays that feminists produced with alacrity from the late 1980s onwards and well into the early 1990s. It was as if, even as they plunged into practical action in the streets and courts, their poky offices and in spaces that were home to various democratic movements, they took a mirror to what they were doing and wrote about themselves, incessantly.
