When the peasantry
raised its voice...
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
A good part of Indian history — and the reference relates to political conditions as they existed before the division of the subcontinent in 1947 — has largely been a long tale of what the poor have tried to make of it. In essence, it has always been the underprivileged masses of the country who have influenced the course of events, particularly in the times of British colonialism. Take the example of the peasantry, especially as it found itself hemmed in by historical circumstances in Bengal. The existence of the zamindari system, one that was not to end until the early 1950s through the efforts of such men as Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Haq, has been one of those factors of Indian politics that were to delay the process of political independence and, of course, economic emancipation. While political independence was eventually to arrive in rather bloodied and truncated manner, through the division of India into two independent states, economic freedom has remained a largely elusive affair. Why poverty has remained a defining characteristic of life in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan is today a matter of academic debate, one that calls for a totality of historical perspective to be brought into it.
And yet there can hardly be any escaping the reality that the Tebhaga Movement, or roughly three-share movement, launched by the peasantry in the northern region of eastern Bengal in the rice-growing season between 1946 and 1947 remains one of those seminal movements instrumental behind the subsequent movements for political autonomy in the region. In hindsight, one can certainly say that the Tebhaga Movement was a launching pad, in a very concentrated way, for all the later struggles Bengalis in this part of the subcontinent were to wage. It is the background to the Tebhaga Movement that is the focus of analysis here. Dhononjoy Roy has surely made a stellar contribution to a sustenance of culture through bringing together a diversity of ideas, as expressed through writing, relating to the history of the doomed struggle the peasants were to participate in. These peasants, known as adhiars, indoctrinated as they were on patently leftist ideas of an equitable distribution of economic resources, took it upon themselves to demand a fair share of the profits to be had from their work in the fields owned by the landlords. It was a doomed struggle because eventually it was put down, brutally, by a combination of the vested interests and the colonial authorities. But when it was launched in 1946, a heavy dose of idealism informed the struggle. In that year, a provincial peasants’ conference in Moubhaga of Khulna district gave out a call for a movement to uproot the system that had come to be known as the Permanent Settlement (remember Cornwallis?), the foundation on which the zamindari system had been based so long. That was the catalyst. The message going out to the peasantry was simple: it had a right to a third of the crops harvested for the landlords. It was in village Thumnia of west Thakurgaon that the first incident of tebhaga-related harvesting occurred. According to plan, the peasants collected their share of the crops and took it home. An irate feudal class filed cases of theft against the peasants, but that did not stop the programme from going on.
The excitement was not meant to last. It was on 4 January 1947, in Chirir Bondor area of Dinajpur, that the police fired into a crowd of peasants. The first casualties of the Tebhaga Movement were Shibram and and Somiruddin. The former was a poor Santal adhiar while the latter was an impoverished day labourer. The shootings were the beginning of the end of the movement, in the immediate perspective. On the scale of history, it was but the first moment of the change that was to come over the Bengal landscape in subsequent years, especially in terms of an eventual abolition of the zamindari system and the rise of popular participation in Bengali nationalist politics.
The work is a detailed observation of the Tebhaga Movement by some of the more important of figures who initiated the movement or were to add flesh to it. Bibhuti Guha, Ajit Roy, Haji Mohammad Danesh, Sudhir Mukherjee and Poresh Mojumdar are some of the contributors to the compilation. The thought is clear: it is a rich collection of reminiscences about a more dramatic phase in the collective Bengali struggle for self-expression.
Tebhaga Andolon
Edit. Dhononjoy Roy
Ananda Publishers’ Private Ltd.
Kolkata
ISBN 81 7756 069 7
Rupees 100/-
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