: The Forgotten Women of the Unfinished Revolution – Part I #IndiaNEWSAll #East Bengaijyot, a small hamlet in North Bengal. A small slab in the midst of a meadow bears the names of Dhaneshwari Devi,

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The Forgotten Women of the Unfinished Revolution – Part I #IndiaNEWSAll #East
Bengaijyot, a small hamlet in North Bengal. A small slab in the midst of a meadow bears the names of Dhaneshwari Devi, Simashwari Mallik, Nayaneshwari Mallik, Surubala Burman, Sonamati Singh, Fulmati Devi, Samsari Soibani- seven names that remain as reminders of a different time, of a revolutionary possibility.
The ‘spring thunder’ that had waged an ideological war against the Indian state has been well documented through numerous stories, films, pictures, songs, plays, poems, and autobiographies. Movements are often remembered through personal as well as social memories. This ‘collective memory is constructed out of tales passed down in families or through collective acts of observation and remembrance. What finds a place in written history is etched from what one remembers, how, and what one would rather forget. This gets particularly difficult to create any archive of any underground movement as much of its history remains censored, hidden away from the eyes of the state. As a result, oral history plays a crucial role. Furthermore, since the movement was an underground one that had undergone brutal state repression and has been almost erased from the national memory, the history of the movement is one filled with absences and silences. It is in these gaps and silences where the factual archive fails, that literary imagination creeps in. While discussing the politics of remembering the movement, it therefore becomes imperative to engage with this ‘imaginative memory’ of revolution that has kept the movement alive in public memory.
Archival documents, oral history, and literature complement each other in bringing to life the history of the Naxalbari movement. While any deliberation on the women of Naxalbari movement, brings to mind the names of the aforementioned ‘martyred’ women. The names of many other women involved with the movement elude us. Even those that make its way in the recollections, or in literary imagination are remembered in the terms of men. Women, primarily middle-class women, in these contexts mostly get cast in the image of the ‘mother’, ‘sister’, ‘lover’, while peasant women are either seen as the ‘victim’ who needs to be rescued by the new man, or the virile courageous guerilla woman. What gets lost in these binaries are flesh and blood stories of resilience, fear, conviction, doubts, hesitation, repression, struggle…
Also read: Emergence of Brahminical Fascism in West Bengal

If the history of Naxalbari is to be reconstructed through the accounts of rural women who had been part of the movement, memories, however slippery, seem to be the primary source.

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