Kavita Punjabi's "Unclaimed Harvest": An Oral History of the Tebhag Women's Movement."

An incredibly important account of a forgotten part of Indian history.

Finished reading "Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement", by Kavita Punjabi: 

What a wonderful and haunting book. As the name suggests, the book is about the Tebhaga Movement (1946 - 1948), which was a peasant-led movement in Bengal, demanding 2/3 of the harvest for the tiller. 

https://t.co/ps3qQVgAXN

It eventually turned into an armed insurrection and was put down with force. Punjabi's focus is on the (prominent) role of women in the movement, which she reconstructs through oral interviews and testimonies, taken many year after it was over. Through these testimonies, she shows how, through the movement, women articulated a vocabulary that allowed them to challenge existing patriarchal structures. 

She also shows how women harnessed an idiom of care, and politicised it. 

She shows how on many occasions, the role of women was instrumental in creating solidarities across class/caste/religious barriers, which otherwise would have been difficult - if not impossible - to construct. 

The role of the undivided Communist Party was crucial here.

As was the role of the Communist Party in providing a space where these structures and barriers could be challenged in the first place (the word "solidarity" is central). Lastly, she confronts the question of violence squarely, and indeed, women's own ambivalence.

Through the oral histories, some astonishing characters appear, such as Ila Mitra, who became a leader of the Santhals, came through custodial violence and torture, and eventually became an MLA.

https://t.co/qoPSEHQOlV

Flawed, but also heroic in the true sense.

At the end we are left with a haunting sense of a movement fundamentally based on liberation and equality, but which - because of an imposed Party-line regarding armed struggle, which many in the movement disagreed with - collapsed. Punjabi leaves us with a sense of the radical possibilities of such movements, but also with a sense of how often and easy it is for such movements to fail, and the fundamental question - did it matter? - remains unanswered.

All in all, recommend this book very much. Read this book as part of readings for the history of the Indian Left, in the Kosambi Research and Analysis Circle. Also reinforces what @itihaasnaama says about the 40s and 50s being the most fascinating periods of recent Indian history.