Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women's Movement by Kavita Panjabi

Author:Kavita Panjabi [Panjabi, Kavita]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Zubaan Books
Published: 2018-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

However, while men emphasized the need for the infrastructure women provided, Guha’s underlined the number of women involved and the massive spread of the movement due to them. What she indicated, then, was: one, that there were transformations of an inward quality that led women to ‘throng’ to join the movement; and two, that huge numbers of women came together to infuse the movement with this attribute, which indicates that this experience of meaningful subjective transformation was widespread amongst them.

A third point about how women transformed the movement qualitatively was made, curiously enough, only by men, and as an instinctive first response that: ‘Women knit the movement into one big family.’ This in some ways reinforces what Bina Guha said about women bringing antarikata to the movement.

Indispensable, thus, to the forging of political solidarity across villages, women also shaped the Tebhaga movement strategically, creating not only an efficient infrastructure and network of political bases in their homes, but also an elaborate spy system right across the Tebhaga areas. Abani Lahiri said that women formed the most effective intelligence wing of the underground CP and the krishak sabha in the days of state terror during the Tebhaga movement. MARS, the mahila samiti of the CP and the krishak sabhas, as well as the zamindars and jotedars’ fields, became centres of intense struggle. Women began to play other roles in the movement too, forming gaynbahinis or battalions carrying gayns (used for pounding rice) and chilli powder for attacks, carrying the grain from the fields to their own threshing floors in defiance of the landlords’ orders, and marching to the zamindar or jotedar’s house in protest against sexual exploitation (Chattopadhyay 1987; Cooper 1988; Custers 1987; Ganguly 1992; Majumdar 1993; and others).

In addition, they also took on leadership of the movement, both on a daily basis and specially when the men were arrested or forced to flee, often themselves being the ones hunted by the police and in need of shelter, as evinced in the narratives of peasant women like Bimala Majhi of Mednipur and Phuli Goldar of Narail, and urban women like Rani Dasgupta of Dinajpur and Ila Mitra of Narail. Without such qualitative political participation of women, Tebhaga would have been scarcely more than a series of sporadic attacks. The women, it becomes clear from the oral narratives of activists across the two Bengals, did not merely play additive or supportive roles, but qualitative and strategic ones. They actually gave the movement a sustained, organized and widespread form, proving the indispensability of women’s contribution to peasant struggle.

Ila Mitra testified that one of the successes of Tebhaga was that it marked an awakening amongst peasant women:

Anyway, as I’ve told you, the Tebhaga struggle assumed the shape of a mass uprising and I want to say something about the role of women here. There were some aspects of both success and failure in the Tebhaga movement, because in the fight against zamindars and jotedars—I’ll come to the question of Santals later—peasants were swept away in a flood of blood … they lost everything.

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