Revolutionary Desires

Women, Communism, and Feminism in India

Ania Loomba

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815381747
• eBook ISBN: 9781351209694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Revolutionary Desires examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalist and communist women in India from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. This close study demonstrates how India's revolutionary women shaped a new female – and in some cases feminist – political subject in the twentieth century, in collaboration and contestation with Indian nationalist, liberal-feminist, and European left-wing models of womenhood.

Through a wide range of writings by, and about, revolutionary and communist women, including memoirs, autobiographies, novels, party documents, and interviews, Ania Loomba traces the experiences of these women, showing how they were constrained by, but also how they questioned, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. A collection of carefully restored photographs is dispersed throughout the book, helping to evoke the texture of these women's political experiences, both public and private.

Revolutionary Desires is an original and important intervention into a neglected area of leftist and feminist politics in India by a major voice in feminist studies.

1

THE ROMANCE OF REVOLUTION

On 11 February 1932, a British intelligence report noted that ‘girl students’ are among the ‘most generous potential assassins possessing a desire for ‘martyrdom’ akin to the early Christians’.¹ The report was probably responding to an event that took place five days earlier – Bina Das, a student aged 21, had shot Bengal Governor Sir Stanley Jackson at the Convocation of Calcutta University. Three months later, the Rajshahi District Magistrate O. M. Martin described women terrorists as ‘more deadly than men’. What made women revolutionaries more ‘deadly’ than their male counterparts was neither their numbers, nor the nature of their actions, but rather, the shock and surprise of their participation in the militant underground movement for the independence of India from British rule. Women had not been welcomed by the underground groups in Bengal, Punjab, or the United Provinces, the three areas where such groups were most active. The fact that young women were now being allowed to join, often because they had already acted on their own initiative, required both Indian and British men (not to mention other women) to rethink their very conceptions of Indian femininity.

Feminist scholarship has tended to query the deeds, subjectivities, and political impact of revolutionary women according to a somewhat rigid set of terms: seeking to analyse the deeds, subjectivities, and political impact of revolutionary women; should they be considered ‘goddesses’ or ‘rebels’? What effects did the presence and actions of these women have on the revolutionary underground? How did they conform strategically to existing gender ideologies in order to carve out spaces for their own participation in subversive activities? Did they open up a far more radically proto-feminist space within the nationalist movement? These are particularly pressing questions because, as historian Durba Ghosh has suggested, ‘even when women were not particularly well-behaved, the practice of history-writing – as it has been generated by particular bourgeois norms and professional demands – produced Indian women as middle-class ideals of womanhood’ (358). More than a generation ago, Geraldine Forbes had pointed out that such an appropriation had occurred in the revolutionaries’ lifetimes:

Because they operated in a political sphere where women who were dedicated to the nationalist movement could take part in activities which would have otherwise been closed to them, the extent to which they were social rebels was obfuscated. What was emphasized was their sacrifice. To Bengalis they were the brave girls who defied the British, who were so devoted to the ideal of political freedom, that they would sacrifice not only material comfort and family, but even their own lives.

(‘Goddesses or Rebels?’ 12)

Such a view was, to some extent, shared by the revolutionary women themselves, and Ghosh suggests that their own pronouncements set the tone for later ‘histories of revolutionary women terrorists [that] take the form of reinstating the “ideals of Indian womanhood’”(321). But the question lingers: were they simply re-instating established ideals, or simultaneously redefining them? As Forbes observes: ‘no one, including the revolutionary women themselves, considered revolutionaries representative of Indian womanhood’ (Women in Modern India 155). Revolutionary women, she notes, dramatically enlarged the scope of female political activities: they spent days and nights in underground hideouts with men, learned to shoot and used guns, made and hurled bombs, disguised themselves as men, resisted torture in prison, committed suicide in order to evade arrest, recruited and trained other young women, financed the movement, wrote in and ran journals, and – this is of particular interest here – a majority of them remained unmarried, at least while they were active in the movement.

The most interesting question that arises from their histories is not whether these revolutionaries were ‘bad’ or ‘good’ women, rebels or goddesses. To frame the questions using such binaries is to occlude the fact that the meanings of these terms were then in flux, in part because of the activities of such women. It was through their revolutionary actions that conceptions of what was feasible and socially acceptable for Indian women were transformed. Moreover, revolutionary women were not a homogeneous group with a single approach to either nationalism or femininity, and their lives and writings necessarily open up the range of their negotiations with dominant assumptions about ideal femininity.

Hagiographic accounts of revolutionary women often fail to elaborate the differences between the demands made of them by the revolutionary nationalist underground and by mainstream nationalists. Within the larger national context, it is true that nationalists of different stripes shared certain attitudes towards female political participation, and about the subjectivity, affective lives, and sexuality of women. But their points of divergence, as well as their shared attitudes, are both crucial to understanding revolutionary women – not just in Bengal, but also in Punjab (to which I turn in the next chapter) – and to situating them in relation to women active in the Communist Party of India in later decades. While many revolutionary women did join the CPI and other left-wing groups, my aim is not to detect and trace the seeds of Marxist ideology in their early actions. Rather, I want to ask: how do the histories and representations of these women enable us to understand the powerful and abiding construction of revolutionary desire in India?

In many literary texts and historical archives, revolutionary women’s passion is consistently expressed as a desire for the nation and for freedom, accompanied by a need to make this desire heard. Their personal attachments are always represented as subsumed within and indeed legitimated by this nationalist passion. This sort of identification with a higher political ideal was often generated at the explicit behest of their revolutionary organizations, which were wary of admitting women in the first place. Women’s sexuality was understood as a potential threat to the brotherhood of revolutionary men, and the onus was on women to set aside their personal desires in the service of the larger cause. At other times, such nationalist identification followed from the fact that these women shared the prevailing ethos about political commitments being more important than any personal desire.

However, strikingly, this model of women prioritizing the larger cause is decidedly not the case in two influential novels of the time – Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Pather Dabi (The Right of Way) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Char Adhyay (Four Chapters). The publication of these novels framed the years of most intense and widespread female participation in the revolutionary underground. Pather Dabi appeared in 1926, just before this period, and its portrayal of male and female activists was formative for many of the young revolutionaries in Bengal. Like Bankim’s Anandmath and Devi Chaudhurani before it, it featured women as active revolutionaries, but it also marked a departure from those earlier novels which are set in historically distant times, do not engage directly with contemporary political debates, and are markedly Hindu in their vision of the nation. Char Adhyay was published after this period, in 1934, and offered a damning account of the militant underground precisely in its depiction of a woman revolutionary and her lover. Although formally very different, both novels portray militant nationalism in highly gendered and sexually charged vocabularies. Together, as I will suggest, they illustrate some of the ways in which nationalist passions and individual libidinal desire were framed as both antithetical and inseparable.

These issues are complicated by the fact that, as recent scholarship has argued, we cannot rely on conventionally constituted archives when it comes to unearthing revolutionary histories. As Kama Maclean writes, ‘Given the necessary secrecy of revolutionary organisation and the flaws in the written record […] if we were to rely solely on written archives, we would have little chance of retrieving revolutionary histories’ (680). Against the assumption that memoirs and oral histories are too fanciful and unreliable, Maclean demonstrates why they are central to any history of Indian revolutionaries. Fiction, I want to suggest, is equally important, although Tanika Sarkar, who fruitfully pairs Pather Dabi and Char Adhyay, wonders if it is ‘presumptuous to comment on the works of two literary giants of modern Bengal for the purposes of a narrow field of historical research’ (‘Nationalism’ 449).² If Maclean is arguing against the view that certain non-traditional sources fall short of counting as historical evidence, Sarkar’s demurral constitutes literature as too capacious and complex for the same purpose. However, if, as feminist and other radical scholarship has argued over the last many decades, literature and history are mutually constitutive modes of representation, then what matters is not the nature of materials but rather our reading practices. Especially as we try to imagine the lived experiences that constitute history, we will need to promiscuously juxtapose literary representations, memoirs, interviews, and anecdotes with orthodox archival materials. This is my approach in the sections that follow, which focus first on Pather Dabi, then on the women revolutionaries, and finally on Char Adhyay.

*

In a memoir published in 1947, the year in which India became independent, Bina Das recalled that one of the formative incidents in her youth was

acquiring Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Pather Dabi. I was preparing for the matriculation examination. Learning that the book was banned, I felt a great compulsion to read it. I read it over and over and almost had it by heart. In school too the book was the most important topic for discussion.

One night I saw father reading the book till three o’clock at night. Next morning he commented, ‘A woman’s common-sense approach is always better. Bharati’s opinion is better than the Doctor’s.’ I argued with father on this point, and then went to school and continued the opposite stance with my friends.

(8)³

Bina wrote a long essay on the novel, much to the consternation of her headmistress. The school authorities were compelled to disallow the essay as part of Bina’s examination because in 1927, a year after it first appeared, Pather Dabi had been proscribed, alongside ‘Bolshevik literature’ that continued to ‘invade the country’.⁴ Although the essay was ultimately allowed to stand, Bina received lower marks for it than one she had written for another test; the headmistress was sure that it was because of the nature of the book she had chosen to write on.⁵

Pather Dabi was influential for many of the young revolutionaries in Bengal – for men as well as women.⁶ Kamala Dasgupta, who later gave Bina the revolver she used to shoot Jackson, first read it when she was depressed because Gandhi had not allowed her to join his ashram without her parents’ permission. As it turned out, the novel’s world of heroism and romance directed Kamala’s political energies towards the militant organization Jugantar (Dasgupta; Forbes, ‘Goddesses’ 138). The attraction for the women lay partly in the fact that this novel (like Bankim’s Anand Math and Devi Chaudhurani before it) featured women as active revolutionaries. For instance, Pritilata Waddedar of the Chittagong group of revolutionaries, ‘learnt how Sumitra and Bharati of Sarat Chandra’s Pather Dabi participated in the revolutionary movement, how Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in his novel Devi Chaudhurani prepared heroine Prafullamukhi for great sacrifices. Reading these books, Preeti [sic] was highly impressed and started dreaming of the day when she could be like one of those women’ (Mandal 89; Joshi 39).

However, it was the charisma of the central character, Sabyasachi, also known as the Doctor, that these young women found particularly attractive. Kalpana Dutt (later Kalpana Joshi) – Pritilata’s comrade in the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch – recalls being so struck with their leader Surya Sen that she told Pritilata, ‘Do you know, I think our Masterda [as Sen was called by his comrades] is greater even than Doctorda’ (see Appendix 2 for more on Sen). She reports Preeti responding with, ‘Yes, I think so too’ (Chittagong 16). At that point, Pritilata had not met Surya Sen, but his reputation was legendary. Kalpana recalls the circulation of stories about

how he slipped through a police cordon, dressed like an old mali (gardener). How he was seen talking to the village-folk dressed like a sanyasi. How he walked through village after village, in broad daylight, talking carelessly to a police officer companion, who did not know who he was talking to […]. Uneducated village-folk used to say Surjya Sen knows mysterious ‘mantrams’ – nobody can catch him, he vanishes into thin air. He was a superman – what else can you call a man who kept the Government on tenterhooks all the time?

Educated folk put the same feeling differently. […] Some of them would describe where and how they had seen Surjya Sen, they would describe every glimpse they caught of the great leader and every word they heard. […]

The police tortured scores of people, trying to get them to inform on Surjya and his associates. But they never got a word out of them. […] They were innocent, but they stuck it out and it never occurred to them to blame Surjya Sen for their sorrows.

(Chittagong 14–15)⁷

Pather Dabi’s Doctor-da was indeed uncannily like Chittagong’s Master-da in his ability to elude capture, mesmerize his followers and embody implacable opposition to the British state.

In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, published in book form a quarter of a century earlier, a Bengali named Hurree Chunder Mukherjee is a master of disguise, but trained by and in the service of the British state. Pather Dabi’s Sabyasachi, on the contrary, is, as a senior police officer describes him in tones of awe:

a revolutionary! An enemy of the state! A worthy enemy indeed! The person who named him ‘Sabyasachi’ must’ve been really inspired. […] He never misses a target with gun or pistol. He can swim across the mighty river Padma; nothing can stop him. […] He can speak a dozen languages so fluently that one would find it difficult to guess what was his mother-tongue. He studied medicine in Germany, engineering in France, law in England, and since he lived for some time in America, he must’ve done something there as well. […] The burning passion he has for his country is like an inextinguishable flame coursing through his veins! Torture him, torment him, it’ll not cease as long as he lives! He has neither compassion, n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The romance of revolution
• 2 Love in the time of revolution
• 3 Commune-ism
• 4 The political is personal
• 5 The dance of hunger
• 6 The family romance
• 7 Becoming ‘Indian’
• By Way of a Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Index