Mohammed Amin (1928-2018) was one of the giants of the trade union movement in India. Born in Howrah in Bengal of Urdu-speaking parents, Amin had no formal education. At fourteen, he became a worker in a jute mill where his father worked. He joined the Communist Party at eighteen, lived through the endemic communal violence of the late 40s, emigrated to East Pakistan, and lived for a while in a refugee camp there. He was arrested for being a Communist and incarcerated. On release, he returned to Calcutta and became a trade union organizer. Amin taught himself Urdu, English, Hindi and Bengali at home, in night school and in prison. For a time, he worked as a journalist with an Urdu daily for five years; he also rolled bidis to augment his paltry party wage. He was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly and the Rajya Sabha multiple times, and held major ministerial portfolios in the State. He also served as the national General Secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions and as a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Amin became an accomplished poet in Urdu, a published author, and compiled a Bengali-Urdu dictionary. His was a fascinating journey. His autobiography, published in Bengali in 2017, tells the story of that journey.
Amin’s paternal grandfather Abdur Rahman came from Banaras district. After a stint as a hotel worker in Karachi, Rahman settled down in the industrial outskirts of Calcutta. Amin’s mother came from Bhagalpur. Amin’s father was literate in Urdu; his mother was illiterate. Amin grew up in Alambazar on the north-western margin of Calcutta. This was an area dotted, at the time, with factories operated mostly by Urdu and Hindi-speaking workers with family roots in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Amin’s grandfather taught him to read and write in Urdu and Hindi. The book provides a harrowing but unflinching account of 1946-50, a period of intense and recurrent communal violence in Calcutta.
Amin provides a fascinating account of life in refugee camps and prisons in East Pakistan. He spent 26 months in the notorious Rajshahi Central Jail. This was the site of the Khapra Ward massacre of 1950, when the prison authorities opened fire on Communist detainees, killing seven and injuring about thirty others, including Mansur Habibullah—the future Law Minister of West Bengal and the Speaker of the West Bengal Assembly. Also incarcerated in Rajshahi Central Jail at the time was the legendary peasant leader Ila Mitra—an Olympic-level athlete who had suffered sexual violence and torture in police custody. In prison, Amin studied Marxism, political economy, history of religion and Bengali. He had the responsibility of reading and explaining English newspapers to those who could not read English. Amin used this to improve his command over both English and Bengali—something he put to use after his release by writing an Urdu-Bengali dictionary. There are both revealing and tragic-ironic vignettes here. Amin’s mastery over Urdu made him stand out among Communists in East Pakistan and offered him privileges while dealing with the authorities. Sunil Sen survived Rajshahi prison only to get murdered in Calcutta in the early 70s. Ratan Sen, who stayed on in East Pakistan, was killed in Khulna after the creation of Bangladesh. After his release in November 1953, Amin returned to Calcutta and became a whole-time Communist organizer, and was tasked with building unions in Titagarh—an industrial suburb of Calcutta. Amin writes about his struggles as an organizer in Titagarh. He gradually built up Communist unions in the area. However, during and immediately after the 1962 Sino-Indian war, ideological and factional conflicts within the Party peaked. Even the paltry monthly wage that Amin used to receive as a Party whole-timer was stopped. One of the most striking aspects of Amin’s discussion of this period is his emphasis on grassroots democracy within the unions that he led.
In 1969, Amin was elected to the West Bengal Assembly on a CPI(M) ticket and became the Transport Minister in the short-lived United Front Government. He writes about his experiences during the subsequent period of extreme political violence in Bengal—1971-77, especially during the elections of 1972, which were heavily rigged by the Congress. Amin was elected to the State Assembly in 1977 and became the Transport Minister in the first Left Front Government. He lost thereafter, became a member of the Rajya Sabha in 1988, and was elected to the State assembly again in 1996 and 2001. He served as a Cabinet Minister, first for Minority Affairs and subsequently for Labour. He was elected national General Secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions in 2007, a position he held till 2010. In 2007, he was also elected to the Rajya Sabha once again, and to the CPI(M) Politburo in 2008. The book, however, concludes with his electoral defeat in 2006.
One of the most striking features of the book is Amin’s accounts of the extreme repression and hardship that early Communists suffered both in Pakistan and India. He tells, for example, of a trade union activist, Rumalludin, who was tied to a police car and dragged around in front of the Khulna Jute Mill in East Pakistan till he died. His body was left there as a warning to the workers. Another early Communist and Amin’s political mentor, Hafiz Jallaluddin, died in 1950 of injuries suffered during torture by the Uttar Pradesh police while in prison. Amin’s account also highlights how strikingly footloose and cosmopolitan many of the early Communist organizers active among Calcutta’s immigrant industrial workers were. These men came to Calcutta’s industrial suburbs from many different parts of India, often as manual workers. They spoke, read and wrote multiple languages. Many of them were self-taught men like Amin, with little or no formal education. Many of them kept shifting base across South Asia in search of revolution. They survived precariously; they worked odd jobs. These men belonged everywhere and joined class battles anywhere; but everywhere they went the state sought to hunt them down. A large proportion of them were also Muslims.
This book is essential reading for anybody interested in the history of labour and Communist organizing efforts, especially among Hindi and Urdu-speaking workers, in the industrial suburbs of Calcutta.
Indraneel Dasgupta is Professor of Economics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.