Poetics of Memory
Navaneetha Mokkil
UNCLAIMED HARVEST: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE TEBHAGA WOMEN’S MOVEMENT by Kavita Panjabi Zubaan, Delhi, 2019, 322 pp., 995
February 2019, volume 43, No 2

Animating the past and reflecting on its political resonance in the present has been a central preoccupation of feminist scholarship in South Asia. Kavita Panjabi’s Unclaimed Harvest makes a significant contribution to this corpus of work. This book is a nuanced and thought-provoking account of the Tebhaga Movement that was launched in undivided Bengal in 1946 by landless peasants and entered a phase of armed struggle from 1948-1951 after Partition. Panjabi’s primary aim is to write a history of women in the Tebhaga Movement by activating the memories of those who participated in it. By archiving and engaging with an affective tapestry of memories, she explores how the radical transformations wrought by this movement can tangibly inform current deliberations on feminist visions for social change.

The opening section of the book provides the reader with a detailed historical account of critical developments in the 1940s. Panjabi records the activities of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (MARS) since 1942 and the Mahila Samitis set up by the Communist Party (CP) that led to a process of politicization that enabled women’s dynamic participation in the Tebhaga Movement. She demonstrates that the gendered history of Tebhaga can be mapped only by engaging with international developments in that time period. The positioning of the Tebhaga Movement in relation to international trajectories of the women’s movement and Left radical struggles shows how the theoretical and methodological issues raised by this book can resonate across time and space.

One of the key contributions of this book is to examine how the subjectivity of urban and rural women is transformed in the aftermath of the ‘man-made’ famine in Bengal and its devastating repercussions. Peasant women enter into the movement ‘out of hunger’ (p. 86), caught in the vortex of a life and death struggle to feed the family. The entry-point and motivating force for urban women were different. Witnessing mass starvation and death, women in cities started working in langarkhanas set up by MARS and CP. Thus domestic tasks such as cooking and sharing food acquire a public dimension here. Panjabi observes that the ‘langarkhanas drew the rural and urban women into inter-subjective processes, one to one, in which the destitute woman became a beneficiary of relief and care, but the woman caring for her was also transformed’ (p. 101). Thus, she argues that the history of hunger and women’s critical role in the processing and sharing of food is a significant dynamic that we need to pay heed to in order to analyse women’s history (p. 93). Her analysis etches the processes through which an ethic of care translated into a politics of care that led to massive mobilization and the awakening of a powerful political consciousness in the first phase of the Tebhaga Movement.

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