Abstract
This is an important book on women’s history, especially on South Asian women’s history, and on the history of communist movement in India. The works and lives of women communists across India are explored with a focus on the intimate connections between their everyday life and political activism during the turbulent decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. These women came from diverse class and caste backgrounds, and led extraordinary lives, crossing territorial, cultural and ideological borders; they responded to personal crises with determination and resilience without sacrificing emotional sensitivity and they remained committed to the political ideology of Marxism at the greatest individual costs. The author admits at the outset that this book is both a personal and collective quest to understand her/their mothers’ generation of communist women who made unexpected choices and, without self-identifying as feminists, coursed through their lives with an acute sense of gender equality (pp. 3–4). The immediacy of this acknowledgement of the rationale for this book is layered with complex connections between the private and public spheres of becoming and being an independent woman, a communist and a communist woman. The simmering passion of this book—to empathetically understand an apparently aloof mother who teaches her daughters to be independent through example—captures the reader from the beginning and by taking Loomba by the hand, her readers embark on a journey into the lives of women such as Kalpana Joshi (nee Dutt), Bina Das, Manikuntala Sen, Prakashvati Kapur, Ushabai Dange, Parvathibai Bhore, Suhasini Chattopadhyay, Vimla Dang, Shaukat Kaifi, Kondapalli Koteswaramma, Kalyanibai Syed, Usha Dutt Verma, Murtazai Shakeel, Sheila Didi and many others. Some of them were famous, some of them were leaders, some remained unknown activists—but all of them had minds of their own and did not shy away from speaking their minds.
This book is divided into seven chapters. Each chapter covers the interconnections between the private and public lives of specific women within particular contexts. The chapters juxtapose different kinds of source materials, such as novels, autobiographies and interviews, so as to speak to the inner lives of women and how one can credibly conjecture the structures of feelings within which they operated. Shifts in the ‘political line’ of the party in the 1940s and 1950s were important events in constituting the political culture of the Communist Party of India (CPI) that was formed in 1925. The Sino-Soviet debate, in the late 1950s, fuelled a definitive split in 1964 whereby the second communist party, the CPI (Marxist), came into being. The factionalism in the 1940s and the split in 1964 made for a range of felt emotions for many women communists, beyond the ideological and organizational transformations. This book pays attention to their articulations of living through the debates, discord and hostilities between the members of different factions.
The first chapter ‘The Romance of Revolution’ focuses on the transition of women activists who were part of the armed anticolonial movement towards socialist ideology in Bengal. Loomba interweaves the lives of women revolutionaries such as Kalpana Dutt, Pritilata Wadaddar, Bina Das, Shantisudha Ghosh with three novels—Anandamath by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Pather Dabi by Sharat Chandra Chattrejee and Char Adyay by Rabindranath Tagore to trace their ideological commitment towards political violence against the colonial forces, their defiance of the normative traditions of passive femininity and their interiority as affective political subjects. The overlap of affect and politics in their lives is not limited within romantic attachments but it encompasses friendships and familial relations. This expanded affective community of women activists allows us to glimpse, quite early on in the book, the possibility of an international community of women revolutionaries—especially when Pritilata Wadaddar invokes women militants from foreign countries (p. 57). As the boundary between the private and public sphere begins to get blurred, and the romance of revolution makes not only the personal as political but also the political as personal, women’s history marks a decisive shift in women’s self-fashioning. The second chapter ‘Love in the Time of Revolution’ follows up this theme through the remarkable romance between Punjabi socialist poet-novelist Yashpal and Prakashvati Kapur. This chapter was my personal favourite because of the deft handling of multiple aspects of a revolutionary woman’s pursuit of love through many tribulations and her determined commitment to a life of political activism. Sifting through Yashpal’s autobiography Simhavolokan and his novels, especially his magnum opus Dada Kamred, Prakashvati’s autobiography, Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s memoir, archival documents of Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary Army, the author expands one love story into a larger question of gender relations within such non-Gandhian nationalist organizations, how these revolutionaries grappled with violence and finally how they found a partial resolution in socialism and its gendered ramifications (p. 95).
Loomba briefly discusses the ‘Kollontai-Lenin’ debate on freedom of love to introduce Indian communists’ experiments with such freedom in the third chapter ‘Commune-ism’. Communes incorporated both political and affective aspects of collective living, making a serious effort to substitute the patriarchal family with shared but independent individual lives (or marital units), and the chapter explores nuances of gender relations, romantic love and gender division of labour in the commune established by CPI in Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1940s and 1950s. The historical contexts, however, seem a little uneven as the context shifts to Maharashtra. While the first two chapters give details of the transition from armed anti-colonial movements to socialism in Bengal and Punjab, respectively, such a context (or the lack of it) is unavailable in case of Maharashtra, another significant region of armed anti-colonial movement. Autobiographies and memoirs of the members of the commune tell us charming anecdotes about party marriages, conjugal domesticity within the commune, daily lives of party ‘whole-timers’. But the author also compels the readers to puzzle through the prevalent farzi shadi in the party. Sexual and romantic tensions, or love that was not licit in the eyes of middle-class norms, could be resolved through farzi shadi or contract marriages between two comrades for pragmatic reasons (pp. 131–132). The most notable story in the Bombay (Mumbai) commune, however, belongs to Kalyanibai Syed who joined following her children and took over the kitchen duties, thus establishing the iconic socialist mother-figure (pp. 138–141).
The fourth chapter ‘The Political is Personal’ focuses on autobiographies of two Marathi women communists, Ushabai Dange and Parvathibai Bhore, who were trade union leaders in the mill-workers’ districts of Bombay (Mumbai). The class difference between university-educated women in the Bombay (Mumbai) commune and trade union leaders is explored through the writings of Ushabai and Parvathibai. Their autobiographical narratives also contrast the ideology behind commune with middle-class or working-class women’s need for family as a refuge from external political turmoil. Working-class women’s militancy in the picket lines during long strikes and their formation of a different kind of affective community through support network indicate a deep class-based chasm in the competing imaginations of intimacy within the communist movement. In the sixth chapter ‘The Family Romance’, these imaginations are explored further through the lives of four women—Vimla Dang, Usha Dutt Verma, Murtazai Shakeel and Kondapalli Koteswaramma. Usha Dutt Verma and Kondapalli Koteswaramma’s narratives come across as the most hard-hitting due to their relentless struggle with destitution, poverty and difficult or dysfunctional marriage. The sadness in their narratives becomes poignant because both Verma and Koteswaramma were artists in the cultural front of the party. The lives and works of women performers who were ‘people’s artists’ in the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) are discussed in the fifth chapter ‘The Dance of Hunger’. The principal thematic, however, revolves around feminized representations of the famine in 1942–1943 in the communist movement. Three texts—the legendary play Nabanna, Krishan Chander’s novella Anna Data and K. A. Abbas’s film Dharti ke Laal—form the core of the analysis.
The international context of the communist movement returns in the final chapter ‘Becoming “Indian”’ with the extraordinary figure of Sheila Didi who was a Kenyan–Indian communist revolutionary and worked in both the countries. This chapter offers so much new information for a revised historiography of the Indian communist movement that it is nearly impossible to identify the principal thematic in a sentence or two. It is probably best to consider this chapter as the beginning of further historical exploration of Indian communism in the international context, especially the role of women revolutionaries in crossing different borders.
The richness of documents—of memory and of fiction—read in this book comes through the lucidly written detailed chapters. And yet the diversity of regions would possibly have benefited more through a focus on the spatial materialities of women’s experiences—how the geopolitical connections within a historical frame forged socialist internationalism and how gender relations were quite central to this imagination of internationalism. This is, however, a minor quibble. Weaving in women’s autobiographies, memoirs, interviews along with novels, archival records, photographs and histories of performances, this book itself becomes an impressive testimony of restoring a significant historical period to women who lived and loved fiercely through these decades.