 This is an edited excerpt from an interview conducted by Vishwabandhu of Prof. Uma Dasgupta based on her recent book “History of Santiniketan: Rabindranath Tagore and His Life’s Work, 1861-1941.” The full interview can be found on Youtube. Q: In trying to find studies of Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati, I was not able to find so many. You would think that given the enormity and the importance of the project there would be a lot of work done on it. It seems it has not been given enough attention, and I wanted to ask you if you agree with this? A: Yes, I do very much so. I mean, Tagore was obviously a great writer, a great poet, and that goes without saying, but he was also a very committed educator, that is hardly known. And there have been, so far as I saw from my research, and this is probably quite factual, no histories of Santiniketan. There have been contemporary tracts. When I was looking at the archives, I was asking the archivists and the librarians at Santiniketan, in the Rabindra Bhavana repository, which is the major repository of Tagore’s works. And they said there are teachers’ pamphlets. Teachers who taught at the time wrote little pamphlets about their own experience, and that we do call contemporary tracts in historical research. So I could use them, but there were just a very few, not even a handful, but no connected history of either Santiniketan or Sriniketan or Visva-Bharati. Q: I know you’ve had a very long association with Santiniketan. Maybe you could just talk about that a little bit. A: I had a strong family connection because my mother’s mother lived her widowed years in Santiniketan. She was a lady from Dhaka. When her husband died, who was a lawyer in Dhaka, she had four children who were still growing up, it was a family of sixteen children, but four were still in the age of ten to fifteen, sixteen. And Tagore used to go to Dhaka, of course, and as was the tradition in those times, he was obviously by then quite a celebrity by the time he was going to Dhaka. And the ladies would get together and cook a wonderful meal for him each day of his stay. And one of them was my grandmother, my father’s mother. So there was a connection. There was also another connection which was my grandfather’s youngest sister was a child widow, like so many were at that time. And the two child widows, I mean two remarriages of child widows that Tagore actually was present for—one was his own son, I won’t go into that, but the second was a teacher of the Santiniketan school who was married to my pishima, my mother’s father’s sister, who grew up in their household—they were like one family. And so Tagore wrote to my grandmother saying, “Why are you raising these little children in Dhaka all on your own? Just come to Santiniketan. We’ll have a house ready for you.” That was the kind of place Santiniketan was. How did I come to this work? Because in 1973, when my husband was teaching at Presidency College and I was teaching at Jadavpur University, our son was born. And we were then in Oxford on two fellowships, each of us. And our son was born in Oxford. And my husband’s teacher, who was then the Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, an eminent historian called Pratul Chandra Gupta, wrote to my husband saying, “Why don’t you come to Santiniketan and help us improve the history department?” Earlier vice-chancellors always did this because they knew what Santiniketan was about. And so my husband said to me, “If you agree, we can give up our Kolkata jobs and take our little boy, raise him there, and serve Santiniketan.” And that sort of answered something of a question that we all should have, which is how were we so indifferent to Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan? Because I began by saying in response to your first question that he was hardly known as an educator. Everyone knew that Santiniketan was there. Everyone thought it must be a great institution. But Bengali intellectuals didn’t come forward to help. Bengali intellectuals, Bengali academics somehow treated it as a rural institution, which it was, but which it was meant to be as well. Not for the sake of it being rural, but he wanted a close connection between Santiniketan and the city. In other words, between the village and the city. And so when I came I was looking for a post-doctoral research project because once you start research you don’t want to stop it. And nor did my husband want me to stop my research. And that’s why he said, “Look, try and find something close by to Santiniketan to work on. Then we can all be together as a family without you having to go anywhere because the child is so small.” And I completely agreed with him. And so we came, and I began to look at the Rabindra archives, which we always knew to be literary archives, which it is, but that it had so many letters—thousands of letters—from all over the world to Tagore. And he also answered letters. And that, I think, we never factored in. And so when I found nothing written on Santiniketan as a history, and the archivist also didn’t know that there was anything, quite rightly, except those tracts, I said, “What about the letters?” They said, “Yes, the letters are there. They’re still being hand-listed. We don’t have a catalogue.” And I said, “Okay, never mind. Can you still let me read those letters and I’ll be very careful?” And I did. And I just—I didn’t know who had come, who had gone, how Santiniketan had come up. So I just started from A because it was alphabetical. Their hand-listing was alphabetical, and although it was incomplete, I started from A and went through the files. And there was so much that he wrote on Santiniketan. There was so much that he wrote about what he wanted of Santiniketan as the years passed, and what were his disappointments, what were his hopes. So that’s how I actually wrote a history of Santiniketan and a history of Sriniketan. That was my research, which went on for years, because Tagore needs time to really understand. Q: You use the term “the Santiniketan quest” in your book, and you connect it to Rabindranath’s philosophy, and what I found particularly striking was that you connected it to his approach to Indian history. And so I just wondered if you could expand on that a little bit—what the Santiniketan quest was and how it was connected to his philosophy. A: Tagore wrote essays on India’s history, and Jadunath Sarkar, who was a grounded historian unlike Tagore, in fact, translated one of them into English because Tagore wrote all of those five, six essays on India’s history in Bangla. He thought this is a very important history. And yet, as you know, Tagore was not reading in the archives. Now he did actually believe that we were not, in that sense, a nation because we were not a state. That’s one thing. And therefore that sense of nation hadn’t come because after all we were colonized earlier and, you know, close to Tagore’s life and in Tagore’s life a second time. We don’t always talk of the Mughal period as a colony, but it definitely was because there was a lot of merging of cultures, right? But the British was a different issue because after all they were in all senses foreign, whereas, of course, in some senses the Mughals were also foreign, but that’s not how we treated it. Because what Tagore believed—and what is, I think, historically proven—that India, not being for ages a nation-state as it is now, was a civilization, a social civilization, where many other streams of cultures were coming in. And this is why there has been a race problem, which he never denied. He said there is a race problem and there has been a race problem. It is a race problem to the end of his life. He said it hadn’t been resolved. But what had happened—he completely believed in that and he documented it in his own way in his essays—was that there was a continuous attempt to bring the Hindus and Muslims together. But the conflict part was very—was obviously getting a bit sometimes out of hand for various reasons, for religious reasons. However, what gave him so much hope was that although it hasn’t been resolved, there is a continuous attempt. This was because of two things. One was—where was the problem? The problem was they lived next to one another, Hindus and Muslims. Santiniketan was an ideal site for an alternative education because there were Hindus, Muslims and tribals living in the same area. So they were staying next to one another but they wouldn’t marry, they wouldn’t eat with one another. That was the basic thing, or if you call it race. They wouldn’t, you know, this thing of touch, which as you know is very endemic to orthodox Hinduism and also orthodox Islam. So therefore how is it being resolved? At least, you know, they were staying next to one another physically, although there were these differences. Secondly, he believed very much—he was actually devoted to the medieval saints whom he called the people’s saints. Nanak was one of them, his great hero. He wrote on the Sikh gurus. And then there was Chaitanya who brought this great movement of love and mingling with one another. And actually almost teaching the people that there is no other preacher greater than man. So, you know, that whole thing of humanism, human—it’s all related to this. So man is the most—there is no other greater than man. So don’t fight as man and man. Come together. Q: I’m very moved by what you’re saying, the emphasis on the human. And I mean you see it all over Santiniketan. You see it not only in his own writings but, for example, in Kala Bhavana and all of these great artists that come out of Kala Bhavana. Because really, when I say emphasis on the human, I’m pointing to your comment that he didn’t think about inter-civilizational dialogue as something between governments but really between men, you know, people knowing each other. Basically the idea that man must know man, and woman must know woman, but man in the very general—mankind. And I really see that kind of flowering in the experiment of Kala Bhavana. And to me it seems like the artwork and the Santiniketan school of art is something that is of historic importance for all of mankind. And it’s really—I see it as an achievement of human beings, but really again understudied, I feel. So I was hoping you could say something about this: what made all this outburst of creativity possible. A: Yes, because you know this entire experiment of forming a different education, a new education, which is what Santiniketan is about—I remember I started by saying bring the city and the village close—it had nothing to do with colonial education, which was the only other thing there was. However, what did we want at that time? Even Nehru has written about this, leave alone Tagore. We wanted English education because we knew that the only way to get jobs from the government was—and indeed colonial education was aiming at that—they were creating clerks, doctors. And the middle-class Indians were lending themselves to this. So this whole thing of being indifferent to Tagore’s institutions, which you asked in the beginning—why didn’t we serve more, why didn’t Bengali intellectuals serve Santiniketan, as of course some of them did, but a very few—he had more Western human support, I don’t mean money. Artists came from the West. They loved Santiniketan. Tagore announced, “Anyone who likes my idea, come to Santiniketan.” Kshitimohan Sen said to him—one of the core people there—Amartya Sen’s grandfather, incidentally, “You are inviting all these people. How will we look after them?” And Tagore said, “Look, I can only play the flute at the gate and invite people. You will have to do the looking after. Don’t worry. You have only to give them your love. They will be happy.” So therefore, yes, one other element in this whole experiment was that he did not of course join the Pan-Asian movement of Okakura, but Okakura was one of his closest friends, although Okakura died young. If anything could be put up as a contrast between Western colonialism and our larger identity, not just as Indian identity, was our Asian identity. So Asian unity meant a lot to him. And indeed Visva-Bharati’s early name, the early name that he thought of for a larger university, was an Eastern University. In fact, there is a whole long essay that he wrote which is called “An Eastern University.” And then there is this very moving and historically important correspondence with C. F. Andrews, saying, “You know, Charlie, you thought I belong only to Asia, but I’ve been now to the world.” He said, “I can’t just call it an Eastern University. It must be an international university. So that’s how Visva-Bharati got its name. No, Charlie, please understand, I belong to the world. The world has accepted me.” So all these things were coming together. It was becoming larger and larger, I think, and the concept was growing. Kala Bhavana actually started before Visva-Bharati was institutionalized, in 1919. Kala Bhavana meant so much to Tagore. For Kala Bhavan, Tagore was writing to Abanindranath, who was a swadeshi and remained a swadeshi for a very long time. Tagore leapt out of it, but not Abanindranath. And the Bengal School of Art, which Abanindranath founded, of course a very remarkable school of art and has been recognized to be so, was entirely a swadeshi based art movement. Tagore said, “Please, uncle and nephew, please go to Japan. Look at their art. It’s very important for us to know Japan’s art.” A (continuing): I just want to say one thing about the—because it was so important to your intellectual—about your question why Bengali intellectuals, which you started with—why was Tagore’s experiment marginalized, why wasn’t it taken up. Because I think of what I was saying then, that middle-class education was very important to the Bengali psyche and to the Indian psyche. I think it was also the Punjabi psyche, if one reads Tandon’s book. In other words, they wanted to be professionals. And one can’t quite blame them for it because new ideas were coming into it. But then one has to understand therefore they had no time for an alternative education, which was the Santiniketan/Sriniketan/Viswabharati experiment. In one phrase, one must say this: that it was an alternative education where no degrees were ever given. And the students came to Tagore in his time and said, “Look, where will we go? You are not giving us any degrees.” He understood. He was not at all an unsympathetic man. This is important for us to understand this. He said, “However, I cannot have Visva-Bharati give degrees, but I will arrange for you. I understand your need for it.” He tied up with the University of Calcutta that their syllabus would be taught as a parallel course to the Visva-Bharati course in Santiniketan for those students who wanted it. And some students did, and they took their exams at the University of Calcutta and their degrees from the University of Calcutta. And Ashutosh Mukherjee, who was also a great intellectual and greatly understood Tagore at his core, said, “Yes, of course, let that be done.” And this is why Visva-Bharati also actually had graduates who were Visva-Bharati graduates not by degree but Calcutta University graduates by degree, because they did two parallel courses. So in other words, what I’m trying to say was that it was alternative education absolutely from A to Z, because Tagore did not give degrees. That has all changed. You said very beautifully that it is a futuristic thing, and I hope, and it must be, philosophically it is, but I don’t see any hope for it as something that will completely reverse itself. He didn’t think Visva-Bharati would survive. And that was why he said to Gandhi—his last letter to Gandhi was this—“Will you take it as a trust? Will you be its trustee if you believe this is an institution of national importance, if you believe it is an institution of international importance, then I hope my country will believe the same and preserve it. And I leave it to you.” I won’t go into Gandhi’s answer. But why did he say this? He was anxious that this institution would not survive. So I think you have to connect all this in your understanding of the experiment, why in a sense it failed. You could call it a failure. How many people are following this? It’s a central government university. The University Grants Commission has to follow their syllabus, has to follow their degree, absolutely from bottom up and up down all the way. So it can’t survive as it was conceptualized. Q: Maybe in the future, you know. I mean, you’re right, Umadi, that, you know, in one sense it has been a failure, but I hope that in the future it can be taken up. A: Indeed, so do I. I join you in that hope. Professor Uma Das Gupta is a historian and a renowned Tagore biographer. She is the author of many books and articles on Tagore.
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by Supriya Roychowdhury  I’m absolutely delighted to be given a chance to pay my personal tribute to Shripad Dange. Part of my PhD thesis was on the textile industry in Maharashtra, and I was doing fieldwork in Mumbai in the ’90s, when Shripad Dange was no longer alive. But his name was a vibrant presence in the industry to all whom I spoke to.
And he actually wrote the first report on the rights of textile workers, which anyone who studies the textile industry in India views almost as a bible. Dange was one of the founders of the Communist Party of India (CPI), and he was a typical politician of those times. He joined the nationalist movement with Gandhi, but he later turned to leftist organizations. And his long political career—he had thirteen years as a political prisoner—and, particularly the last few decades, were marked by many vicissitudes. Unfortunately, towards the end, he actually had to leave the CPI, of which he was the founder and one of the foremost leaders. For me, what is represented through Dange’s life is that he actually represented the quintessential left politician of those times, moving very effectively between the trade union movement and the political party, that is, the CPI, of which he was a leader. But he was also the foremost founder of the trade union movement in the Maharashtra textile industry before he formed the CPI. And in fact, two of his most successful elections to the Lok Sabha, from the Bombay Central constituency, was the direct effect of his work amongst textile workers. Why is this important? Because this movement from trade unionism to political parties is something which seems to have almost disappeared from our political world today. Political party leaders can no longer think of the working class as a constituency since they must speak to wider audiences. And in the process, any discourse or narrative on the working class is obviously dissolved to a great extent. We don’t really have the construction, or the political construction, of a working-class narrative. Several of us are trying—academics, trade unionists, politicians on the ground. But at the level of the nation, there isn’t a working-class narrative anymore. On their part, this vacuum has also affected trade unions, because trade unions speak for a smaller constituency now, that is, the organized working class. And they don’t therefore have a political platform on which they can stand. And many trade unions have actually moved from being ideologically inspired organizations to very professional outfits who are pursuing very specific, limited objectives within the framework of workers’ rights. As things are, the platform from which they are speaking gives them no scope to talk about the larger working class as such. So the trade union movement is localized in space and time. This brings me to the topic which is industrialization in India and the future of the working class. And I think one has to remind oneself of the deceleration of the communist movement, which can be a starting point actually for looking at the process of industrialization in India. As of the 2024 elections, the parliamentary seats for both the CPI and the CPM have been reduced to, I think, two and four respectively. And there has been a steady deceleration of this. Of course there is a groundswell of ideology and activism inspired by socialist ideas, but we’re not going into that. We’re looking at more national figures—in that sense, if you look at the performance of the CPI and the CPM, they are not anymore national players. Historically, communist or leftist parties have been closely aligned to industrial working classes through a network of trade unions. So one way of looking at the deceleration of the communist parties and at the decline of leftist ideas and ideologies in India is to look at what has happened to the industrial working class itself. Borrowing from the experience of industrially developed countries, the genesis of the modern industrial class happens through the transfers of large numbers of people from farms to factories. And in economics, this is known as structural transformation: that is, the shift from farms to factories, from country or rural areas to urban areas, from informal work to formal work. This is the standard trajectory that the developed countries have followed, and even late developers like Japan, South Korea, etc., i.e. East Asian countries have followed this trajectory. Now, in India, it’s a very stark and staring feature of our development that this expected transfer from agriculture to industry, from farm to factory, has not really happened. It is true that since economic liberalization, there is fast growth in GDP, there is industrial development, and there is a lot of wealth generation. We are going to be the third largest economy very soon. We are going to be the economic powerhouse of the future. However, we need to remind ourselves that the largest number of working people are still in the agricultural sector despite the fact that agriculture’s share in GDP has declined systematically. It is now only 14 percent. There are successive agrarian crises reflected in rural indebtedness, farmer suicides, lack of public investment in agriculture, and very low and very slow development of large swathes of the country’s rural areas. About 44 to 46 percent of the working population is still employed in agriculture. Now it is expected that in the course of development, industry’s share in GDP will exceed that of agriculture because of higher productivity. And this has actually happened in India. So industry’s share in GDP is 25 percent as compared to agriculture’s 14 percent. But the percentage of people who find employment in industry is actually very low. It is 25 percent. If you leave out the construction sector and you look only at manufacturing—construction is non-manufacturing—then it is only 11 percent. And there have been steady decline in the number of people who can find jobs in the manufacturing sector, particularly in organized manufacturing. On the other hand, there is, of course, the service sector. The service sector now leads development and economic growth. Fifty-five percent of GDP is accounted for by the service sector. But the growth of employment in services has been quite low in proportion. It is now only 31 percent, having risen from about 20–23 percent in 2013. There is obviously a great disjuncture between output and generation of employment. In 2009, when the first Urban Poverty Report came out, one of our leading economists, S. A. Hashim said that the reason that agriculture continues to harbour large numbers of people, despite the fact that it does not have the space to do so, is a very complex problem, but one that is closely related to the kind of urban and industrial development that has happened in cities. We therefore need to look at what the service sector offers. The service sector offers highly paid jobs to technically qualified people. And there has been a spillover into other service sectors like hospitality, maintenance, security, housekeeping, and so on and so forth.There has been a huge boom in employment in all of these sectors. But these jobs are all typically unprotected and unregulated. They hover around the minimum wage. There is no security of tenure. So the attraction of those in rural areas seeking jobs in urban areas for the service sector is actually very limited. This is part of the reason why we are not seeing a major transfer of the job-seeking population from rural to urban areas. Mainly what I wanted to emphasize is that in the process of economic growth and development, typically large numbers of unskilled or even semi-skilled labour look for factory jobs. And that is where the Indian economy has, to a certain extent, failed these job seekers. There are a large number of surveys but just taking one particular survey, the Enterprise and Establishment survey during the period 2017–18 to 2022–23, the loss of jobs in manufacturing was in the order of four million. The policy response to this seeming crisis in jobs has been that governments have come up repeatedly with industrial policies with a focus on creating employment. When the UPA government was there, we had the National Manufacturing Policy of 2011, which aimed to create 100 million jobs in the sector by 2022. It didn’t happen. The NDA government, as we all know, has this paradigm of Make in India. Very recently, in 2025, the National Manufacturing Mission has re-emphasized the goal of boosting the sector with a projected outlay of almost 200 lakh crores in sectors like automobiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and so on and so forth. Now making policy is one thing. Policies, as we know, are often driven by political imperatives. Often it is a reaction or a response to data coming out on joblessness. As distinguished from policies, there is the question of a policy paradigm. I want to emphasize that the overall policy paradigm post–economic liberalization continues to be marked by features which are not necessarily conducive to creating jobs in the organized factory sector. Essentially, liberalization, which came in the 1990s, meant that the state was withdrawing from its role as leading industrial development through large public sectors and would increasingly depend on private capital as the driver of investment in the industrialization project. So the state facilitated both domestic and foreign direct investment such that private capital could become the main driver of industrial development. The overall aim was to make Indian industry competitive at the global level. If this was the aim—that is, globally competitive industry—obviously the shift to capital-intensive and technology-intensive industrialization, rather than labour-intensive, was the way to go. One can see this reflected in particular policies. Every policy is accompanied by an announcement that it will lead to greater employment. However, when you see what is happening to specific sectors, it’s a different story. So, this is a context where jobs are disappearing because of automation, because of increasing capital intensity and knowledge and technology intensity. Here, the ready-made garment export industry, connected to global players, large global companies, multinational companies which have invested in India for the production of ready-made garments, stands out because it is predominantly labour intensive and is offering employment to unskilled, semi-skilled job seekers, particularly to women. Many of the women employed in this sector are rural, semi-rural, unskilled women with barely high school education, who are looking for employment because their sources of income in the agricultural sector have all but dried up. We have been studying the ready-made garment industry for many years, particularly in Karnataka, through successive surveys. Around four to five lakh women employed in the garment sector in Bangalore. We have found low wages and very harsh working conditions. There is some social insurance, but no tenure security. There is no written job contract. Loss of jobs can happen any time. These features have become the main instrument in the hands of management and shop-floor supervisors in garment factories in Bangalore, who use coercion as an instrument of production. These industries are also very valued in the eyes of the state as major foreign exchange earners. However, in terms of the workforce, they have created a footloose workforce, who move in and out of the industry or in and out of different factories in the industry itself in search of better working conditions or even in search of just 500 rupees more. If another factory or another sector pays more, they move out. We found that the only option actually available for garment-sector workers is domestic work, which is not much better. But many move out to domestic service because it offers them a more relaxed way of making less money. So this footloose workforce actually offers a very fragile and unstable basis on which to organize trade union activities. This is also a workforce which, because of very low salaries, has a lot of indebtedness. We found that after working for 15 years women are getting as low as 10,000 or 12,000 per month, so there are no savings. We also found that after retirement a large majority of the women are forced to go back to their rural areas of origin. And so this industry, in a sense, questions the whole idea of urbanization. Because what is happening is that through foreign investment in garment exports these women are brought out of rural and semi-rural areas to provide labour for this highly profit-making industry. This is what we call the informal in the formal, particularly in the garment sector. This is factory employment and there is a salaried wage and some social insurance. But as I have tried to explain, the basic parameters of formal employment are not there. And this particular sector, being part of the organized sector, bears some of the classic features of informal employment. I now come to the question of how you represent workers’ rights, or who represents workers’ rights. In terms of a collective voice or collective organization, the problems which trade unions face is the shrinking of the organized sector. To mobilize and organize informal workers presents one of the most difficult and challenging tasks for trade unionists, because workers who do not have permanent or regular jobs fear termination if they engage with trade unions or in trade union activities. Hence, there is a low level of unionization in most sectors today. There is also a disconnect at the local level. Local-level trade unions are disconnected from larger national trade union federations. State governments have responded with a whole range of welfare measures. You get free rations, free bus passes, free electricity, cash transfers to women, old-age widow pensions, and so on and so forth. Every government in every state has come up, almost competitively, with these welfare measures. And in a sense what these have done, these welfare provisions or social policies, is to dull the edge of want. In the process, what has happened is that the question of work, employment, livelihood, and income has even more receded into the background for the working class itself. So the demand is not for work and more income. The demand, or the expectation and the claim, is for social policies. I would say at the end that the future possibly lies in organizations like the GATWU (Garment and Textile Workers Union). I have seen these kinds of grassroots trade unions struggling for over three decades in Bangalore and in other states. The script is written against them, but the struggle is very real and significant. In the struggle, one can actually see the opposed binaries of capital and labour working out. Furthermore, the challenge is often put forward by these trade unions to the state, because the state is a major stakeholder in industries like the garment industry. So they’re negotiating not only with capital—that is, the owners of the factories—but also in a very substantive way with the state, which is an important creator and participant in the minimum wage board. I want to end this by going back to one of the lines which I read from a text of Shripad Dange, which is that when we think of labour, we have to think not only of the yesterday and of the today, but we have to think of the tomorrow. To think significantly of the tomorrow in India’s larger framework of industrialization and of the working class, I think there are two points which stand out. One is that the state is obviously pursuing a model of economic growth which is based on the growth of the services sector. And one of the main questions which needs to be asked is: can the services sector lead development where the largest number of job seekers are unskilled or semi-skilled? And if indeed the service sector is leading economic growth, then what kind of regulations does the state need to put forward to protect those who are employed in the services sector? The other important question is: can the state in a democratic framework be persuaded, or perhaps even forced, to provide a more substantive, a stronger regulatory framework as far as industry is concerned, or as far as the services are concerned? On many of these points—whether we’re looking at the service sector or whether we’re looking at the governance system, the labour governance system—there is enormous scope for activism to work itself out. Because we cannot at the same time be talking about macro policies. Macro policies are not framed at the local level. Macro policies are framed in New Delhi, where larger economic interests are driving policy. These interests are international. These are large economic and industrial interests of industrialists who are deeply vested in a globally competitive economic policy regime. So those are not changes that, you know, local trade unions or even academics like us can be talking about. But we can certainly be talking about changes at these micro levels, where pressure can be brought about on states to provide a more supportive regulatory regime within the framework that exists. This is a shortened and lightly edited version of a transcript from a talk given at Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore. Supriya Roychowdhury is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. Her book, “City of Shadows: Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore”, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.  Sahir Ludhianvi When the tide of oppression rises too high It exhausts itself, it must die But the martyr’s blood when it is shed Freezes into a drop of immortality shining ruby-red Blood Martyr’s blood It leaves its stain On the desert sand, On the book of justice, On the martyr’s grave And also on the tyrant’s hand Blood is eloquent, it will not remain mute It cannot be hidden, it cannot be silenced, It will proclaim itself. Let the evil ones operate from their hide-outs The trail of blood will lead to the murderer’s dens Let the conspirators veil themselves in darkness But every drop of a martyr’s blood Will light an immortal flame. Proclaim then, to the doomed prophets of oppression Warn the tricksters of diabolical diplomacy Unveil the blushing bride of U.N.O Warm them all Proclaim to them all--- The passion of blood that defies all tyrannies, The flaming sweep of blood which can drown the citadels of injustice! Beware, beware, you tyrants --Beware, beware, you foul conspirators The blood you sought to hide in desert sand The blood you tried to dam with a martyr’s grave Has flooded the whole wide world Here a flame of revolt There a stone flung in protest And a banner of freedom everywhere Sahir Ludhianvi Translated from Urdu by K. A. Abbas Who held the chisel And carved out the solid black figure A boiling lava of anger Coursing through her veins? Violence tore up her vermillion blouse It dyed her skirt into a blood-black colour Bare-breasted She walked through the streets A drop of milk trickled down her black breasts A drop of water fell from her red red eyes Guarding motherhood And searching the dead body of a black fire The blood is purple Can the white sheet hide this red spot in its folds? The black forests shake And the copper heated sky rumbles The stone gates of the caves have opened The doors of the U.N.O are shut A question arises from the dark continent Like the earth’s red tongue licking the breasts of the sky Amrita Pritam Translated from Punjabi by Balwant Gargi Another start shot in the gloom of night The shackles break, and breaks the chain, And brightens like a chisel’d gem, The conscience of humanity; Again a dagger flashed in some hand, And streams of blood Glittered in the hush of night; And then the breeze blew past my doors this morning, With brows all daubed with the blood of dawn. Glory to United Nations and the “Security” bestowed by it And mind the sway of truth and faith, The cross of hopes Is more pronounced in the wilderness; And lo, another drop of blood Crept down the eye of dawn. So long as the traces of assassins last, Proceed to wipe out each and every trace of theirs--- Awake, Don’t be Silent! Speak! Rise to the Martyrs’ festal days, And listen over there the altar cries: “Keep quiet never more. Ah never more.” Makhdoom Mohiuddin Translated from Urdu by Wahab Hydar  Amrita Pritam This year marks the 200th birth anniversary of Dadabhai Naoroji, pioneering economist and fighter for darker humanity. Below we reprint his essay 'Famine in India'.  It was a pure matter of fact that Great Britain, during the whole period of her connexion with India, had never spent a single farthing of British money on the Eastern Empire. All the great wars which had been engaged it had been paid for by the Indians themselves, and it was India, or rather its Natives, who had given this noble heritage to the British Empire. Indians had also shed their blood in order to maintain and extend that Empire. Upto the time of the Indian Mutiny the British Army there never exceeded 40,000 men, while its average strength was from 15,000 to 20,000 men. But the Indian Army of 200,000 was placed at the service of the Empire; it was maintained by India, and it shed its blood for India. Surely these facts required no comment. But that was not all. From the time when Great Britain first obtained territorial jurisdiction in India down to the present day it had drawn millions upon millions sterling from that Empire. Great Britain had appropriated this Indian wealth, thereby reducing the population to extreme poverty. At the beginning of the century only about 3 million a year was drawn from India, but now the amount taken away was officially admitted to be about 30 millions sterling annually. This was an open sore, and no country could withstand being bled unceasingly in this manner.
The result had been to reduce the bulk of the Indian population to extreme poverty, destitution, and degradation; and it was "Great Britain's bounden duty, in common justice and humanity, to pay from her own Exchequer the costs of all famines and diseases caused by such impoverishment". There could only be one ending to this continual bleeding of India. Famine was following upon famine; each visitation was becoming more disastrous, and the present was the most disastrous of the whole century. For from thirty to forty years I had been crying in the wilderness against this terrible treatment. I had realised, and had endeavoured to make the people realise, that a country thus drained must in the end die. Great Britain owed a debt to these poor, wretched, dying people. The British people, through their policy, were the cause of the misery which now prevailed, and the least they could do surely was to try and help the Natives of India in their time of terrible distress. The great idea of the Indian Government appeared to be not to let the English taxpayer have any trouble or annoyance in connection with India. The rulers of that Empire seemed to think that the moment the English taxpayer was called upon to contribute a farthing for the maintenance of India, he would demand to know the reason why India had been treated in the manner she had been. They were well aware, too, that no good reason could be shown for such treatment. Let him give one illustration of the unwisdom of maintaining a running sore. Thirty years ago France and Germany had a deadly struggle. France was beaten and had to pay dearly for it. A heavy burden was imposed upon her, a severe wound was inflicted. But in process of time it healed. France paid her debt, the account was closed, and she became as prosperous as ever. Why was not an endeavour made to treat India in the same way ? Why, having once drawn from her enormous sums of money, was not the account closed and the Natives of India allowed to reap the benefit of the wealth which their country produced ? No. The policy was to keep the wound running day after day and month after month, and they might rely upon it that until the bleeding was stopped India would have no chance of prosperity. It surely was the duty of the British Exchequer, seeing that their policy was responsible for the present famine and disease, to pay the whole cost of saving life and of restoring the stricken people to their normal industrial condition instead of further oppressing and crushing the Indian people themselves by compelling them to find these costs directly or by loan under the deceptive pretext or disguise of what is called "the resources of the Government of India", which simply meant squeezing the wretched people themselves. The term "resources of the Government of India" was a most deceptive one. They had often been told that India had not exhausted her borrowing powers. But what were the facts ? The Government of India consisted of Europeans. The Indians had not the slightest voice in the expenditure of a single farthing. They had only to pay, and, before any portion of the taxation exacted from them could be used for the benefit of India, 200,000,000 of rupees were annually devoted to the payment of salaries and pensions of Europeans who constituted the Government of India. The population of England paid 5%. per head per annum in the form of taxation. The people of India did not even pay 5%. per head; yet. strange to say, they were crushed by a heavier burden of taxation than were the English. The incidence and heaviness of taxation did not depend upon the amount; it depended upon the capacity to bear it; and the fact was that, while English taxation represented from 6 per cent to 8 per cent of the taxpayers' income, the taxation in India represented 14 or 15 per cent. They all knew how hard it was for a man earning £1 per week to give 1s. out of it. It was far more easy for a man with an income of £1,000 a year to give away £100; and hence it was that the people of India, in their wretchedness and impoverishment, felt so heavily the taxation imposed upon them. Was it not most humiliating and discreditable to the British name that other countries should be appealed to come to Britain's help for the relief of Britain's own subjects after they had been under British rule for a period of 150 years ? British rule was supposed to confer great blessing upon the Indian race. But what had been the results of it ? Millions of the people were dying of famine and disease, and scores of millions from year's end never knew what it was to have a full meal ! As had been well said it was a shame that our own fellow-subjects should starve while the British Empire was the greatest and richest in the world. In treating India as they were doing they were killing the bird that laid the golden eggs. They were deriving great benefits from India, but those benefits carried with them losses to the Indian people. If they would only-treat India honestly, if they would act as honourable Englishmen and fulfil their pledges to India, they would be able to gain ten times as much benefit from India, and those benefits would then carry with them the blessings of the Indian people. More than that, how was the wealth now withdrawn from India distributed ? It went into the pockets of the capitalists and the higher classes. It did not benefit the working men of Great Britain. He had no desire to appeal to their selfishness, but he was bound to point out the economic fact that the doing of evil reflected upon all who had a share in it. Now, in England the production represented something like £40 per head per annum. They exported goods to the whole world, and the amount of exports was placed at three hundred millions sterling per annum. Upon those exports rested the question of their employment. Their own colonies had slammed the door of protection in their face, European countries had also adopted protective tariffs; so, too had the United States of America, and yet, notwithstanding this fact, Great Britain annually exported the produce to the value of three hundred millions sterling. India was the only place where they had perfect freedom of trade, entirely under their own control. But what proportion of the British exports went into that country? Only about twenty-five millions sterling. Why was it that such a small amount was exported to India? Simply because the process of bleeding had been carried on to such an extent that the people had literally, no money left with which to buy British produce. Now if, instead of treating the Natives of India in this cruel and barbarous fashion, they were to deal with them honestly, what would be the result? Let them remember that the Indians were not a race of savages. Two thousand years ago they were the mostly highly civilised nation in the world. And what sort of people were the Natives of England when at that period they were discovered by Caesar? Now, the Indians know how to enjoy the good things of this world, and if they were only allowed to benefit by what they produced they would be able to buy the manufactures of Great Britain. The Government were willing to massacre savages in South Africa in order to find markets for British goods, whereas if they would only develop the resources of India with her three hundred millions of population they would find ample outlet for British trade, and there would soon cease to be any unemployed in Great Britain. Thus if they would only adopt an honest police to India they would benefit ten times to the extent they now did. Nemesis always followed upon unrighteousness, and, as Lord Salisbury once said, “Injustice will bring the mightiest of the earth to ruin.” He did not see why England should be an exception to that rule. British rule had given the people security of life and property; but of what value to them was a life which meant death by starvation or disease, or of what good was property when it was only produced for the benefit Great Britain? The fact was that Indian Natives were mere helots. They were worse than American slaved for the latter were at least taken care of by their masters, whose property they were. All the Indian people asked was that this country should faithfully carry out the terms of the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 which promised that “Our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified to discharge.” Hitherto the policy of Great Britain had been in distinct contravention of Parliamentary pledges and of the Queen’s Proclamation. The romance was that British rule was a blessing to India; the reality was that it was destroying India, and they might depend upon it that the destruction of India must ultimately be followed by the destruction of Great Britain. Let them alter their policy before it was too late. He very much feared that the present famine would be followed by another famine next year, because the land had become so dry. Things were going from worse to worse, and it behoved the people of Great Britain to arouse themselves, and in the interests of humanity and common justice to adopt such a policy in India as would enable the people to develop the enormous wealth of that country and to enjoy the fruits of their own country. This is the transcript of a presentation given by Anthony Monteiro at the online discussion "The Legacy of the African Liberation Struggles: Continuing Struggle Against Neocolonialism in a Time of Western Crisis", an intercivilizational dialogue organized to commemorate the centenary of Patrice Lumumba. Anthony Monteiro is a scholar of W.E.B Du Bois and founder of the Saturday Free School in Philadelphia. He was involved in the international solidarity campaign in support of the African Liberation Struggles and in the anti-Apartheid and black liberation movement.  I think to celebrate Patrice Lumumba and to be invited is a great honor. Of course, I am going to look at Lumumba, the history of the Congo and of Pan-Africanism from the standpoint of the United States and the current crisis of the United States. Because, you know, I believe that the further we get from the time that Patrice Lumumba lived, the more clarity his life brings to world events.
We felt in the African-American community, although I was a teenager at the time, we felt the assassination of Patrice Lumumba very deeply. We looked upon it as a blow against the anticolonial struggle in Africa and we saw it, and increasingly so, as the West speaking out of both sides of its mouth; claiming to be for anticolonialism and democracy while preparing through the CIA, the British intelligence, and of course NATO to carry out coups and assassinations of African leaders. This was saying, in effect, that the West was not interested in real independence, but were interested in establishing a new order, a neocolonial system and Africa would be a fundamental foundation of this. You know in 1963, in November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and when Malcolm X, after giving a speech in New York, was asked what is your view about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Malcolm said it was an instance of the chickens coming home to roost. By which he meant that the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was now being actualized with the assassination of an American president. I would just extend that observation to the over 60 years since the United Nations General Assembly declared 1960 the year of Africa, ironically the same year that Patrice Lumumba became the prime minister of a new Congo. However the Western countries were committed to guaranteeing that there would never be the substance of independence, economic independence on the African continent. In a lot of ways, sixty-five years later after the independence of the Congo, in a certain sense, the political instability and crisis of the United States to use Malcolm X's words is an instance of the chickens coming home to roost. The wars, the destabilization, the assassinations especially of African leaders at every level and the attempt to control the world and to control the wealth and labor and intellect of Africa now is coming home to roost. For people who are not intimately familiar with the situation in the United States, we look like we are in something close to a civil war. The political sides are that antagonistic. I think that we can speak of and think of Patrice Lumumba perhaps as the first martyr in what is this continuing struggle against the global neocolonial system that the West, and especially the United States, wanted to replace the old colonial empires with a new global neocolonial system. This has been a very difficult struggle because whereas in the old colonial system it was very direct. You knew that the Belgians controlled the Congo, that the British controlled Nigeria and Ghana and Sierra Leone, that Liberia was under the foot of the United States even though it claimed to be independent. And that South Africa and Zimbabwe and Namibia and the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde were controlled by what appeared to be settler colonial regimes or the Portuguese but in fact were controlled from the centers of finance capital, especially in the United States. Here we're talking about Wall Street banks which have now evolved into these behemoths of world finance and investment and trade. We're talking about not just banks in the old sense but investment banks, hedge funds. Then we're talking about the corporations connected to them such as mining companies which have exploited Africa, not only the Congo but South Africa, Namibia, the large oil companies that sought to and have pretty much controlled a good part of the petroleum in Angola and Nigeria. In this larger scheme we're looking at what drove the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the illegal overturning of his government and the attempt by people like Tshombe and Joseph Mobutu, traitors to Africa, to work with the West and Western intelligence for their own interest and sometimes for the interest of small groups of their own ethnic group against the cause of Africa itself. You know, we talk of the Cold War and it's talked about a lot, the Cold War, the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But why was there a Cold War? Why was there attempts by the West to guarantee that there would not be an effective pan-Africanism, an economic and even monetary union on the African continent? Why did this never occur? Why were there all of these attempts to undermine positive non-alignment, effective non-alignment? Why was there all of this effort to marginalize leaders like Patrice Lumumba, like Kwame Nkrumah, like Amilcar Cabral and on and on. What they in the West wanted to call radical African leaders as though they were unreasonable. The point was that the two systems, the system of freedom represented by the Indian independence, the Chinese revolution, the Russian revolution, that example could not take root and should not take root in Africa. And thus the Cold War, in many ways focused heavily upon Africa, was to prevent leaders and nations from arising that would unite with Asia, would unite with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in a win-win economic order. Now here we are 65 years after the Congolese independence and then in 1961 the assassination of Patrice Lumumb. We have a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in China and a good part of the delegates representing governments and states were from Africa. Even when they did not make it officially to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, they expressed their solidarity with China and with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. These nations that have become the targets of Western corporate and imperialist power. I think that we are looking at a new world order, an anti-neocolonial world order. This is very hopeful. And lastly, on the crisis in the United States. Do not underestimate this crisis. It is existential. The ruling elite itself is uncertain of its capacity to rule a country that is divided so sharply as the United States is. I live through the 1960s, a decade of assassinations. In many ways we look upon that decade as that of assassinations beginning with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba then Medgar Evers then John F. Kennedy then Malcolm X then Martin Luther King then Robert F. Kennedy. This was a period, I would suggest, where elements of the deep state engineered a coup d’état in the interest of a powerful US empire. I think they were partially successful in that. We might now be entering another period of assassinations with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But more than a period of assassination and unlike the 1960s, the political divisions in the country looked like a low-level civil war. The forces associated with MAGA and Donald Trump have openly said that they will avenge the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They blame his assassination on the so-called left and the rhetoric and the liberals in effect calling Trump and his allies fascists and so on. They say their rhetoric created the psychological conditions for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I bring this out to say that at the same time that the system of neocolonialism is in crisis, the major hegemon, the major empire in the world, the United States is also in a deep domestic political crisis. The question for us is where do we go from here? This is the transcript of a presentation given by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja at the online discussion "The Legacy of the African Liberation Struggles: Continuing Struggle Against Neocolonialism in a Time of Western Crisis", an intercivilizational dialogue organized to commemorate the centenary of Patrice Lumumba. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is a Congolese diplomat, activist and author. He served as the Permanent Representative of the DRC to the UN in 2022-2023. He is known for his book The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, and has written a biography of Patrice Lumumba.  I am very pleased to know of your vision statement which is excellent and also wish to acknowledge the leadership of India in terms of giving African countries the strength and the courage to start the fight for independence. India was our example for the whole world and Gandhi of course and Nehru are people that we worship in Africa. We are extremely proud of their leadership in terms of ending the British Empire in Asia and of course in the rest of the colonial world.
My statement is going to be quite brief, basically to say something about Lumumba's assassination, who assassinated him and why they did it. I will certainly be able to answer any questions that people might have concerning Lumumba. There cannot be a full restitution for Lumumba's murder. No amount of money or other form of compensation will do justice to the harm suffered by the Congo in losing a 35-year-old visionary leader who could have helped build a great country. No amount of money would be justice to his children after having grown up without a loving and supporting father to guide them through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. And the same goes for his wife and other relatives whose loss could not be mitigated by material acquisitions. What is needed from all the accomplices in Lumumba's murder is, first of all, an acknowledgment of the crime they committed against him, his family, the Congo and Africa. An apology for the harm done in this regard and an effort to honor the Congo's first democratically elected leader by promoting his legacy through schools, public education and cultural events in all the countries whose leaders took part in this disappearance, beginning with the Congo itself. While the Sankuru region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is mostly known as the home of the Tetela people to which Lumumba himself belongs, it is inhabited by people of other ethnic groups who ended up there either because of the activities of the Swahili Arab slave traders or of Belgian colonialists. These groups include the Kusu of Maniema, the Luba, the Songye and other groups from the Kasai region as well as the Ngombe of Equateur. In addition to growing up in the multiethnic environment, Lumumba's formative years as a middle class civil servant took place between 1944 and 1956 in Kisangani, then Stanleyville, one of the major cities in the Congo and in other parts of a country that was really committed to ethnic diversity, and not through working about one single group. In general, Congolese nationalist leaders were strong believers in nonviolence and Lumumba was no exception. This is why they were all shocked by the mass uprising for independence on January 4, 1959 which erupted in Léopoldville, present day Kinshasa after members of an anti-colonial party were denied the right to assemble. Celebrated today as a day of martyrs, it was the first major outbreak of violence in the independence movement and marked the turning point for the anti-colonial struggle. Later on, these leaders understood that mass violence was a bargaining chip in their confrontation with the colonial masters and the latter found it difficult to maintain law and order in the vast Congo once the masses had rejected colonial authority and were unwilling to obey colonial administrative directives. The Congo crisis cannot be understood without reference to the Belgian engineered Katanga secession in collaboration with international mining companies which recruited white mercenaries to join Belgian troops in backstopping the secession in Katanga. The UN refusal to use force to expel Belgian troops and the mercenaries led to a dispute between Prime Minister Lumumba and UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld, who shared the same world view as a major western power, and was very hostile toward Lumumba as shown by his cable traffic in UN archives. He was the single most important obstacle to the independence of the Congo because for Dag Hammarskjöld, the colonial territories of Africa should remain part of the western sphere and should not be taken over by the Soviet Union. In their mind they didn't think that we Africans can take care of our business ourselves. Instead, they thought that we have to be controlled by somebody else which was total nonsense and racist at best. We do get a glimpse of this vision from postcolonial Congo in several of the major speeches and letters that Congolese and other leaders have made. While preoccupied with the unity, independence and sovereignty of the Congo due of course to the counterrevolutionary situation facing the country from July 10 to July 11, 1960, the Belgian military invasion and the Katanga secession respectively, this main concern was how to transform the inherited structures of the state and the economy in order to improve the quality of life of ordinary Congolese. Like Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko, Lumumba’s martyrdom transformed him into a powerful symbol, a force that continues to inspire radical movements across Africa. We believe that our people should continue this process. Because for Lumumba he was assassinated, as you know, because of the fact that he did not want to have the former colonial powers and the United States to dictate us how we should run our countries, how we should manage our resources which are abundant. Our country is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of minerals, forests, land, water and so on. It is up to us Africans to make sure that we follow the teachings of Amilcar Cabral: knowing our own weaknesses and finding ways to overcome them, and the voice of Nkrumah: collective continental security through an African military high command. We need our own equivalent to NATO to ensure the security of our people and of our endangered progressive leaders. As a matter of fact to sum up Lumumba's personality and what his vision was: Lumumba was a person who was committed to using the fabulous resources of the Congo, the wealth of our countries to improve the living conditions of African people, not only in the Congo but across the entire continent. As a matter of fact, when he held a conference of Pan-African people in Kinshasa in August of 1960, he gave a whole program of how Africa can really improve itself and how Africa can be in control of its own territory and not from outsiders. So he was not a communist as the western countries tried to paint him but he was a person who was committed to the independence of the African people like Nkrumah. He felt that independence of one country like Ghana and the Congo was not enough. That we should do our best to make sure that countries of Southern Africa, for example, which were under colonial control by colonial settlers who didn't want to leave (should gain independence). This required that Africans take up armed struggle to be able to end this colonialism and we did our best in providing money, providing security, in providing whatever was needed so that these people can go forward. And so Lumumba was assassinated by the Belgians with the support of the Americans and of course with the involvement of Congolese leaders who were against Lumumba who felt that getting money from Uncle Sam in Washington was better than working with Patrice Lumumba to make sure that the Congo become a big country, a country that can really help Africa move forward. Thank you very much. |
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