Abstract
This book examined the global circuits of Marxism in Calcutta, where “circuits” signified the simultaneous and nonhierarchical functioning of the publics, the media they used, and the meanings they generated. To examine the Marxist public, I have focused on the Popular Front, especially the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). I also showed how the IPTA privileged audio-visual media in a bid to reach the masses while the PWA adhered to conventional print media, scholarly rigour and select audience. Finally, I examined the generation, development and repudiation of the narrative of Indian/Bengal Renaissance to plot the changing meanings of Marxisms in Calcutta between the Swadeshi and the Naxal movements. Thus the book presented the global circulation of Marxism as a problem of mass mediation. I conclude with a review of literature on mass mediation in relation to the methodology above.
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Notes
- 1.
William H. McNeill, The Ecumene: Story of Humanity (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); for a discussion on McNeil developing, in the late 1940s, Toynbee’s idea of “oikumene,” see Gilbert Allardyce, “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course,” Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (1990): 23–75; Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950); Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995/1951). How the later generations of historians have benefitted from this particular strand of global history is remarkably exemplified in Chris Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), which builds on the ideas of “Indian ecumene” and “network society,” duly modified of course.
- 2.
On Braudel’s Marxian point of view see Hobsbawm’s chapter in How to Change the World.
- 3.
Paul Duedhal, “Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History, 1945–1976,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (2011): 101–133, for a discussion of the tension between the British and the French historians over setting up the guiding principles for the UNESCO project on global history.
- 4.
Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
- 5.
See Partha Chatterjee, “Fruits of Macaulay’s Poison Tree,” in The Truth Unites, edited by Ashok Mitra (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1985).
- 6.
Sumit Sarkar, “Popular” Movements and “Middle Class” Leadership in Late Colonial India: Perspectives and Problems of a “History from Below” (Delhi: Aakar Books, 1983).
- 7.
Ramakrishna Bhattacharya, Bangalir Notun Atmaporichoi: Samaj-sanskar theke Swadhinata (Calcutta, 2005).
- 8.
Starting with Sumanta Bannerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
- 9.
Satyajit Ray’s film The Home and the World (1984) picturizes inflammatory oratory on “swadeshi,” as does Samik Bandyopadhyay’s reminiscences of the different styles of oratory of the CPI leaders of 1950s–1960s. Yet, a study of oratory in Swadeshi days is still wanting a scholarship. Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and Dravidian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), explores the “beautiful Tamil” (centamil) phenomenon in Dravida nationalist oratorical practices in postcolonial India; see, also, Bernard Bate, Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern, eds. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).
- 10.
Damodaran, The Radical Impulse.
- 11.
Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, for instance.
- 12.
Most explicitly ventured by Ibrahim Alkaji, the director of NSD in the mid-1970s.
- 13.
Scholarship on Utpal Dutt’s works have focused on the content of his “revolutionary theatre” more than they focused on the forms. See, e.g., Bharucha, Rustom. Rehearsals of Revolution: Political Theatre of Bengal (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984); Himani Bannerji, Mirror of Class: Essays on Bengali Theatre (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1998); Nandi Bhatia, “Staging the 1857 Mutiny as “The Great Rebellion”: Colonial History and Post-Colonial Interventions in Utpal Dutt's Mahavidroh”, Theatre Journal 51:2 (May 1999), 167–184. On Jatra, see Kayani Ghose, “Jatra,” in The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre, ed. Ananda Lal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 171–173.
- 14.
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
- 15.
Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production.”
- 16.
See Sarkar, Writing Social History, for his later theorization, explicitly acknowledging debt to E. P. Thompson’s works. For Thompson’s view of the move towards social history and cultural studies, see esp. Arguments Within English Marxism.
- 17.
Bandyopadhyay, Modern India; Sumit, A Critique of Colonial India.
- 18.
See the second chapter for a discussion of the documents pertaining to the Meerut Conspiracy trial.
- 19.
Chartier, The Order of Books, 7. For an application of Chartier’s ideas in the study of a discourse, see Anderson, Imagined Communities. Leah Price has shown us how book historians of the twentieth century had oscillated between the two poles. On the one hand, we have Darnton’s (1982) “communications circuit,” structured around human agents writing, publishing, reading the book, while, on the other, we have Adams and Barker’s (1993) model that attributes agency to the physical text and reduces humans as passive handlers. Given this oscillation, Price points to Chartier’s model of public, and also to Arjun Appadurai’s “methodological” tip. See Leah Price, “From The History of a Book to a ‘History of the Book,’” Representations 108 (2009): 134–135.
- 20.
See the introduction in Appadurai, The Social Life, 5.
- 21.
After all, the debates on the Popular Front were the historical context of Gramsci’s theorization of the intellectual as collectives. The Popular Front thesis of 1935 was in the making for about a decade. When it did emerge, the Royists argued that they were proposing a Popular Front for long and that exactly was the reason they were expelled from the Comintern. I have discussed this in the chapters.
- 22.
Romain Rolland did warn that the state will mortify public institutions. See Romain Rolland, The People’s Theatre. Trans. Barrett H. Clark (New York: Henry Holt, 1918).
- 23.
Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830–1981 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
- 24.
“One need only think of the group of scholars in Calcutta whose reading of Hoare and Nowell-Smith’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks inspired them to probe into (and elaborate) Gramsci’s concept of subalternity and whose publications, in turn, travelled to the U.S. and the U.K. prompting new readings and analyses of Gramsci’s text, first by British and American critics and theorists and, before very long, by many others in Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere.” Joseph A. Buttigieg, “Gramsci in English,” International Gramsci Journal 3, no. 1 (2018): 26–40.
- 25.
By the mid-1970s, the Marxians like Hobsbawm had noticed how all Marxist regimes in Asia with laudable histories of anti-colonial struggle had succumbed to nationalism. That was the context of Hobsbawm’s theorization of nationalism as the other of internationalism, later taken up by Benedict Anderson, and argued by Partha Chatterjee.
- 26.
Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India; Chatterjee, “Fruits of Macaulay’s Poison Tree.”
- 27.
“To acknowledge the peasant as the maker of his own rebellion is to attribute, as we have done in this work, a consciousness to him. Hence, the word ‘insurgency’ has been used in the title and the text as the name of that consciousness which informs the activity of the rural masses known as jacquerie, revolt, uprising, etc. or to use their Indian designations—dhing, bidroha, ulgulan, hool, jituri and so on. This amounts, of course, to a rejection of the idea of such activity as purely spontaneous, an idea that is elitist as well as erroneous.” See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 4. Guha read from Gramsci’s “Spontaneity and Conscious Leadership,” alongside reading from Communist Manifesto. Here Guha’s works on “dominance” and “resistance” as in “political society” and not “hegemony” and “consent” in “civil society.” He makes the distinction clear in Dominance Without Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
- 28.
The article was first published as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Baningstock, UK: McMillan, 1988), 271–313. The text appeared in a revised form in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). Spivak has admitted in the latter version that she did not know the works of Subaltern Studies well when she first wrote the critique. However, the section I am discussing has remained in both versions.
- 29.
For a summary of Spivak’s moves via Gramsci, see Ritu Birla, “Postcolonial Studies: Now That’s History,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 87–99.
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Dhar, P. (2023). Conclusion. In: The Popular Front and the Global Circulation of Marxism through Calcutta, 1920s-1970s. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18617-2_6
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