Gender and the Politics of Class: Women in Trade Unions in Bengal

Abstract

The essay examines women’s political participation at the intersection of the labour, nationalist and women’s movements in Bengal. The focus is on women labour activists from the 1920s to the 1970s, mostly from the middle classes but also drawing on the example of two working-class women leaders. Scholarship on the subject has so far either deplored women’s marginality in labour movements or celebrated their participation. Moving beyond such dichotomies, this paper explores women’s activism in unions to address three issues: the nature of women’s engagement with labour politics; their negotiations with their own family and the social limits of gendered behaviour; and their response to the political mainstreaming of trade unions in India.

Keywords:

• Collective resistance
• labour movement
• marriage
• militancy
• sexuality
• trade unions
• women leaders
• women workers
• working-class politics

Asked in the 1980s about women in the labour movement in India prior to Independence, the octogenarian labour leader, Santoshkumari Devi, said: ‘We could not get men to work in the movement, where would we find women?’¹ Santoshkumari was one of a handful of bhadramahila (middle-class Bengali women) who were active in the labour movement from the 1920s to the 1970s. The core gender narrative of politics in this period has been of middle-class women’s participation in the nationalist movement. The freedom movement already had a half-century history by the 1920s, when the labour movement began to gather momentum under the leadership of middle-class men, many of whom operated at the margins of mainstream nationalist politics. The bhadramahila began their political journey in the late nineteenth century, their participation ranging from moderate Congress Party activism to militant terrorism. Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation gave respectable women the scope to join the freedom movement in large numbers, although the narrow social base of women political activists—elite and upper-caste—has been widely noted. These women began to set up their own associations and a women’s movement emerged. By the late 1930s, women were a significant constituency in Left movements. A few of these bhadramahila stepped into the labour movement as leaders and mobilisers. They proclaimed a variety of ideologies—nationalism and socialism of course, but also welfare and social work—and they inhabited a vibrant political space at the intersection of three movements: nationalist, women’s and labour.

Focusing on the stories of a few middle-class women labour activists, the first two sections of this paper unpack patterns of leadership and participation. Scholarly debate so far has been polarised between celebrating their extraordinary achievement and deploring their marginality. Both arguments are valid. On the one hand, elite women had to negotiate almost impossible odds to come forward to mobilise the working poor. The labour movement was itself often a hostile space, riven by intense party competition, corruption and factional rivalry. Indeed, some of these activists were not able to square their ideological vision with these exigencies. On the other hand, the very presence of elite women signalled a comparative hospitability, and it allowed radical transgression of personal, familial, social and spatial limits of middle-class gendered behaviour. In the 1940s, in the context of war, famine and riots in Bengal, women spilled out of the home onto the street. Their presence in political parties, especially Left parties, gradually became normalised. When men went to prison or moved underground, women, often through social service activities, took over leadership, which might otherwise have been impossible.² This may explain in part how and why some bhadramahila trade unionists rose to positions of leadership.³ Over several later decades, however, trade unions became more masculine. An intermediate leadership from working-class men emerged, but middle-class male leaders continued to helm unions and the affiliated political parties. As a result, trade unions became a meeting ground for men across various classes. Leela Fernandes has noted how a particular construction of masculinity began to imbue working-class spaces to exclude women workers;⁴ similar problems attended the peasant fronts of Left parties.⁵ Not surprisingly, women’s leadership in the labour movement began to diminish between the 1950s and 1970s.

What about working-class women in trade unions? I have written elsewhere about women’s militancy in trade unions in Bengal (and Bombay, now called Mumbai) in the 1920s and 1930s.⁶ Ravi Ahuja argues that, in the 1940s, there was a halt to the defeminisation of unions due to the significant presence of women in strikes and public praise of women workers as a ‘vanguard’.⁷ But did a leadership emerge in Bengal from the ranks of combative women workers? We have fleeting mention of a few intermediate-level leaders of whom two (interviewed by Manju Chattopadhyay) are discussed in the third section.

The trope of marginalisation appears overwhelming in many of these stories. It is difficult to distinguish cause and consequence in four interlinked developments of the period: the growth of organised labour protest with the spread of trade unions; the withdrawal or expulsion of women from leadership positions; a steep fall in the proportion of women in the industrial workforce; and the slow attenuation of women workers’ protests and modes of resistance. However, women’s employment declined precisely in that segment of industry that was most heavily unionised.⁸ It appears that formalisation, unionisation and masculinisation took place in tandem.⁹ In the early years, however, women did play a significant role in labour politics as leaders and activists; we are in danger of forgetting this history in our emphasis on marginalisation.

This paper seeks, moreover, to connect labour leaders to a recent crop of writing that inverts our familiar tag: ‘the political’, scholars now affirm, ‘is personal’. Tanika Sarkar has pointed out that feminist preoccupation with the ‘personal’ was crowding out political women;¹⁰ there is now a renewed attempt to link the two. Geraldine Forbes pioneered this quest, noting that romantic and sexual liaisons marked a significant shift in the revolutionary movement in the 1930s, in the life-experiences of activists as well as in fiction. There were, however, stringent limits; women’s political work had to be without ‘social rebellion’.¹¹ Both these arguments have been taken further and there is now some, still highly inadequate, writing on love, sex and marriage in political movements,¹² even though Durba Ghosh suggests that political women sought to write themselves into history as well-behaved and desexed.¹³ How did women labour activists negotiate this terrain? We will see in this essay that many women activists chose unconventional marriages, Bimal Pratibha Devi being the most transgressive. Their choices have to be understood in the context of the second social reform movement.¹⁴ The 1920s to 1950s was rife with debates about marriage, divorce, dowry and inheritance, leading to major reforms in family law, both Hindu and Muslim. Many women activists participated in these debates and made life choices in keeping with their advocacy of more egalitarian gender relations in the family.

There has been much discussion on the predominantly middle-class leadership of Indian trade unions and the significance of ‘outsiders’.¹⁵ Dipesh Chakrabarty created controversy by suggesting a babu–coolie relationship between union leaders and workers,¹⁶ which many labour historians rejected on the ground that it undermined subaltern agency.¹⁷ There has been much less attempt to reprise the role of the babu. These middle-class leaders, according to Chakrabarty, combined authoritarianism with paternalism. How did middle-class women leaders negotiate the social distance of class and caste, complicated by cultural sanctions against contact between elite women and men of lower orders? In an earlier study of some bhadramahila union leaders, I drew attention to their deployment of the intimate and the familial, particularly the trope of motherhood.¹⁸ There has been renewed focus on maternalism in understanding the welfare state in Europe and the USA;¹⁹ the extension of kinship by women to legitimise their participation in the nationalist movement in India has been noted;²⁰ and this paper shows that maternalism was widely deployed in the trade union movement in Bengal.

The idiom of maternalism, combining nurture with power, allowed women to participate in multiple political projects of their time—nationalist, feminist, socialist, peasant and labour movements—and to also be active social workers. Some women had successful public careers: they were popular with workers, lauded for their humanitarian service, won posts in union bureaucracies, successfully contested elections and held positions in government. Some women leaders came from wealthy and influential families, while some were highly educated with professional qualifications acquired in Europe or the USA. Their peers stigmatised them as transgressive and/or Westernised, but workers responded to the idiom of motherhood despite class barriers and social transgressions. Workers—men and women—addressed these women leaders as maiji, mataji or mairam (mother) or behenji (sister) and rallied to their call.

The paper addresses maternalism but seeks to look beyond it to ask new questions about the nature of women’s labour activism. What motivated these women? How did they negotiate personal and family relationships with multiple sites of political activity? Why did so many of them exit labour politics mid-career? And how do we compare middle-class leaders with emerging leadership from the working classes? The answers lie in the paradoxical strategy women leaders adopted in this period of transition. On the one hand, they stretched and strained social conventions—in their choice of political work as well as in their marital and family practices. As a result, the negative stereotyping of working-class women as sexually transgressive also fed into the characterisation of women labour leaders. On the other hand, they adopted a language of empowering motherhood, even drawing on socially conservative ideologies of kinship and nationalism to address the politics of class. These contradictions were key to the enabling spaces women created for themselves in labour politics at the time of nation-making.

The discussions in this paper have been organised under three sub-themes. The first section foregrounds some bhadramahila trade union leaders who were active in multiple movements. Historians have long puzzled over the sudden exit of some of these women from the labour movement. Bimal Pratibha Devi, a mysterious and enigmatic figure, not much known in the historical literature on labour, will be the focus. The second section extends the discussion to those women leaders who pursued long-term engagement with Left or trade union politics such as Maitreyee Bose. Many of these women leaders were able to move from labour activism into mainstream electoral politics. The third section will discuss two women leaders rising from the ranks of workers. In both these cases, leadership was more gendered than in the language of most middle-class women leaders. These two women led women workers (at least initially) and addressed issues specific to women workers.

The lady vanishes: Women leaders in trade unions, 1920–50

Two women trade union leaders in the jute industry in the 1920s are quite well known: Santoshkumari Devi (Gupta)²¹ founded the Gourepur Jute Workers’ Union (1927), and Prabhavati Dasgupta led the scavengers’ strike in 1928 and then the jute general strike of 1929. Santoshkumari had withdrawn from active participation in trade unions by the late 1920s but remained active in the Congress Party and in the women’s movement. Prabhavati Dasgupta came to fame as the charismatic leader of the jute general strike in 1929. She worked closely with socialists and communists in this period but pulled out abruptly from the union after the strike amidst considerable acrimony. She never returned to politics despite her huge popularity. When she went on an election campaign in 1937 after a prolonged absence, she got a standing ovation from the workers. Santoshkumari and Prabhavati did not specifically address women workers and they did not promote women-specific demands. Instead, they raised common demands of workers—wages, working conditions, job security, unionisation and so on. At a time when there were very few labour activists even among middle-class men, these two women were able to cross the barriers of class, caste and language to connect to workers with apparent ease on the tropes of care, service and a transcendental motherhood.²² The two women faced enormous hostility from political leaders and middle-class publicists: Santoshkumari had to face gossip, sexual innuendo (including about her failed marriage) and adverse publicity in the news media; Prabhavati Dasgupta was lampooned in the periodicals Sanibarer Chithi and the Prabasi because she had a PhD from Germany, she had organised a strike among scavengers, a particularly stigmatised group of workers, and, even more scandalously, she socialised with them and she smoked.²³ She later married Bakar Ali Mirza, a Muslim and her comrade in the Bengal Jute Workers Union, who was its general secretary (1929–35). Having already blazed a shocking trail, however, Prabhavati’s inter-community marriage did not appear to cause as much outrage as might have been expected.²⁴

Begum Sakina Farrukh Sultan Muayyidzada followed in Prabhavati’s footsteps. An elected councillor of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, she was highly educated and a practising advocate, and she became the undisputed leader of the 18,000-strong scavengers’ strike in 1940. Under her leadership, union membership soared. She is said to have enjoyed unparalleled popularity. During a second wave of strikes, Sakina (along with about one hundred workers) was arrested and then detained in Kurseong. Her union shattered, she moved out of the labour movement. It took the scavengers another five years to rebuild their organisation and launch their first successful strike.²⁵

Another contemporary trade unionist was Bimal Pratibha, daughter of Surendra Nath Mukhopadhyay who was involved in the Swadeshi movement and was later a member of the charitable institution Prabartak Sangha. Her father’s influence pulled her into politics. She had been married young into a rich and conservative Brahman family, and for about ten years she kept her political activities secret. According to police reports, she used to leave her house under cover. She probably obtained permission for her political activism from her husband in 1928, when she became a member of the Congress Party. She supported Subhas Chandra Bose, helping him raise a women’s voluntary corps. In 1930, she participated in a procession to commemorate Chittaranjan Das’ death: she was arrested and jailed for six months. She later drew her husband, Dr. Charu Chandra Bandopadhyay, into the Congress and even into labour politics.²⁶

In public, Bimal Pratibha was associated with Bose, but she was secretly in contact with terrorists too. In 1927, when Bhagat Singh established the Left-wing revolutionary Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Bimal Pratibha became the president of the Bengal branch and opened an office in Bhawanipur. In April 1930, after the Chittagong Armoury Raid, she helped to raise money for those on trial. On 7 July 1931, she organised a procession to protest the hanging of Dinesh Gupta.²⁷ In 1931, she was arrested in the Maniktala robbery case. On 2 October, on Canal West Road, a group of armed people had arrived by car, entered a shop and robbed the owner: the car belonged to Bimal Pratibha’s husband and she was in the car. Police alleged that she was the ‘brain of the party’, but due to health reasons, she was fined Rs2,000 rather than being jailed.²⁸ She was arrested again soon after however, suspected of a role in the assassination of the magistrate of Kumilla by Santi Ghosh and Suniti Choudhury on 14 December 1931:²⁹ this time she was in jail for five years. Around the same time, she joined the Forward Bloc and encountered socialism. In 1941, when Bose vanished, she was detained for questioning. In 1942, she joined the Quit India Movement, was again arrested and was in jail till September 1945. After her release, Bimal Pratibha joined the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India and became involved with the labour movement in the Burdwan-Asansol-Ranigunj industrial and mining area.³⁰ In 1938, she participated in a historic strike at the Ranigunj Paper Mill which led to the death of the young trade union leader, Sukumar Bandopadhyay. Her husband was appointed to the Congress investigation committee.³¹

In the late 1940s, Bimal Pratibha left home. She first lived in the Azad Hind Fauj office in Kalighat, organising workers in the Ranigunj-Asansol mining area, where she acquired the same sobriquet as her predecessors—Mataji. Eventually she moved to Asansol to live in the labour lines, fully dedicating herself to the union movement. It is said that she lived with the labour leader, Joe Chowdhury, but they did not marry. During this period, she became close to the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI), and she tried to organise all the Leftist unions under the United Trade Union Congress (affiliated to the RCPI). By 1949 she was a full-time labour activist, attending secret party meetings to plan a railway strike.³² At this time, women leaders were being channelled into organising women workers, so the RCPI asked Bimal Pratibha to unionise women workers in the colliery regions of South Bengal. During the first election after Independence, Bimal Pratibha’s influence amongst railway men was greatly valued by the RCPI. According to police reports, working with Saumyendranath Tagore, the founder-leader of the RCPI, turned her into a party activist.³³ In the early 1950s, when dissension broke out within the RCPI, another RCPI leader, Biswanath Dey infiltrated the mining belt through Bimal Pratibha. In 1955, at a conference of the Loco Running Staff of Eastern Railways inaugurated by V.V. Giri, Bimal Pratibha addressed the meeting. She commanded enormous respect because of her knowledge of the working and living conditions in the railways and the collieries. Her confrontational style is said to have earned her another nickname with the locals: Hunterwali (a woman wielding a whip). Later, she is said to have joined the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), but we know next to nothing about this period in her life.³⁴

Bimal Pratibha’s unconventional personal life drew a great deal of criticism. She wrote two novels: Natun Diner Alo (Light of the New Day) (1933–34), published in 1938 and immediately banned; in 1948, she wrote and published Aguner Phulki (Spark of Fire), which she set in Iran in order to escape the censors.³⁵ The novels both have a political activist couple at the centre of their plots: in Natun Diner Alo, a married couple try to establish trade unions in many regions of India; in Aguner Phulki, the political couple are not married. Natun Diner Alo idealises romantic love, while Aguner Phulki is more explicit about sexual pleasure. Each also contains lengthy debates between nationalism and communism; in the first novel, there are passages debating anarchism and communism, and in the second, there is a trenchant critique of the communist People’s War line. In both novels, there is concern with the changing role of women. In Natun Diner Alo, there is a brief passage which sums up Engels’ argument about the origin of the family. In an exchange with her brother-in-law and comrade-in-arms, Surupa, the female protagonist, says: ‘If a society is of human beings, then they will want men and women, everyone to be human beings. They will not want to enslave some people in the name of motherhood and chastity…. We must be, as human beings, home-makers, wives and mothers’.³⁶ Similarly, in Aguner Phulki, a major female character, Sophia, says: ‘For a century now, women have been crying out for equal rights! But it is only for appearances or for economic interest—whatever they do is a pale imitation—it is not real equality!’³⁷ In Natun Diner Alo, Surupa hesitantly questions marriage: ‘I know your opinion of conventional marriage…. Marriage is such bondage; it is an incongruous impediment to our ideology. For existing society and law, however, it is inconvenient not to have something of that sort’.³⁸ In Aguner Phulki, written about fifteen years later, Bimal Pratibha has dispensed with marriage altogether. None of the couples in the novel bother to marry or to discuss marriage at all. These were socially radical positions for women to address, even in fiction. However, these two novels must be read in the context of the two mainstream and hugely influential political novels of the time, Pather Dabi (1926) by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Char Adhyay (1934) by Rabindranath Tagore—both depicted non-marital love, live-in relationships and explored themes of sex, desire and revolution. These two novels were controversial, but both novelists had already established reputations for transgressive depictions.³⁹ By contrast, Bimal Pratibha’s two novels are of doubtful literary merit; they found little circulation and have been all but forgotten. Yet they stand out because they were written by a woman political leader at considerable personal reputational risk and drew on autobiographical details. It is speculated that while Charu Chandra initially accepted Bimal Pratibha’s politics, her increasing political involvement caused a serious rift between them. In this, she has some similarity with Santoshkumari, who left her husband to pursue a political career.

Even Bimal Pratibha’s associates spoke slightingly of her and condemned her extra-marital relationships. Bimal Pratibha had de-classed herself as very few middle-class labour leaders of her time had, men or women. She lived with the workers and ate, drank and smoked with them. She was probably destitute in the last years of her life and she died unsung in August 1978. There was no obituary—nothing marked her passing. She has not even earned a footnote in the history of the labour movement.⁴⁰ According to Manju Chattopadhyay, while courageous and politically conscious, Bimal Pratibha was unpopular because she was arrogant, argumentative and stubborn.⁴¹ Many communist men and women experimented with marriage and family during the 1940s and 1950s, but Bimal Pratibha was exceptional.⁴² Pratibha Bhadra, who was in jail with her, said: ‘Bimal brought the revolt into her own life. She was far ahead of us’.⁴³ An associate, Gopal Haldar, lamented that Bimal Pratibha died without explaining anything, so no one understood her.⁴⁴ Nevertheless she had an intense intellectual and ideological engagement with the big questions of her time.

Manikuntala Sen met Bimal Pratibha in 1949 when they were underground.⁴⁵ Sen was a member of the communist party and her primary field of activism was the women’s front. In her memoir, Sediner Katha, she admits that the labour movement was not quite her forte, even though she did attempt to organise workers. She says candidly that she was at first shocked by the ‘temporary marriages’ prevailing among the jute workers; later, however, she established a good rapport with the women workers. Perhaps because of her experience in the women’s movement, unlike most bhadramahila trade unionists Sen raised women-specific demands such as equal pay, maternity benefits, and crèches and kindergartens.⁴⁶ She was the leader of the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS), which did sterling work in famine relief and refugee rehabilitation. This organisation, led by communists but including women of diverse ideologies, was a crucial bridge between politics and social work. Even so, the relationship between MARS and the Communist Party of India (CPI) was by no means untroubled. Sen wrote at length about the difficulty of getting the communist leadership to take women’s issues seriously, including those of women workers;⁴⁷ trade unions accommodated women’s specific demands only on the intercession of women’s groups. Sen’s writings are explicit about how conversations between women’s platforms and the trade union wing of the CPI gave political space to women workers.⁴⁸

Sen described her negotiations and accommodations with her natal family, particularly her mother, because of her politics, but said nothing about her marriage in her memoirs. She described her public engagements of the time, but not when she met and married a comrade, Jolly Kaul. It was an unusual marriage between a Kashmiri pandit and a Bengali baidya, the bride being older. In his memoirs, published nearly thirty years later and after Sen’s death, Kaul wrote at length of a happy marriage,⁴⁹ whereas Sen said nothing about it. Sen joined the CPI as a student, and she was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1952 and 1957. She lost the third election on the eve of the split in the CPI. Despite her long and active engagement with the party, she resigned and withdrew from politics. She wrote of her discomfort with the split and factionalism, and she also mentioned an attack on Kaul. Sen, like many others, never returned to politics.

Other than Sakina, all the women trade unions leaders discussed so far had unconventional personal lives. Prabhavati and Sen broke the rules of endogamy to marry out of caste and community. Santoshkumari left her husband; Bimal Pratibha took the very bold step of abandoning home and husband to live in an extra-marital relationship. Almost all of them combined many political activities, and in this respect, too, Sakina is an exception. Santoshkumari and Sen were directly involved with the women’s movement; and Bimal Pratibha joined the Nari Karma Mandir, a training centre for women activists, at the start of her political career. However, the striking similarity between them is their abrupt withdrawal from the labour movement. In the cases of Prabhavati and Sen, there has been much (unresolved) discussion about why they severed their connections with the Bengal Jute Workers Union and the CPI respectively at the height of their careers, whereas Sakina’s withdrawal is better understood. Santoshkumari moved into other political activity, shifting her seva (service) to oppressed women and the nationalist movement. Bimal Pratibha did not quite abandon the labour movement, moving away from the mainstream to pursue labour politics in her own way; indeed, it would perhaps be fair to say that the labour movement abandoned her. The space these women’s leaders had been able to stake out politically in the early years of easy informality shrank as political parties fought to increase their footprints and trade unions introduced less personalised and more bureaucratic modes of functioning. Women leaders may have been (self-)expelled by the ‘discipline’ of party and unions, even as women workers were rendered peripheral by these same processes.

Political women: Labour and the nation, 1930–70

There were middle-class women trade union activists in the 1930s and 1940s who continued their engagement for much longer, even though they did not quite reach great heights of charismatic leadership. Many such women embraced the mainstream, joined political parties and participated in elections, but they did not challenge social norms or experiment in their personal relationships. Many had supportive families (natal and/or marital), which enabled them to forge new paths and live lives very different from those of their peers or predecessors.

Bina Das is a household name in Bengal. She shot at Stanley Jackson at the convocation of Calcutta University in 1932. Like many of the other women activists, she came from a political family, her father and all her siblings being involved in various movements.⁵⁰ She was released from jail in 1939, joined the Congress Party, but was also influenced by socialism.⁵¹ She helped Amrita Bazar Patrika press workers form a union, but since this was a nationalist paper, Congress leaders were not willing to help. Das was scathing about the owners’ refusal to negotiate with the union on the grounds that it was communist. A few other women stood with her, among them Kamala Das Gupta. The labour movement was not her primary political interest, but Bina Das was inspired by a humanitarian socialism. However, she failed to involve her Congress colleagues in this aspect of her work, but gradually expanded her influence in cotton and jute mills, iron and steel factories, and aluminium and railway workshops. Her trade union activity helped her win a seat in the West Bengal legislative assembly elections after Independence, but she subsequently moved away from labour politics.⁵²

Sudha Roy was active in the dock workers’ strike in 1934. A year earlier, she had joined the Bengal Labour Party and the secret Bolshevik party within it, inducted by her brother, Sisir Roy, the founding secretary of the Bengal Labour Party. There were criminal gangs operating in the dock area and the workers were mostly men, so it was not easy for a middle-class woman to take up this work. Roy was among the mobilisers for the 1934 strike, often staying overnight in the bastis; the workers protected her from the police.⁵³ However, disillusioned by the split in the communist party, she distanced herself from the labour movement and took up social work.⁵⁴

Maitreyee Bose followed Roy onto the docks. She had studied medicine in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and in 1931, she won a scholarship to study for an MD in Munich. She was in Germany when Hitler was rising to power and she encountered socialism there. In 1937, she married Dr. Swadesh Bose and left her hospital job to start a private practice. In 1942, she joined the Quit India Movement with full support from her husband. Eventually, she abandoned her medical practice and joined the nationalist movement full time, getting involved in organising a dock workers’ union.⁵⁵ The dock workers’ movement was riven both by communist factionalism and communalism. Initially she was attracted to communism, and like many of her peers, she was open to working with them. She later turned hostile to it. Her ideological space was within Gandhian nationalism, which she discussed at length in her autobiography, Muktir Adhikare (The Right to Freedom).⁵⁶ Notably, trade unionists of different ideological persuasions worked together in the AITUC founded in 1920. However, on the eve of Independence in May 1947, the Congress Party broke away from the AITUC to form its own trade union wing, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC). Bose had to tackle two issues when she first arrived on the docks: restoring women carriers who had lost their jobs when the export of coal ceased, and checking the abuse of power by stevedores. Her initial success on both these issues gave her a major boost. She soon became secretary of the Bengal branch of the Hindustan Mazdoor Sevak Sangh.⁵⁷ Bose was associated with the dock workers’ union for about two decades. She also organised jute mill workers, coal miners, tea garden workers, scavengers in the Garden Reach area and transport workers, especially those who drove food trucks. She used to say that she got more respect and love from port and dock workers than from the educated society of Calcutta. She became a member of the Wage Board first, then vice president of the BPTUC (Bengal branch of the AITUC) in 1945 and treasurer in 1947. Later, she became president of INTUC and represented it in the International Labour Organization. From 1952 to 1967, she won a seat in three elections for the West Bengal State Assembly. In 1967, she left the Congress and gave indirect support to West Bengal’s second United Front government. In 1971, she ran as an independent candidate for north Bengal and was elected to the Indian parliament. She retained a strong ideological commitment to the labour movement:

Why labour movement?… Nowadays there is a demand for socialism and for this, you need the full co-operation of workers in industry…. For this, you need healthy workers’ organisations. By healthy, I don’t mean that you have to abjure strikes. You must have strikes when it is necessary but the main weapon will be to create public opinion…. You can be their companion in their misery and happiness only if you can become their friend. If you think ‘we’ are working for ‘them’, it will not be effective.⁵⁸

Bose was inspired by humanitarianism; when she moved away from the workers’ movement and the Congress Party, she devoted herself to child welfare (which she had begun in 1944). In his preface to Muktir Adhikare, Pannalal Dasgupta wrote: ‘she was not a typical political leader or a typical trade union leader or a typical social worker, certainly not a typical doctor. She was involved in all of these and the combination allowed her to transcend each of these and to reach the sky’.⁵⁹ However Bose did not become famous in politics though she had a long political career. She was never a successful trade union leader, even though she worked many long years among many kinds of workers. She was not a conformist and, in the end, she was isolated. Her unwillingness to toe the party line made it difficult for her to sustain a career in politics; she refused to submit to the discipline of formal politics, whether in the Congress Party or in the labour movement.

Phulrenu Guha was politically more successful. She was born in 1911, a few years after Bose. In 1935 she was sent abroad for higher studies because of her involvement with terrorists. Like many of her age, she was attracted to socialism; she joined the Bengal Labour Party and worked with the dock workers’ unions. She is said to have been a member of the innermost committees of the Bolshevik Party. Gradually, she drifted towards Gandhian politics. In 1945 she married Biresh Guha. From the mid 1940s, she became more involved with welfare work and the women’s movement, especially in the contexts of famine, riots, Partition and the refugee crisis.⁶⁰ She was a member of the All India Women’s Congress (AIWC) and this became her life’s work. In 1961 she founded Karma Kutir, a welfare organisation for disadvantaged women. She was the life-long president of the West Bengal branch of the Association for Social Health in India.⁶¹ In 1964 she stood for election to the Rajya Sabha (the Upper House of Parliament). Up until then the police had maintained surveillance on her because of her communist past. In 1972, she became the president of the Calcutta Congress. She contested elections again in 1971 and 1977, but her first parliamentary victory was in 1984. She remained with the Congress Party till her death. A woman of indomitable will, she participated in all possible shades of politics in her time.

Bina Das, Sudha Roy, Maitreyee Bose and Phulrenu Guha all joined mainstream political parties; three joined the Congress Party and were in the fray of mainstream electoral politics. Guha was the most successful politician, while Bose was an idealist and found compromise difficult. The women’s integrity and commitment made them popular labour leaders who were able to win trust and loyalty across the boundaries of class. All four of them were involved in social work of various types: Roy took up social work after she left the CPI. The other three combined welfare activities (particularly addressing women and children) with trade union and political party commitments. However, the high idealism that helped them win over workers stood in the way of them pursuing careers in party-affiliated unions where expediency and electoral calculations overrode other considerations.

Women workers and trade unions: Leaders and followers

The period after Independence saw a gradual decline in women’s employment in India in factories, mills and mines. For instance, between 1950 and 1956, women’s employment in textile industries decreased; there was direct retrenchment of women even as total employment rose, and by 1956, women were only 7 percent of textile workers. In the jute industry, the number of women declined from 37,000 in 1950 to 21,000 in 1956. In the cotton mills, there was a decrease in women winders from 11,317 in 1951 to 8,456 in 1956; there were similar declines in the reeling departments.⁶² Moreover, women workers had low rates of unionisation. At the all-India level, women as a proportion of total union membership only rose from 3.5 percent in 1936–37 to 4.9 percent in 1946–47; the proportion in West Bengal in 1950–51 was just 2.4 percent.⁶³ But, on the other hand, trade unions grew more powerful in the 1950s; one after another, state regulations began to improve working conditions in a small but significant segment of industry. These twin processes—of organisation and formalisation—posed serious challenges for women workers.

In the 1940s and 1950s, women workers had rarely won the support of trade unions in their battles against job losses.⁶⁴ Indeed, trade unions were complicit in the replacement of women by men. Together with union activity, a gendered discourse of morality, focusing on alcoholism, prostitution and crime as forms of social disease, helped to exclude women from factory employment. Moreover, the women workers were unable to sustain alternative forms of collective action. In the 1950s and 1960s, women workers had been militant on the shop floor (sometimes in defiance of union leadership), but over the next two decades, a complex web of family structure, gendered practices in employment and exclusionary practices by trade unions sapped their potential for resistance.⁶⁵

Despite these difficulties, however, some women leaders did emerge from the working classes. But compared to middle-class women trade union leaders, working-class women activists are more difficult to find. Phoolmaya and Dilmaya, who grew up on tea estates, joined the ‘Red Flag’ union when it was established in 1946. Chameli Tamang, a tea garden worker, was elected vice president of the AITUC. Along with Shelly Tamang, she travelled across north Bengal to organise women tea workers. They composed songs about poverty which became very popular. In January 1955, Mouli Soba Raini, a woman union leader, was killed during a police operation in Darjeeling.⁶⁶

Dukhmat Didi⁶⁷ emerged as a leader in the jute industry in the 1940s. She did not understand Marxist theory, but she understood trade unions. She lived all her life in a dark little room in a tenement in Alambazar. Her husband had died, she had no children, and the trade union became her family. She had come with her husband from Bilaspur in 1933–34 and they had found jobs in the Baranagar Jute Mill; in 1937, during the general strike, Dukhmat started mobilising some seven hundred women workers from the mill. She did not get the support of her husband, Ram Deo, although he did not actively oppose her activities. Ram Deo was afraid of managerial retaliation; Dukhmat argued that since their jobs were insecure anyway, there was nothing to fear.⁶⁸

In the 1940s, Kanak Mukherjee drew Dukhmat into the CPI. Dukhmat was illiterate, so Mukherjee brought her to the Calcutta party office, taught her to read and write, and tried to convince her to join the CPI full-time. Although Dukhmat learnt to read and write, she did not want to work for the party full-time; instead, she wanted to return to the jute mills as a trade unionist. Nevertheless, she joined the CPI and remained with the party all her life, leading the trade union from the front. When police came to break up a meeting at Wellington Square in Calcutta, she told the women there not to worry because she would always be at the head.⁶⁹ In the elections of December 1946, Dukhmat campaigned for Chatur Ali, a tram worker who stood for election on a CPI ticket. Dukhmat believed that campaigning helped to popularise the CPI even though it lost. For her, ‘the party’ was essentially of and for the poor; although militant collective protests did not always yield concrete outcomes, they raised the morale of the workers. She participated in the agitation for Works Committees which, she believed, would make trade unions stronger. At the Baranagar Jute Mill, Dukhmat became secretary and later president of the union. In 1953, when there was a ‘gherao’ (picket line) at the Indian Jute Mills Association, Dukhmat brought her trade union members to Calcutta. Their demands included hospitals, post-delivery maternity allowances, service books, retirement benefits, wage increases, accident compensation and bonuses. None of these came easily, said Dukhmat, there had to be prolonged struggle.⁷⁰

Dukhmat also participated in the Food Movement of 1959. The police discovered her identity and came to arrest her. She left the house through the front door wearing her husband’s clothes! She was 77 years old when Manju Chattopadhyay interviewed her; she said: ‘I’m still a member of the party. I go to all the meetings. I join the marches. I do the gate meetings. I can’t see very well but I don’t find any difficulty in doing these jobs. I’m still a party member’. There were many questions in her mind too. She asked why there were so many political and social divisions: ‘All workers are the same. Why then did we become so fragmented? Is our poverty not the same…. Why can we not unite?’ When asked if she regretted becoming a communist, Dukhmat replied that communism helped workers achieve human dignity. She said she had learnt that the consciousness of the workers was the key: ‘I do not regret becoming communist. I am still communist’.⁷¹

Dukhmat organised women workers and helped them voice their demands, but she offered no comment about the union’s gender policies. In their autobiographies, Parvatibai Bhore and Ushabai Dange, union leaders in the Bombay textile industry, raised the question of gender that challenged class solidarity, as well as the question of class inequality among communist women activists⁷² We have no subaltern view of regional, caste or class tensions within the Bengal communist party, but we do have a gender critique from Sukumari Chowdhury. She lost her job at Bengal Lamps Ltd despite being a leader in the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). The women workers at Bengal Lamps organised fierce resistance but were not able to reverse their retrenchment or even recover their provident fund. Chowdhury had come with her family to Calcutta from East Bengal in 1950. The family squatted on a plot in a colony near Jadavpur and built a little hut. In her interview, she spoke at length about the goondas (hired thugs) with lathis who came to evict them. The colony inhabitants collected household and kitchen utensils to use as weapons to protect their homes. From 1950 to 1955, they had to face intermittent lathi-charges and tear-gas attacks by police to retain their shacks, and this prepared Chowdhury for trade union activism.⁷³ In 1955 she joined Bengal Lamps, working with about ten women who prepared the filament in the factory. As the company expanded, the workforce increased to 152. Wages for women were lower than for men, even though they worked with the men on the machines. In 1956, Prabir Ganguly led a successful movement for bonuses and Chowdhury, then a new worker, helped to organise the women. The strike lasted nearly six months. Chowdhury was arrested along with many of the men. She held one policeman by his belt and threatened to throw him in the lake. They were taken to the thana (police station) but released soon after.⁷⁴ During another three-month strike to protest about a young boy being suddenly handed a charge-sheet, Chowdhury married Prabir Ganguly and joined the CPI. Their marriage, she said, was an extension of their comradeship.⁷⁵ Yet, she said, women were never included in negotiations with the factory management:

We were always in front when the police came with lathis or tear gas but when the time came to take decisions we were never called. We spoke about our demands, we asked for equal wages but none of this got much importance in discussions regarding workers’ rights. This was the rule. Even if we were unhappy, we did not protest.⁷⁶

The communist union leadership did not expect women to join the men at the discussion table; even her husband, otherwise her comrade-in-arms, never invited her.⁷⁷

Conclusion

A few middle-class women rose to great heights of leadership in the labour movement, but many of them left the field suddenly and without explanation. Some scholars have argued that these women leaders did not have the necessary political commitment to remain, and that only communist women were able to sustain labour activism.⁷⁸ The stories discussed in this paper show, however, that there was no such pattern. Indeed, very few women were able to maintain a career in labour politics: Prabhavati Dasgupta and Begum Sakina Farrukh Sultan Muayyidzada left the labour movement abruptly after leading unions and strikes in the 1930s and 1940s; Manikuntala Sen and Sudha Roy left during the split in the CPI in the 1960s; Maitreyee Bose left the Congress Party in the 1970s. Many of these women turned from labour activism and political parties to social work. Bimal Pratibha Devi remained in the labour movement but on terms too transgressive for any mainstream trade union or political party to accept.

From the 1950s, the trade union movement began to develop a hypermasculine culture which drove women from participation at all levels. Trade unions were riven by debates over ideological positions as well as factionalism, endemic in the Left political parties. The Congress Party too suffered from personal squabbles: Bina Das and Maitreyee Bose were both victims.⁷⁹ Unions owing affiliation to the Congress Party or to the communist parties often came to blows. In October 1952, Saumyendranath Tagore and Bimal Pratibha Devi were attacked by a rival union at a meeting.⁸⁰ The world of trade union politics became characterised by violence, crime and corruption, which most middle-class women found very difficult to negotiate. But did working-class women union leaders exhibit more ideological commitment, and hence staying power? There is no easy answer to the question. Some were unquestioningly committed to communism, but within the working-class leadership, women had begun to question gender inequality.

The most surprising disconnect in the stories told here lies between middle-class and working-class women. There is very little evidence of women leaders mobilising women workers or encouraging the emergence of working-class women’s leadership. The loftiest of these leaders—Santoshkumari Devi, Prabhavati Dasgupta, Begum Sakina and Maitreyee Bose—were women leaders who led workers, but they were not leaders of women workers; they did not even raise gender-specific issues. Manikuntala Sen, with her Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti background, did recognise the significance of women’s own demands, as did working-class women leaders such as Sukumari Chowdhury and Dukhmat Didi. Women leaders who rose from the ranks posed sharper questions on gender issues to the unions. Dukhmat raised topics such as maternity benefits and crèches; Sukumari raised the question of women’s exclusion from union decision-making. These differences highlight the complex interplay of gender and class in the Indian trade union movement. In the early years of the labour movement, the bhadramahila successfully deployed an expansive maternalism to normalise class hierarchies and establish personalised idioms of power and influence. Such a strategy did not include imaginaries of female solidarity.

MARS named its journal Ghare Baire: activist women appreciated the inextricability of home and world. The world of labour politics helped them challenge (or even escape) the social and moral norms of the bhadramahila, though some, such as Bimal Pratibha Devi, paid a heavy price for transgressions. In contrast, women workers who experienced ‘temporary marriage’, onerous familial responsibilities and unstable households may have aspired to respectability and upward mobility through their political engagement. Class did not wield a homogenising brush over marriage and sexuality. Dukhmat Didi could not share political work with her husband, but Sukumari Chowdhury was able to. Occasionally, among communist women, the search for comradeship in marriage crossed class boundaries. Equally, political families and comradely marriages facilitated political engagement. Comradely marriages, especially, brought greater opportunities for (as well as burdens of) public activity for wives. Female labour activism lay at the cusp of two movements, the working-class movement and the women’s movement, and as such it challenged working conditions in factories as well as women’s place in the home, norms of employment as well as domesticity, and tropes of solidarities and collectives as well as those of love, marriage and family.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Preface’, in Sramiknetri Santoshkumari (Calcutta: Manisha, 1984), translation mine.

2. Initially, the revolutionary groups were wholly masculine. In a major shift from celibate male culture, they began to admit women when many leaders were arrested: see Geraldine Forbes, ‘Goddesses or Rebels? The Women Revolutionaries of Bengal’, in Oracle, Vol. 11, no. 2 (1980), pp. 1–15. Many revolutionaries became socialists or communists while in prison, so there are multiple linkages between the two movements. For the role of women in socialist and communist parties, see Adrienne Cooper, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal 1930–1950 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co., 1988); and Peter Custers, Women in the Tebhaga Uprising: Rural Poor Women and Revolutionary Leadership, 1946–47 (Calcutta: Noya Prakash, 1987).

3. I have discussed the entry of the first two bhadramahila trade union leaders in Bengal previously: see Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 6.

4. Leela Fernandes, Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997), p. 109.

5. Manikuntala Sen and Renu Chakravarty tried to address the question of women’s roles with the CPI leadership. The CPI leaders wanted peasant women to be ‘good comrades’ and put the struggle above ‘personal’ concerns: Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 215; also see Cooper, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles. These debates have been explored most recently in Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), chap. 5. Gender relations in Left and communist parties at a later period have been explored in Mallarika Sinha Roy, Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975) (London/New York: Routledge, 2011); and Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012).

6. Samita Sen, ‘Segregation and Solidarity: Women Textile Workers in Calcutta and Bombay, 1920–1940’, in Bharati Ray (ed.), Women in Politics (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 2000); also see Radha Kumar, ‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919–1939’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 20, no. 1 (1983), pp. 81–96.

7. Ravi Ahuja, ‘Produce or Perish: The Crisis of the Late 1940s and the Place of Labour in Postcolonial India’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 54, no. 4 (2020), pp. 1–72, DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X17001007.

8. Samita Sen, ‘Gender and Class: Women in Indian Industry, 1890–1990’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 1 (2008), pp. 75–116. Conversely, industries in which women predominated unionised only slowly: Neetha N., ‘Flexible Production, Feminisation and Disorganisation: Evidence from Tiruppur Knitwear Industry’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 37, no. 21 (May 2002), pp. 2045–52; and Velayutham Saravanan, ‘Women’s Employment and Reduction of Child Labour: Beedi Workers in Rural Tamil Nadu’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 37, no. 52 (Dec. 2002), pp. 5205–14.

9. Samita Sen, ‘Gender and Class’. In Kerala, despite a history of radical trade unionism, there was a process of ‘effeminisation’ in the cashew industry that defanged women’s militancy: Anna Lindberg, Experience and Identity: A Historical Account of Class, Caste and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930–2000 (Lund: Lund University, 2001); also see S. Uma Devi, ‘The World of Women’s Work’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 37, no. 16 (April 2002), pp. 1513–5.

10. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Political Women: An Overview of Modern Indian Developments’, in Bharati Ray (ed.), Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), pp. 541–63.

11. Forbes, ‘Goddesses or Rebels?’

12. Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, ‘Death and Desire in Times of Revolution’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 48, no. 37 (2013), pp. 59–68; and Loomba, Revolutionary Desires.

13. Durba Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s’, in Gender and History, Vol. 25, no. 2 (2013), pp. 355–75.

14. Bhaswati Chakrabarti, ‘The Second Social Reform Movement: Gender and Society in Bengal, 1930s–1950s’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, Calcutta University, Kolkata, India, 2016.

15. Nirban Basu, ‘Outside Leadership, Political Rivalries and Labour Mobilisation: A Study in the Jute Belt of Bengal, 1919–39’, in Arjan de Haan and Samita Sen (eds), A Case for Labour History: The Jute Industry in Eastern India (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1999).

16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

17. R.S. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Subho Basu, Does Class Matter? Colonial Capital and Workers’ Resistance in Bengal, 1890–1937 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).

18. Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India, chap. 6.

19. Marian van der Klein et al. (eds), Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012).

20. Gail Minault, The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Delhi: Chanakya Publication, 1981).

21. There is some difficulty with names in this paper. Some of the women used ‘Devi’, which is a generic upper-caste honorific rather than a family name. The one Muslim woman leader discussed used ‘Begum’, which had similar resonance. Some of the later women did use family names but there is an additional problem with change of family name after marriage. Given all this confusion, I have sometimes used first (given) names without honorific or used family names for uniformity and readability. This is not a mistake; no disrespect is intended.

22. Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India.

23. Manju Chattopadhyay, Sramiknetri Santoshkumari (Calcutta: Manisha, 1984); also see Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘The Pioneering Women Labour Leaders of Bengal (1920–47): Some Observations’, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 52 (1991), pp. 744–9; and Nirban Basu, ‘Women in the Trade Union Movement in Bengal 1921–47’, in Revolt Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2 (1985), pp. 67–80. For a more detailed account of Prabhavati Dasgupta’s activities and the scavengers’ strike, as well as the role of caste, see Tanika Sarkar, ‘Making and Remaking Caste and Labour: Calcutta Municipal Methars and Their Strikes in 1928’, in Anuradha Roy and Melitta Waligora (eds), Kolkata in Space, Time, and Imagination (New Delhi: Primus Book, 2019), pp. 185–214.

24. Bakar Ali Mirza joined the Congress and became a member of parliament (MP) twice. Nothing much is known about their married life, but in a recent article, there has been some exploration of Mirza’s relationship with Agnes Smedley and their experimentations with sexology. There was considerable conversation between these new social-sexual experiments and communism: see Veronika Fuechtner, ‘Agnes Smedley between Berlin, Bombay and Beijing: Sexology, Communism and National Independence’, in Veronika Fuechtner et al. (eds), A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), pp. 398–421.

25. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Kolkata-e Dhangar Dharmaghat Ebong Prabhavati Dasgupta O Sakina Baegam’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 2 (1987), pp. 305–8; also see Anandabazar Patrika (27 Aug.–6 Sept. 1940).

26. I found Bimal Pratibha in the late 1980s in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) Archives, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata. IB Archives, DIG, CID IB 271 of 1921. There have since been two essays in Bangla: Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Bimal Pratibha Devi’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 13 (1999), pp. 574–78; and Sandip Bandopadhyay, ‘Bidrohi Nari Bimal Pratibha Devi’, 11th Shahid Pritilata Waddedar Memorial Lecture, 2009, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University (Kolkata: Dey’s Publication, 2010).

27. Bandopadhyay, ‘Bidrohi Nari Bimal Pratibha Devi’.

28. DIG, CID, IB, 727 of 1930.

29. Bandopadhyay, ‘Bidrohi Nari Bimal Pratibha Devi’.

30. Robin Sen, Panch Adhyay (Kolkata: National Book Agency, 1988 [Bangabda 1395]). Founded by Kamalesh Bandopadhyay of the Jugantar group, the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India was a small anti-Stalinist, pro-Trotskyist party.

31. Bandopadhyay, ‘Bidrohi Nari Bimal Pratibha Devi’. Bimal Pratibha’s eclectic political career is reminiscent of Satyavati Devi, and we need more research to understand the significance of this phenomenon: Swati Chaudhuri, ‘“My Only Wish Is India’s Freedom”: History Sheet of Satyavati Devi’, in Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 5, no. 2 (1998), pp. 243–51.

32. Sonali Satpathi, ‘Mobilizing Women: The Experience of the Left in West Bengal, 1947–1964’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Calcutta University, Kolkata, India, 2013, chap. 6.

33. Ibid.

34. Sushanta Banik, ‘Keu Mone Rakhe ni Asansol-er Hunterwali ke (No One Has Remembered the Hunterwali of Asansol)’, Anandabazar Patrika, Rabibasariya (30 Aug. 2020). Banik has recounted some local memories.

35. In 1958, the novel was reprinted with a Preface by Sourendra Mohan Mukhopadhyay: Bimal Pratibha Devi, Natun Diner Alo (Kolkata: Sishir Publishing House, 1958 [Bangabda1365]); and Bimal Pratibha Devi, Aguner Phulki (Kolkata: Haradhan Chattopadhyay, 1948). There may be another novel, but it has not been traced. The heroine of a trilogy, Tridiba, by Haldar was supposedly inspired by Bimal Pratibha: Gopal Haldar, Tridiba, Rachanasamagra 1 (Kolkata: A. Mukherjee, 1956); and Subrata Roychoudhury, Gopal Haldar: Prasanga Tridiba (Kolkata: Ainatak Publishers 1997).

36. Bimal Pratibha Devi, Natun Diner Alo, pp. 189–90, translation mine.

37. Bimal Pratibha Devi, Aguner Phulki, p. 295, translation mine.

38. Bimal Pratibha Devi, Natun Diner Alo, p. 211, translation mine.

39. These two novels were widely read by revolutionaries, and Pather Dabi enjoyed something of a cult status: Tanika Sarkar, ‘Bengali Middle Class Nationalism and Literature: A Study of Saratchandra’s “Pather Dabi” and Rabindranath’s “Char Adhyay”’, in D.N. Panigrahi (ed.), Economy, Society, and Politics in Modern India (Delhi: Vikas, 1985), pp. 449–60. Other novels of the time also depicted such relationships. For more discussion of these novels and Dada Kamred (1941) by Yashpal, see Loomba, Revolutionary Desires.

40. The recent newspaper article cited earlier makes the same point: Banik, ‘Keu Mone Rakhe ni Asansol-er Hunterwali ke’.

41. Chattopadhyay, ‘Bimal Pratibha Devi’.

42. Loomba, Revolutionary Desires.

43. Bandopadhyay, ‘Bidrohi Nari Bimal Pratibha Devi’, p. 18, translation mine.

44. Ibid.

45. Manikuntala Sen, Sediner Katha (1982), in Janajagarane Narijagarane (Kolkata: Thema, 2010), p. 180.

46. Ibid., pp. 142–4.

47. Ibid., p. 232. As mentioned earlier, we also know this from the accounts of other women in the CPI: Soma Marik, ‘Breaking through a Double Invisibility: The Communist Women of Bengal’, in Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 45, no. 1 (2013), pp. 79–118.

48. Manikuntala Sen, Sediner Katha, p. 209.

49. Jolly Mohan Kaul, In Search of a Better World: Memoirs (Kolkata: Samya, 2009).

50. Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s’.

51. A great deal of writing on Bina Das focuses on the shooting and her confession. Her later political career has not had as much attention: Forbes, ‘Goddesses or Rebels?’; Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s’; Loomba, Revolutionary Desires; and Uttara Chakrabarty, ‘The Rattling Chains: Bina Das, A Woman in Revolution’, 10th Shahid Pritilata Waddedar Memorial Lecture, 2008, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 2017.

52. I have drawn heavily on Bina Das’ memoirs notwithstanding the arguments made in Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes’: Bina Das, Shrinkhal Jhankar (Calcutta: Jayasree Prakashan, 1996 [Bangabda 1402]); also see Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Biplabi Bina Das: Ekti Anya Charitra’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 5 (1990), pp. 420–5.

53. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Bandar Sramik Dharmaghat (1934) O Communist Netri Sudha Roy’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 3 (1988), pp. 413–7; also see Jyotirmoy Nandy, ‘Je Sudha Royke Jantam’, in Kalantar (8 July 1987); and Kamal Sarkar, ‘Comrade Sudha Roy’, in Shramik Andolan (Aug. 1987).

54. Nirban Basu, personal communication; also see Marik, ‘Breaking through a Double Invisibility’.

55. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Dr. Maitreyee Bose: Eka Ebong Eka’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 10 (1995), pp. 575–80.

56. Maitreyee Bose, Muktir Adhikare (The Right to Freedom) (Kolkata, 1978).

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., translation mine.

59. Ibid.

60. Nirban Basu, ‘Phulrenu Guha: Biplabi Karmi theke Manabatabadi Netrite Uttaran’, 12th Shahid Pritilata Waddedar Memorial Lecture, 2010, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University (Kolkata: Dey’s Publication, 2010).

61. Ibid.

62. Padmini Sengupta, Women Workers of India (Calcutta: Asia Publishing House, 1960) [https://ia801900.us.archive.org/13/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.54370/2015.54370.Women-Workers-Of-India-1960.pdf, accessed 19 Aug. 2018].

63. J.S. Mathur and A.S. Mathur, Trade Union Movement in India (Allahabad: Chaitanya Publishing House, 1957), pp. 44–75; also see Basu, ‘Women in the Trade Union Movement in Bengal’.

64. Bauria Jute Mills retrenched fifteen women, and the dismissal of individual women such as Dukhi Devi, Parvati and Chanda was reported in various newspapers: see Swadhinata Patrika (15 May 1947); and Satpathi, ‘Mobilizing Women’, p. 219.

65. Fernandes, Producing Workers; and Samita Sen, ‘Gender and Class’.

66. Bela Devi, ‘Meyeder Katha’, in Swadhinata Patrika (4 July 1954), cited in Satpathi, ‘Mobilizing Women’.

67. ‘Didi’ means elder sister, and this is what she was called in the CPI. There is no record of a family name for her or her husband.

68. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Alambazarer Laraku Netri Dukhmat Didi’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 4 (1989), p. 385.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., cited from interviews of Dukhmat by Manju Chattopadhyay on 22 Aug. and 11 Sept. 1988, p. 390.

72. Loomba devotes Chapter 4 to these two women. Parvatibai Bhore was from the working class, and hers is the only known autobiography of its kind: Loomba, Revolutionary Desires.

73. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Sukumari Chowdhury and Bengal Lamp’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 17 (2003), p. 369.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., p. 372.

77. Ibid.

78. Manju Chattopadhyay, ‘Bangladeshe Sramik Andolone Pratham Mahila Sanghatakra’, in Itihas Anusandhan, Vol. 1 (1986), p. 190.

79. Chattopadhyay, ‘Dr. Maitreyee Bose’.

80. Satpathi, ‘Mobilizing Women’. The intense factionalism in Bengal’s trade unions has been explored by Nirban Basu in several of his publications: see, for example, Basu, ‘Outside Leadership, Political Rivalries and Labour Mobilisation’; and Nirban Basu, The Political Parties and the Labour Politics 1937–47 with Special Reference to Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1992).