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Occupy College Street: Student Radicalism in Kolkata in the Sixties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2019
Abstract
1968 saw a wave of protests and student radicalism in India, some of the tactics and issues of which were reminiscent of those in Europe and North America. The anti-imperialist theme was similarly strident, and the student and youth movement posed serious challenges to the old established Left, sharing traits of a global New Left agenda. The upsurge of post-independence radicalism in India, however, drew on different historical legacies, and exhibited many specific features, all of which culminated in the student and youth upsurge of 1968–69. In order to demonstrate the complex history and legacy of 60s radicalism in India, this essay takes us back to the sixties in Kolkata when the insurgent movement in West Bengal had developed the tactic of occupation, which helped the movement crystallize and caused, ironically, the undoing of the mobilization in the end. Occupy as a tactic thus has a history, and the radicals of today perhaps in their enthusiasm for the New Left ethos have ignored the history of the insurgent tactics of the past, especially tactics developed in the postcolonial context.
- Type
- Critical Discussion Forum: 1968
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019
References
1. The Naxalite movement was perhaps the most significant social movement since Independence. The popular revolt erupted in 1967 and continued until 1972. Influenced by Maoism, the Naxalites were equally critical of US imperialism, Soviet-style communism, the local system of landownership, and the established Indian Left.
2. On the origin of gherao movement in India, see Dasgupta, Sugata, Bhattacharjee, Ronen K., and Singh, Surendra Vikram, The Great Gherao of 1969: A Case Study of Campus Violence and Protest Methods (New Delhi, 1974), 3n1Google Scholar; Dasgupta and others also bring to light the contribution of Ram Manohar Lohia in inventing the form, “ghera dalo” in the wake of the anti-famine agitation in Palamau, Bihar, in 1958, 4n2.
3. For details of these prison revolts and killings of prisoners, see Ebong Jalarka, special issue on Jail Bidroha 14, no. 3–4 (October 2011–March 2012).
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8. Some of accounts on that time tell us of the spirit of dialogues among the radical activists. Besides the three volumes of Sattar Dashak, edited by Anil Acharya (reprint, Kolkata, 2012), (in particular, in Volume III, Dipananjan Ray Chaudhury, “Chatro-Andolon O Presidency College,” 131–58, and Kaushik Bandopadhyay, “Shat Dashaker Chatro Andolon Proshonge,” 201–28), see also Mukherjee, Aloke, “Shat Sattar Dashaker Sandhikkhane B.E. Colleger Chatra Andolan: Kichu Katha,” Ebong Jalarka 17, no. 1–2 (April 2014–September 2014): 194–214Google Scholar; Kaushik Banerjee, “Katachenrai Barbar: Naxalbari, Charu Mazumder,” Parts I and II, Ebong Jalarka 16, no. 3–4 (October 2013–March 2014): 219–44; and Ebong Jalarka 17, no. 1–2 (April 2014–September 2014): 250–84.
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12. Fifty years later, in 2017, when the government of West Bengal proposed banning protests and processions on College Street on the ground that these hampered the day to day academic functioning of the colleges and the university there, many of the participants of the unrest in 1967 recalled the days of that tumultuous time. One erstwhile student leader said explicitly that those were the days of “Occupy.” From burning trams in protest of rising tram fare to resisting police onslaughts against a students’ strike, to erecting a barricade with hundreds of blackboards pulled down from the university, to jamming College Street with the demand to release political prisoners, to preventing Robert McNamara from arriving in the Governor’s House by road—these were, they said, acts of occupation. See the report, “Boma-Barud-Pratibader Itihas College Streeter,” Ei Shomoy, June 5, 2017, 3.