S.V Rajadorai
(Translated from the original in Tamil)
Like the last few years, this year too ‘International Women’s Day’ was observed at various places in Tamil Nadu. As usual, non-governmental organizations organized several rallies and performances; A few independent non -party women’s organizations organized one or two in-depth seminars on women’s issues. Apart from most of the left- wing movements, the political, cultural movements and media in Tamil Nadu were full of patriarchal rhetoric, and Periyar’s ideas made a lasting contribution to women’s emancipation. The play ‘Aanmaiyo Anmai’, which depicts with emotion and sadness the suppression of rhetoric and pseudo-rationalism, was performed by the Chennai ‘Marapachi’ theatre group in Chennai and Madurai. People who cannot digest the criticism presented by this drama are saying , “These women talk too much ” . An article written by K. Veeramani group for the English website Countercurrents a few years ago was as if Periyar’s thoughts and contributions on women’s emancipation were of no importance. K. Veeramani, spoke on the platform of the Dravidar Kazhagam from the young age of eleven. The article, which included ‘rare historical titbits‘ such as Annadurai being hailed as the ‘Sage of the Dravidian Movement‘, did not contain a single line about Periyar’s views and activities for women’s emancipation (see: Periyar’s Movement, Countercurrent.org, 28 June 2003).
‘Dinamalar‘ and an electronic media like ‘Sun TV’ also celebrated Women’s Day. Like the ‘Varalakshmi Fast’, ‘All Women’s Day’ is celebrated as another festival in various colleges and schools; but as an expression of right-wing Hinduism and the conservative tendencies in the Tamil national movements, joining hands. The ‘old woman’ opposed to Bharati’s ‘new woman’ depicting, through dance and song, programs highlighting ‘femininity’.
Left wing movements, Periyar movements, Dalit movements and Tamil National Movements do not seem to have held any significant programs on this day. Even the faintest traces of the tradition of the self-respect movement, which had innumerable female thinkers like Annapurani, Nilavati, Jayasekari, Visalakshi, Sivakami, Krijadevi, are no more today even considered!. Even the claimants to the leftist tradition, who were the primary contributors to the celebration of a particular day across the world to raise the issue of women’s emancipation, do not organize an event that can have an impact on people’s minds.
Even so, many women in the Indian leftist tradition have made a significant contribution to the overall social, political, economic and cultural emancipation, including women’s emancipation and led many a heroic struggle. Yet revolutionary women have engaged in activities such as demolishing police barricades. An example is Pritilatha Vadatta, who led a group of armed women to storm the hilltop house of a British army officer in Chittagong and seize weapons from an armoury, and was seriously injured in a bomb explosion. Arrested by the British, she took cyanide to escape torture. Kalpana, who was arrested with her and sentenced to life imprisonment, later associated herself with the Communist Movement. The immense sacrifice and bravery of Pritilata and Kalpana gave great impetus to the freedom struggle of the Indian people. The Hindustan Republican Army formed by Bhagat Singh and Chandrasekhar Azad also had many women. For example in Delhi, seventeen-year-old Rupvati Jain took charge of making a bomb. A young woman, Durga Devi, who played the wife, was shot dead by a British police officer in Bombay. There were also many women in Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. A regiment, commanded by Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, who passed away a few years ago, was named after the Jhansi Rani.
A demand for two-thirds of the crop to be given to the tiller (Tebhaga movement) farmers’ struggle in Bengal led by the Communists large number of women participated in the protest and gave their support. A large number of women also participated and played an important role in the heroic Telangana revolutionary struggle of 1946-51. In the Telangana movement, the number of women who participated in the armed groups was very low because the Communist Party leadership that led the movement thought that women should be protected and that their participation in the armed groups would bring great harm to them. However, many women were at the forefront of the struggle. Around a hundred women were brutally raped and killed. A revolutionary fighter named Lachamma, was stripped naked, and tied to a tree and brutally tortured. They led a hunger strike in the prison under the leadership of a revolutionary named Rambayamma against the prison atrocities. In both the above-mentioned protests, they not only faced fierce oppression of the landlords and the police but also paternalistic social patriarchy from their associates.
Even in Tamil Nadu there were many women revolutionaries in the United Communist Party. Manyamma, Janaki Amma, Papa (Umanath), Coimbatore Stains Mill worker Rajamma were just some of them. There have also been militant women in the parliamentary communist parties. The women’s struggle in the wage hike in Kheel Venmani and the protest against the rape of tribal women by government officials in Wachathi was commendable. The Maithili Sivaraman trade union saw the Naxalites as revolutionary communists, in contrast to the official position and assessment of the CPM party. Her activities in the forefront of women’s organization and in the human rights field; her research articles on Tamil Nadu, Indian and international political conditions, her studies on casteism and barbarism cannot be ignored. We are amazed by the bravery shown by thousands of women in the ongoing protest demanding the closure of Kudankulam Anumin station (atomic power plant).
When the farmers’ struck work in Naxalbari in 1967, described as the spring thunder over India, many women participated in it. A large number of intellectuals too in the movement were women.
Women participated in a big way in the armed peasant revolution in the Chirikakulam region of Andhra Pradesh in the late 1960s led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Dr. Narayana, who participated in the Sirikakulam protest, was a gold medalist in medicine; after he and Panchadi Krishnamurthy were killed, he led the Panchadi Nirmala movement. In December 1969, she along with women militants Angamma, Saraswati and famous Andhra poet Subbarao Panigraki were arrested by the police and after gruesome torture they were shot dead as ‘Enakwunder’. 17 women were killed in the Chirikakulam protests that lasted until 1970; A thousand women were imprisoned; more than 3000 women were falsely accused.
After many setbacks, thousands of women joined the revolutionary communist movement again and again in Andhra Pradesh and later in central India like a ‘phoenix’. A third of the Maoist guerrilla army in central India is said to be women. In Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Orissa, Maharashtra, women belonging to the revolutionary movement are not only brutally oppressed, but also they are facing those oppressions with determination. Thousands of women gather even in the forest areas and celebrate ‘All World Women’s Day’ every year. As part of the struggle against imperialism, feudalism, capitalism, patriarchy, casteism and religious fundamentalism, they organize ‘International Women’s Day’ events.
It was decided in 1910 in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, that one day in March every year should be observed as ‘International Women’s Day’. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Working Women held there, one day in March was celebrated as Women’s Day in all countries of the world to celebrate the movement for women’s rights and to help all women get the right to vote. Clara Zetkin, a German Communist and Lenin’s comrade in arms, brought the resolution. The motivation for bringing that resolution was the struggles of working women in the United States. Her resolution was unanimously accepted and carried out by 100 delegates from 17 countries. However, no specific day was set as ‘International Women’s Day’.
According to the above resolution, the first International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19, 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and more than ten lakh women and men participated in the rallies in those countries. They also raised their demands that not only the right to vote but also the right to employment should be given to them, they should be given the right to learn the profession of their choice and discrimination in employment opportunities should be abolished. The reason why German women chose March 19th is because on the same day in 1848, the Prussian King, who condemned the armed uprising of the masses, announced that he was going to carry out various reform measures, including the right to vote for women. But none of it was fulfilled.
It was in 1913 that March 8 was decided as International Women’s Day. This day was chosen to commemorate and honour two events that took place many years ago. On March 8, 1857, women workers from garment and textile factories in New York City, United States, protested against the inhuman working conditions in the factories, 12- hour days, and extremely low wages. The police beat and kicked the protesting women workers and ordered them to disperse. Two years later, again in the same March, 15,000 women workers staged a rally demanding shorter working hours, higher wages, voting rights and the abolition of child labour. They created the slogan ‘Bread and Rose’ by combining ‘Bread’ which means economic security and ‘Rose’ which means improved lifestyle. In May of that year, the American Socialist Party decided to celebrate the last Sunday of February every year as National Women’s Day. . The first National Women’s Day in the United States was celebrated on February 28, 1909. Following suit, European women also began observing the last Sunday of February as Women’s Day. It was in this background that Clara Zetkin brought a resolution to celebrate a specific day every year as International Women’s Day at the Copenhagen Conference in 1910. But a week after March 25, which was celebrated as the first International Women’s Day in European countries in 1911, a fire in a knitting factory in the United States killed more than 140 female workers. The deadly incident forced the US government to make major changes to labor laws and to better observe International Women’s Day. It was the events that took place in America that made March 8 every year ‘International Women’s Day’.
In 1913, when European countries were preparing for World War I, Russian women celebrated the first International Women’s Day in their country on March 8. The following year, various European countries held rallies and demonstrations against the war and in support of oppressed women on March 8 and in the days that followed. The most famous of the subsequent ‘International Women’s Day’ events in Russia was the March 8, 1917 strike in St Petersburg led by Communist militants, Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollantai, for ‘Bread and Roses’. That strike, along with various other uprisings that broke out in the city from March 8–12, led to the February Revolution (the March days were counted as February days in Russia at the time) in which the Tsar abdicated the monarchy.
In the Soviet Union, March 8 was declared a national holiday to celebrate the heroic women workers. This, had a great impact on women around the world. The Chinese Revolution, which was completed in 1949, was the best proof that women could participate in a revolution even in a country with one of the most regressive feudal and patriarchal ideas in the world.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when democratic uprisings in Western capitalist countries and national liberation struggles intensified in Third World countries, women’s liberation movements became stronger. Various feminist thinkers in Europe and the United States presented in-depth studies and critiques of patriarchy, and patriarchal culture. As the women’s liberation movements had a huge impact worldwide, various attempts were made by imperialism and the ruling classes to counter them and steer them in a harmless direction. Women’s movements began to emerge to oppose socialist goals. In 1977, the UN officially declared March 8 as ‘International Women’s Day’, a major attempt to dilute the revolutionary aims of the women’s movement. From the media that commodifies women to Hinduism that sees women as protectors of Hindu purity and dignity, everyone is celebrating ‘International Women’s Day’ today with gusto.
However, there are many progressive, democratic, revolutionary feminists and women revolutionaries in India to restore the revolutionary content and goal of that day. Their struggle is united as a people with the tribal people who are seen as anti-national forces by the Indian ruling classes and who are considered by the exploiting classes as unwilling to come into the ‘stream of modern civilization’, who do not get even a cent of the publicity received by the corrupt politicians, media experts, pseudo-leftists, etc. who protect the interests of global capitalism, imperialism, Indian reactionary forces, etc. It is now necessary to remember an extraordinary woman fighter and thinker who imbibed character and instilled in them an international spirit for her part.
In 1939, China’s New Democratic Revolution was advancing in the form of a national liberation struggle against Japanese imperialist occupation. A united front was formed under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party to carry out the revolution. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China passed a resolution to add a large number of intellectuals to the anti-Japanese occupation war to organize tens of thousands of peasants, develop a revolutionary cultural movement, expand the revolutionary united front, and build a new China. The resolution drawn up by Mao
(Recruit Large Number of Intellectuals, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, First edition 1965, Second edition 1967, Vol II, pp 301-303) intellectuals in the Chinese revolutionary army, party branches, various organs of the government in the areas under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, etc. pointed out the reluctance and resistance to inclusion. the contrast between intellectuals in semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries and intellectuals in capitalist countries; the difference between intellectuals serving the landlords and capitalists and intellectuals serving the workers and peasants; considering the situation in which the Chinese bourgeoisie and Japanese imperialism were competing with the Chinese Communist Party to win intellectuals, Mao said that the Party, the military, government organs, cultural organizations, and mass organizations should include a large number of intellectuals. Other key points in the resolution drawn up by Mao were: that intellectuals should be recruited on the basis of qualifications determined by the Party; To develop working relationships with intellectuals who do not meet that qualification or who do not want to join the party and guide them to work with the party; enrolment of intelligentsia should be wary of enemy handlers, members of bourgeois parties, and non-party loyalists; those who have already entered the party, military, and government organizations should be weeded out on the basis of concrete evidence; truly loyal intellectuals should not be suspected; be careful about false accusations made by counter-revolutionaries against innocent people.
All intellectuals who are reasonably loyal and useful should be given suitable jobs, political education and guidance should be given to them so that they eventually overcome their weaknesses, revolutionize their world outlook, identify themselves with the masses, and unite with old party members, workers, party workers and peasants; Party workers from the labour and peasant classes in the Party must work hard to raise their cultural level; Workers and cultivators should become intellectuals and intellectuals should become workers and cultivators. Be very cautious about recruiting intellectuals in Japanese-occupied areas; at the same time, the Party must maintain appropriate contacts with non-Party intellectuals who support the Party and organize them in the great struggle against Japanese imperialism and for democracy, in the cultural movement and in building a united front.
What Mao said in 1939 is also applicable to the Indian context during the phase of the New Democratic Revolution. However, today’s conditions are quite different from those in China, India, and the world before the revolution, especially in the first half of the last century. For example, the following are some of the features of present day imperialist system: the changes in Russia (the Soviet Union), which saw the world’s first socialist revolution, and its collapse/reversal; capitalist restoration in China after Mao’s death; changes in the capitalist mode of production and distribution in the name of ‘neo-liberalism’; unprecedented unity among imperialist nations; dominance of finance capital in all walks of life; the oppressive apparatuses of the ruling classes having become sophisticated; the illusion created by the bourgeois state of democracy; the presence of revolutionary forces in the world and in India; the rise of religious fundamentalism; the growth of caste politics; the spread of pessimistic postmodern ideas that comprehensive social, political and economic change is impossible; advances in communication technology and the power of the media in shaping public opinion; etc etc.
Today’s Indian environment is full of these negative elements; and it is amidst this that the armed working people’s struggle search for signs of ‘green shoots’. They bravely face not only the deadly repressions of the central and state governments but also the slanders carried out with the help of the media. Those working people who know economic exploitation, caste and cultural oppression and patriarchy in their daily life experiences, are able to theoretically picture the imperialist-capitalist and feudal structures which is the basic source of various kinds of exploitation and oppression. While working with them to help them further develop their understanding and raise the level of consciousness, countless intellectuals have come forward to revolutionize their worldview and make themselves part of the laboring people who are the source of the material and spiritual wealth of mankind. The most extraordinary of such an intellectual was Anuradha Gandhi (Comrade Anu).
Born to a Gujarati mother and a Kannada father on March 28, 1954, Anuradha Shanbag, while studying at Elphinstone College in Mumbai in the early 1970s, began to apply the communist outlook she had received in her family environment to the world around her. She was an active participant in the Progressive Youth Movement; taking a degree and M.Phil in Sociology. After graduating, she married a young Communist, Kobat Gandhi for love while working as a talented college lecturer. . When Indira Gandhi’s emergency-era brutality highlighted the need for organizations to protect civil and democratic rights across the country, Anu played a key role in establishing the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights (CBDR) along with progressive intellectuals in Mumbai.
Accepting the call of the nascent revolutionary movement in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, she settled in Nagpur in 1982 to spread revolutionary ideas. While working as a lecturer in Nagpur University, she played a leading role in trade the union and Dalit movements of Vidarbha. She also organized women domestic workers to fight for their rights. Also 5000 construction workers working at the thermal power plant in Kaparkheda and led a militant struggle against the construction companies and the police department that stood in their way. Due to her revolutionary activities, she was sent to jail several times.
In 1983, Comrade Anu moved to Chandrapur district where she devoted her energies to organizing coal miners and construction workers, fighting for the rights of unorganized workers who were neglected by traditional trade unions. She established links with progressive trade union organizations in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. While working at Nagpur University, she lived in Indora, a sprawling Dalit basti, she studied Ambedkar’s works in a Marxist light. Participating in countless Dalit events, she became the Maoist face of the Dalit movement. Her best contribution was to provide the philosophical basis for examining casteism, untouchability and oppression of Dalits from a Marxist perspective; taking the example of Maharashtra, the birthplace of anti-caste fighters such as Jotiba Phule and Dr. Ambedkar, and linking the anti-caste struggle with the new democratic revolution.
In the late 1990s, at the invitation of the revolutionary movement, she went to Bastar in the state of Chhattisgarh and lived with the tribal people for three years. In order to help the tribal people of Dandakaranya know their history, she studied all the doctoral dissertations written on the tribal people of Dandakaranya – particularly the Gonds. During those three years, which she considered to be the most fulfilling of his life, she lived the life of the tribal people – Gond tribes, and specifically their struggles, built in the most difficult situation. She also studied the experience of women, their revolutionary organization, women fighters in guerilla groups very keenly.
In 1997, when the brutal famine hit the Bastar region, she witnessed the mass death of tribal people and herself suffered from malaria several times while working shoulder to shoulder with the guerrilla groups of the revolutionary movement who seized food from hoarders and distributed it to the poor people. Her comrades-in-arms and the oppressed people leading the struggle, would always say that there was never a moment when she did not have a smile on her face, in spite of all the physical hardships.
When the state repressive machinery sent its paramilitry forces to encircle the Bastar region and crush the revolutionary movement, she worked side by side with the revolutionary forces without the slightest fear. During a firefight between the revolutionaries and the paramilitary forces, she once narrowly escaped with her life, bullets raining around her in all directions. To be with the masses in twentieth-century rural India, she would say, meant being ready to face state oppression at any moment, just like them.
In Bastar, she was stationed in Byramgad, an area where the Salwa Judum mercenary forces continued to hold gruesome raids. There she was also attacked by malaria several times. She was protected by the tender care of tribal women. During that period, she conducted Marxist classes for tribal people. There were classes on women’s health issues, oppression of women, new democratic revolution. She taught them – especially the tribal women who came to lead the revolutionary movement – common sense (logical thinking) and Marxism. She also wrote many pamphlets and articles for the revolutionary movement in that area. She was a founding member of the People’s Committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in Maharashtra and was elected as a member of the Central Committee of the Maoist Party in the 9th Congress. During the period when the revolutionary movement gave her the responsibility of the West Bastar region, she was involved in the study of the problems faced by women in the revolutionary movement. She focused her attention on its various forms on how it manifested in the organisation. It was then that her life suddenly ended by falciparum malaria, a disease that crippled her internal organs. The comrades who wanted to protect her and continue her contribution to the freedom struggle of the Indian people admitted her to a hospital regardless of the cruel surveillance of the government. Death gripped the face of Comrade Anu on April 12, 2008, whose smile did not change in spite of severe pain.
The International communist movement has produced revolutionary women thinkers and leaders such as Comrade Anu, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollantai, who exemplified the dialectical relationship between the revolutionary intelligentsia and the oppressed working people – the working people must become intellectuals and the intellectuals the working people. Philosophy & Practice – Comrade Anu belongs to the legacy of those revolutionary women fighters who combined both.
I have had the opportunity to meet and interact with Comrade Anu a couple of times. The first meeting was in 1981. During the 1980s when MGR ruled Tamil Nadu, many communist revolutionaries were illegally shot dead by the police in the name of ‘encounters’, hundreds of people were arrested in the name of Naxalite supporters, and many human rights activists and intellectuals were taken to trial, and the media seemed to ignore the repressions in Tamil Nadu. I was sent to Bombay and Delhi to make arrangements for setting up an all-India fact-finding committee to inform the world and take legal action. A Bombay friend, who was closely associated with the ‘Pragnaya’ pamphlet, took me to Comrade Anu’s house. Then we got acquainted. Legendary playwright and director Vijay Tendulkar was then the president of the CPDR. Madhav Sathe, a Lohia socialist, was its spokesman. He was imprisoned for nineteen months during the ‘Emergency’. When we went to Comrade Anu’s house (a small one-bedroom flat), Kobad cooked the food. We had ‘Dal’ (which he called), i.e. lentil broth, was served with rice. It was less salty and spicy. Later, on their advice, met Bernard de Mello, who was then working at the ‘Times of India’ and later deputy-editor of ‘Economic and Political Weekly’, Olga Tellis, another important journalist concerned with human rights, Rajni X Desai from another human rights movement, and left for Delhi. I went set up the ‘truth team’ that visited Tamil Nadu. This included Mohanram (Mohanram was a communist sympathizer; associated with Telangana militants like Nagi Reddy) and Claude Alwares, then India’s most prominent journalists. Anu was not included in that fact-finding group. Neelam Raheja from CPDR, Jyoti Punwani and Professor Sudesh Vaid from Delhi were instrumental in getting placed in that group. Till 1984 I met Anu only once again. So many changes in our lives. I came to know that she and Kobad went to Nagpur in the 1980s. But I couldn’t believe it when my friends told me later that both of them were active workers of the Marxist-Leninist movement. Both of them were so humble. Unafraid of sacrifice or temptation, they could respect those who held alternative views – so long as those views do not serve the ruling classes; those who want to win them over to their position through logical argument; those who don’t mince words – these are my impressions of them.
A collection of Comrade Anu’s essays corroborating these sentiments was published posthumously. Released in Delhi by a former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court, AP Shah. Articles giving importance to caste abolition and women’s emancipation are a major part of this book. Ambedkar, Periyar, Phule and western feminists have digested the ideas of Dalit emancipation, caste abolition and women’s emancipation, absorbed the creative elements in them, and transcended them through Marxist philosophy. Philosophical articles to help navigate the site; historical essays documenting her experiences as a field fighter; writings that express a strong fascination with the Maoist movement – writings that demonstrate how a delicate, petite woman, always with a hint of a tinged smile, was a threat to one of the most powerful state apparatuses in the world.
Speaking at the launch of this collection of essays in Mumbai, Arundhati Roy described Comrade Anu as a ‘romantic communist’. Indeed, from Marx to Mao, from Lenin to Che, from Rosa to Anu, all true communists were ‘romantics’; It is those who see the dream and vision of an ideal world; Without these dreams they could not have been revolutionaries.
