Bangladesh’s Left is still waiting for the Calcutta train
There was a time when a Bangladeshi teen could read Kalbela and emerge from his bedroom vaguely disappointed that nobody had yet invited him to overthrow the state.
Samaresh Majumdar was particularly good at this. His Animesh trilogy — Uttaradhikar, Kalbela and Kalpurush — gave the Naxalite years of West Bengal a potent set of weather, romance, cigarettes, tortured young men, courageous women and the glamour of doomed conviction. Animesh could have simply acquired a respectable job and worried about provident funds. Instead he discovered revolution. Generations of Bengali readers on both sides of the borders were grateful.
Samaresh was enormously popular on both sides of Bengal. His political novels followed young Animesh from the tea gardens of the Dooars into Calcutta, as well as to Dhaka. Kalbela won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1984. In Bangladesh, as in West Bengal, the books became part of the furniture of middle-class adolescence.
But literature occasionally crosses borders more efficiently than political ideas should.
Bangladesh spent much of the late twentieth century consuming a particular Bengali conception of the Left that had been manufactured and eventually fossilised in Calcutta. The curious result is that a country born from one of South Asia’s great nationalist uprisings developed an intelligentsia that often preferred to explain itself using the political vocabulary of the neighbouring Bengal.
This was a bit peculiar because Bangladesh was not born in a Marxist revolution.
The movement that produced Bangladesh was an enormous Bengali nationalist coalition. The Awami League certainly incorporated socialism into its programme — its 1970 manifesto combined the Six Points and elements of the Eleven Points, and the constitution of 1972 famously installed nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism as state principles. But “socialism” in the constitutional settlement was capacious enough to mean social justice rather than proletarian dictatorship. The Liberation War Museum itself describes the constitutional idea in essentially those terms.
The actual social coalition behind independence was even messier.
East Pakistan was overwhelmingly rural and Muslim. Peasants, small traders, teachers, clerks, students, professionals, landowners, workers and an emerging Bengali bourgeoisie could all recognise themselves in the nationalist complaint against West Pakistan. The genius of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was precisely that he did not demand ideological entrance examinations from them. One did not have to finish Das Kapital before supporting the Six Points.
The Awami League succeeded because Bengali nationalism was wide enough to accommodate a peasant who wanted a fair rice price, a small businessman irritated by West Pakistani economic domination, a student quoting Marx, a civil servant wanting political representation and fair promotion and a devout Muslim who nevertheless thought Islamabad had no business deciding how Bengalis should live and practice Islam.
That is, in all good senses, nationalism. It is untidy. Marxists generally prefer diagrams.
The great divide
The communist movement itself was already busy proving its talent for division. Bangladesh’s Left inherited the Sino-Soviet quarrel with almost comic enthusiasm. The Communist Party split between Moscow and Peking orientations, producing sharply different attitudes towards the Liberation War.
The pro-Moscow current supported independence and worked alongside the Awami League; sections of the pro-Beijing Left regarded Bengali nationalism with suspicion, although Siraj Sikder’s movement developed its own distinctly East Bengali revolutionary nationalism and fought Pakistani forces.
Siraj Sikder is particularly inconvenient for anyone attempting to turn Bangladesh’s history into a simple left-versus-right morality play.
His East Bengal Workers Movement was arguing as early as 1968 that East Bengal was effectively being colonised by Pakistan and that national liberation had to take priority. His followers later organised armed resistance in the guava-growing region around Jhalokathi. After independence, however, Sikder concluded that liberation had merely replaced one oppressive arrangement with another. His Sarbahara Party turned its guns towards the Bangladeshi state.
The state returned the compliment.
The mythology surrounding Sheikh Mujib sometimes obscures how extraordinarily violent the first years of Bangladesh became. His government called itself socialist, nationalised much of the economy and eventually created BAKSAL, but attaching the word “socialist” to an institution no more settles its character than calling North Korea democratic makes it Denmark.
Post-war Bangladesh instead produced something recognisably South Asian. Party patronage, administrators of nationalised industries, smugglers, contractors, politically connected beneficiaries and an increasingly coercive state. One account describes the nationalised sector producing a new high-income elite of politically connected administrators rather than workers’ control.
Then there was the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini.
Created in 1972, it became notorious for repression of armed and unarmed opponents, particularly on the radical Left. The early 1970s consequently offer an awkward spectacle for anyone insisting that the Mujib government represented a socialism confronting reaction. Much of the bloodshed involved a government proclaiming socialism while hunting actual communists.
Siraj Sikder was arrested at the beginning of January 1975 and died in police custody shortly afterwards. His death became one of the foundational controversies surrounding extrajudicial killing in independent Bangladesh.
The revolutionary Left was hardly composed of harmless book-club members either. Sarbahara and other Maoist formations practised armed struggle, attacked police stations and banks and carried out what they called the “annihilation” of class enemies. The romantic vocabulary of revolution could conceal a remarkably straightforward activity…killing people.
This is where Calcutta enters the story.
The Calcutta factor
Not, to be precise, because West Bengal had a communist government in 1971. It did not. The CPI(M)-led Left Front would only take power in 1977. But Calcutta was already the great Bengali factory of Marxist intellectual culture. Naxalbari had erupted in 1967. Presidency College and Calcutta University had become political laboratories. Charu Majumdar, student radicals, communist factions, little magazines, coffee-house debates and revolutionary literature supplied an entire aesthetic of rebellion.
During the Liberation War, enormous numbers of Bangladeshis crossed into India. Political leaders, writers, artists, academics and journalists spent crucial months in West Bengal. Independent Bangladesh therefore emerged not merely next door to Calcutta but in intense cultural conversation with it.
And after 1977 the relationship acquired an asymmetry.
The Left Front ruled West Bengal continuously for 34 years. Jyoti Basu alone served as chief minister for 23. Over time the CPI(M) became an ecosystem of unions, universities, teachers, cultural organisations, publishers, theatres, newspapers, intellectual circles and the ubiquitous Bengali gentleman carrying a jhola and possessing firm opinions about American imperialism.
Critics of the Left Front have described precisely this institutional capture: universities and cultural bodies increasingly divided between aamader lok — our people — and everybody else. Intellectual conformity became one of the less charming consequences of prolonged political success.
Bangladesh imported much of the aesthetic without ever acquiring the political machinery. Thus appeared a fascinating creature…the Bangladeshi salon Marxist.
He might own property, employ servants, send his children to expensive English-medium or top Bangla-medium schools and regard an American graduate scholarship as approximately equivalent to receiving the Nobel Prize. Yet at a seminar in Dhaka he could explain, without detectable embarrassment, the evils of bourgeois accumulation.
Calcutta supplied the accessories: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Gramsci later on, a little Che Guevara, Desh magazine, College Street, coffee-house melancholy and the conviction that being culturally sophisticated required being somewhat left-wing.
Samaresh supplied the romance.
His Animesh entered Naxalite politics in fiction just as the real movement was becoming history in West Bengal. In Bangladesh, however, armed Maoism survived far longer. The Sarbahara Party, Purba Banglar Communist Party and numerous factions and splinters remained active particularly in western and southwestern districts. Young men continued disappearing underground long after Calcutta’s revolutionary students had discovered professions.
So we read Kalbela rather differently.
For a reader in Calcutta, Animesh increasingly belonged to memory. For a reader in Bangladesh’s Kushtia, Jashore, Rajshahi, Pabna or Khulna during parts of the 1980s and 1990s, people resembling Animesh — considerably less romantic ones — could still exist a few villages away.
That distinction mattered.
The change of colors
We remembered the idealism and forgot the corpses.
The underground Maoist organisations of Bangladesh could be ferociously violent. Factional killings, assassinations, extortion and the elimination of supposed class enemies became part of the landscape in several districts. Yet educated Bengali culture retained a sentimental weakness for the revolutionary. A young man carrying a rifle for Marx somehow seemed intellectually superior to a young man carrying one for money.
This was an aesthetic judgement essentially masquerading as politics.
By the 1990s the absurdity was becoming difficult to sustain. Bangladesh was changing at extraordinary speed. Garment factories expanded and migration transformed village economies. NGOs arrived everywhere. Satellite television appeared. Private universities multiplied. Mobile phones followed. Young Bangladeshis became interested in business, computing, migration and consumer goods.
The revolutionary was defeated by the shopping malls and gadgets.
Meanwhile West Bengal’s Left was undergoing its own transformation from revolution into administration. The party that once promised class struggle became the party of Writers’ Building and electoral management. Critics described the CPI(M) of the 1980s onwards as increasingly indistinguishable from the state itself…a once-organic movement becoming a vote-producing machine.
Eventually history produced one of its better jokes. Bangladesh’s intellectual Left continued looking culturally towards West Bengal at precisely the moment West Bengal itself was getting tired of the Left.
The Left Front collapsed electorally in 2011. Yet in Dhaka, the old vocabulary survived.
This helps explain one of the strangest characteristics of Bangladeshi progressive discourse: its extraordinary capacity to analyse a country that no longer exists.
The peasant has changed. Agriculture has mechanised. Millions work in garments and services. Women entered the workforce on a historic scale. Remittances created new rural classes. Islamic movements developed sophisticated welfare and organisational networks. A huge informal economy expanded. Digital capitalism appeared. Even veteran communist Haider Akbar Khan Rono acknowledged that the agricultural system had changed so substantially that the old model of peasant mobilisation required rethinking.
But portions of the ‘intellectual’ Left continued discussing Bangladesh as though a zamindar might arrive at any moment demanding rent. This failure was costly.
Where organised leftists withdrew into increasingly tiny parties and theoretical quarrels, Islamists learned how to organise. They built student organisations, charities, mosques, professional networks and grassroots structures. One veteran communist put the outcome as such that the bourgeoisie did not replace the Left; fundamentalists did.
The Left’s response has often been to conclude that the people are wrong. This is rarely a successful electoral strategy.
Divorcing a nostalgic past
Even today, thoughtful Bangladeshi left-wing thinkers concede that organised parties are fragmented and weak while arguing that concerns traditionally associated with the Left — inequality, labour rights, environmental protection and restraints on concentrated capital — remain highly relevant.
They are right. Bangladesh desperately needs a serious Left.
A country of garment workers, migrant labourers, indebted households, polluted rivers, politically connected oligarchs and spectacular urban inequality should provide more than enough raw material for one. There is no shortage of class politics here.
What Bangladesh does not particularly need is a Bengali Marxist heritage society. The Left can matter again only when it stops treating Calcutta as its intellectual Vatican.
Bangladesh’s history is sufficiently rich to generate its own radical tradition…Bhashani’s peasant populism, the language movement, the Six Points, the mass uprising of 1969, labour struggles, Siraj Sikder’s contradictory revolutionary nationalism, the extraordinary social transformation produced by garments and migration, and repeated popular rebellions against authoritarian rule.
None fits neatly inside the old Calcutta template. That should be liberating.
Samaresh Majumdar died in 2023. By then the world that created Animesh had disappeared long ago. His novels remain wonderful precisely because literature need not provide a programme for government. Kalbela can still make revolution feel intoxicating. That is what novels are allowed to do.
Politics has fewer excuses.
Those of us who grew up reading Samaresh perhaps owe him both gratitude and a small complaint. He sold us beautiful idealism, and in eastern Bengal we bought industrial quantities of it.
For a while many bright young Bangladeshis secretly imagined becoming revolutionaries. Then came multinational jobs, foreign scholarships, apartments, air-conditioning and American visas. History staged the counter-revolution without bothering to convene a central committee.
The red flag gradually migrated from the barricade to the bookshelf. Perhaps that is where it belongs.
Bangladesh’s Left, if it wants a future, must finally perform the most revolutionary act available to it…stop imitating somebody else’s past.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa