Communist Prints. Sidenotes to the Asian Women’s Conference of 1949.

The paper caught my attention. The pictures slipped into my fingers from the archive file. The paper was fine and strong, with a subtle texture and sheen. It felt as if it were made of silk.

Three of the brightly colored woodblock prints shared the same paper. All featured peasant women reveling in the benefits of communism. The images suffered from mild water damage. This blurred the writing and spread a pink wash of watercolor paint over parts of the image. The stories they tell, however, are undimmed.

One woodcut depicts the gains of communist land reform and women’s new rights to property. Another portrays a literacy class for women and children run by a communist party cadre. A third woodcut shows rural women and men voting in elections. All of these pictures celebrate the work and dreams of rural women. All portray the dynamic physicality of peasant women taking hold of their future.

Hand-written translation at the back of the print:

“We have our land certificates – we must increase production. Better days are coming!”

**

These woodcuts were exhibited in December 1949 at the Asian Women’s Conference, held in Beijing - only two months after the victory of the Chinese Revolution and the formation of the People’s Republic of China.

The All-China Democratic Women’s Federation (later known as All China Women’s Federation) and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) hosted the conference. 199 delegates came to Beijing from twenty three countries. Asian delegates attended from fourteen countries, and foreign guests from the remaining nine countries.

One of those foreign guests was the American communist Betty Millard (1911-2010). Millard worked for WIDF in Paris between 1946 and 1950. She went to the conference as part of her work at WIDF.

In her diary notes, Millard writes about the incredible art exhibit that she saw and of meeting Yen Chien of the National Art Academy. Millard procured several of the woodcuts. That is how I chanced upon them in her collection, which is in the Sophia Smith Archives in Smith College (USA).

The woodcuts are part of the revolutionary Yan’an print movement developed under the leadership of Lu Xun during the 1930s and shaped by Jiang Feng in the 1940s. The revolutionary artists of the Yan’an print movement sought to transform a rural art form, woodblock prints, and the popular nianhua or lunar New Year’s drawings for two new purposes. The first purpose was to lift the spirits of the soldiers who were then fighting in the northern Shaanxi Province. The Lu Xun Arts Academy (formed in 1942) created a troupe to bring their artworks and plays to the troops. The second purpose was to counteract the development of pro-Japanese propaganda. The Japanese formed ‘Pacification Teams’ that used Chinese folktales and rural art forms (particularly woodblock prints) to make art in support of the Japanese occupation of China.

The Lu Xun Academy Woodcut Troupe experimented with black-and-white forms and more subtle uses of tones through chiaroscuro, to create a popularized artistic mode for pro Communist propaganda in the struggle against Japanese occupation. The use of bright colors in woodcuts developed in the 1940s to appeal to rural audiences. 

The Yan’an print movement for a national form of proletarian art gained momentum after Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ in 1942. Mao noted that ‘the thoughts and emotions of our workers in literature and art should become one with the thoughts and emotions of the great masses of workers, peasants and soldiers’. Mao’s message supported revolutionary artists’ experiments. For instance, Chen Bo’er, a revolutionary film director dedicated to communism and women’s liberation, developed an artistic practice in Yan’an so that 90 per cent of her actors came from the working-class and the peasantry. She gave them the power to change lines or scenes to better represent their life experience. Wang Zheng, the author of Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964, contextualizes Mao’s remarks,

The Yan’an Talks were by no means a monologue singularly produced in the great leader’s mind for the purpose of controlling Party members and harnessing artists’ creativity, but rather Mao’s theorizing of Communist cultural producers’ innovative practices. He cogently articulated a vision of cultural revolution that had long been shared among revolutionary artists such as Chen Bo’er.

Another print Millard brought to the United States was by a woman artist, Feng Shin, from Guangzhou in South China. The production of this print illustrates the dialogic artistic process developed in film by Chen Bo’er. The print, titled ‘Children’s Play’, was based on the children Feng Shin witnessed in Hebei province while working for land reform in the region. After she watched them enact the confrontation with a landlord, she saw that their ‘little faces revealed a deep hatred for the landlord’s exploitation’. She later asked children to enact the play of China’s fight for independence, and created characters such as Uncle Sam with his military planes and the Guomintang with their Nazi allies.

These prints tell a story about women after the victory of Chinese communism over the Guomindang, Japanese and American forces. They seek to tell a story about women’s emancipation. They use brilliant color, with red used to emphasize the vibrancy of rural women and rural children. The color bleeding is most often of the reds, and only sometimes the blues of the padded coats synonymous with the communist party cadre. 

Another print depicts a literacy class, called ‘Learning Lecture’ and the writing on the board, ‘We are not going to be blind anymore’. Wang Zheng reminds us that literacy classes taught women to read, but they also opened doors – or in the title of this print, opened eyes. Women learned about their rights, including the new Marriage Law.

Another print is called ‘Bean Election’, by Gu Cun from the Masses Art Society, and shows a voting scene in of Dahecun village in the northern province of Hebei.

The voting site lies within a ruined temple. Nearby is a village school. On the poster boards are the names of the candidates. As with the other prints, Millard provided translations. ‘Vote for the best candidate!’ reads the banner. The bustling scene centers on a woman in a red shirt dropping her bean in the cup of her candidate. Children also play active roles, with a child in blue seeming to urge on the man in a brown coat. Fully engaged in the civic process, a girl with a baby on her back talks to man sitting on a stool. An old woman balances on a stool to better point out the candidates’ names to voters.

Perhaps even more than the nianhua about land reform, the story told by this image is one of civic leadership as power, and of self-determination. Again, women are at the center of this story, running the election and voting by dropping a bean in the cup for their candidate. The table that holds the cups in the center front of the image is a repurposed temple altar. The future is built on the past, but only to bring that past into new use.

The inclusion of these pictures of peasant women in the People’s Republic of China in Betty Millard’s repository has another significance in the formation of women’s anti-imperialist solidarity during the 1940s and early 1950s. As early as its opening conference in Paris, 1945, WIDF members from North Africa, West Asia, and India urged the organization to take leadership from women fighting for the end to colonial rule. 

One month before the Asian Women’s Conference, in November, 1949, the WIDF held its executive council meeting in Moscow before boarding the train with delegates heading to the conference. The 1949 meeting resolution stressed the centrality of peasant women, and ‘called for the strengthening of work in the countryside, among peasant women and women farm laborers, to be more active in defending their economic and social rights and to draw the women of the countryside into the common struggle of the working people against poverty and the threat of war’. The voices of Asian women, as well as the women from North Africa, West Africa and East Africa who attended the conference mirror the pictures Betty Millard brought back with her.

Soong Ching Ling specifically addressed Asian women on the second day of the conference, ‘If you are in liberated land and territory, we say improve your country and your position in it. If you are still counted among the oppressed, we say struggle to organize and then ARISE!” The struggle against colonial occupation sought palpable gains vividly shown in these woodcuts – of land, of rights, of skills and of another more just future to break from an oppressive past. Rural people were critical to the success of this vision.

On the last day of the conference, Celestine Ouezzin Coulibaly, a guest from Ivory Coast expressed her solidarity, ‘from my distant forest on the Ivory Coast to salute the Chinese victory in the name of the millions of black women who, back in my country, are dreaming of liberty’. As she spoke at the podium, a Chinese woman ran up from the audience and threw her arms around her. The aspirations for an Asian and African women’s movement closed the conference in that embrace.

A Conversation about the Future.

Esther Cooper (left), Alice Dritz (middle), Vidya Kanuga (right)

World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), First Congress, London, November, 1945

Esther Cooper is mid-sentence in the photograph with her eyebrows slightly raised. More than that, she’s deep into an idea, a vision, an analysis and Vidya Kanuga leans towards her looking directly into her eyes, mouth relaxed, with her hand extended, palm up, toward her. There’s a third person in the photograph, Alice Dritz, who looks away. Her distraction takes her out of the photograph almost, which is strange since Alice also stands close to Vidya and Esther. But it’s as if neither notice her, since their conversation is so deeply with each other; and thus, perhaps, Alice’s attention wanders. What matters most is the conversation and the focused intimacy in their expressions – they met to build another world – a world without fascist terror, without racism and without colonial occupation. They met for the first and only time in November, 1945 in London, England at the founding convention of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. A conversation assumes a shared language at the very least, whether of gesture, attention, or common goals. But even in 1945, even among allies, the meaning of words like fascism and solidarity; militarism and peace; freedom and tyranny had to be made on the floors of these revolutionary conventions among people far from home.

This photograph was included in the official record of the conference, “Forward for our Future!” It begs the question to us, its viewers, today: What must it feel like to stand in the ashes of war that spanned the globe, wrenching the lives of the majority of the people on the planet, cutting short the lives of millions of others? As we stand in our own rubble of wars that never end even when the media declares them finished, or obscures that wars of economic blockade, military occupation or aerial bombing exist right now. What does this memory about a conversation mean for us now as we refuse to accept the differential injuries of our lived violence? Vidya, Esther, and Alice collaborated on a systemic analysis of their moment. At this gathering, with other young people’s movements around the world, they linked racism to colonialism to fascism. Vidya and Esther added patriarchy as integral to the war and violence capitalism relied on to reproduce itself. They enacted their analysis differently; Vidya established global movements and Esther built her local one. 

Vidya Kanuga traveled from Sheffield where she had been studying medicine to attend the conference – she first came to England in 1938 to pursue her education. Vidya had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, as it was then called, in 1942, and was a leader in the Federation of Indian Students. Throughout the war, Indian students fought British colonial occupation as integral to their opposition to fascism. They built a global opposition that included African students and Caribbean students from the colonies. Esther Cooper was a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and traveled from Birmingham, Alabama. She was the executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a group that led the most radical direct action, grassroots organizing of young people against Jim Crow racism in the southern states during the war and afterwards. Scholars like Dayo Gore and Erik McDuffie highlight the pivotal vitality of Black feminist leadership that emerged from the Communist movement in the United States during the 20th Century – a movement that included Party members and fellow travelers. McDuffie uses this photograph of a conversation between Esther Cooper, Alice Dritz, and Vidya Kanuga to illustrate the importance of Black feminists to the internationalist movement to end oppression and exploitation worldwide.

The official conference report retains the conflict and the hope of over four hundred delegates and another one hundred fifty observers. Youth from occupied countries refused to declare any victory over fascism throughout the reports. During a floor discussion at the second plenary, one Nigerian delegate referred to as G.K.J. Amachree reminded the young people, “racial discrimination existed not only in Germany and Japan, but was also practiced by the United States, South Africa, Great Britain, Belgium, etc.” Since racism was endemic to the nations declared the victors of war, students alongside Amachree declared, the struggle against fascism was not victorious. Amachree linked racism to apartheid to Jim Crow to colonialism to fascism in his invocation of nations; systemically, they could not be disentangled. 

Vidya Kanuga was the secretary of one of four commissions, called “The participation of youth in the construction of a stable and lasting peace.” As she said on the floor of the convention, “(t)he freedom and self-determination of all colonial peoples is necessary for the maintenance of peace and for world economic reconstruction. Youth of the world must support the just struggles of the colonial peoples for their rights.” The struggle against war, the struggle for peace was economic and required the rebuilding of more than Europe due to the ongoing material theft of colonialism. Perhaps Esther approached Vidya after she spoke at the convention, since her movement also disrupted the social fabric to refuse Jim Crow segregation and its inhumanity. Perhaps Esther Cooper brought her insights to these expanded notions of “peace” that retained armed struggle within them. Rather than one side of a war, fascism for both Cooper and Kanuga was an ideology embedded in capitalism, a particularly wretched tool to shore up a broken, dying system.

Vidya and Esther were both in their mid-twenties – not “youths” exactly, but young and ready to face the reconstructive possibilities of their scorched-earth moment. For Vidya Kanuga, as for many progressive and communist young people, the war felt unfinished, held at bay in places like England, perhaps, but ongoing elsewhere. She described the urgency of this moment in her memoir. In her words, refusing fascism, warmongering, and colonial bondage required a global unity of purpose, one she described in the third person of the World, even as it was her own:

Never again would they permit another monstrous war to take such a toll in human lives, to destroy the treasures created by youth’s creative labor over centuries and to darken the future of young generations to come. Never again would they permit such a senseless waste of young energy and young lives for the selfish interests of a handful of imperialist warmongers. Never again would fascism be allowed to raise its ugly head in any corner of the globe. They declared their solidarity with all peoples living in colonial bondage and affirmed their will to work together in friendship and cooperation to ensure a happy future for coming generations of youth.

What does this memory mean for us now as we imagine our future? Where is the future that they dared to imagine? These two young people who met for the first and only time at the London WFDY gathering took different paths, but both were catalysts for far-reaching demands to dismantle old oppressive relations and ways of being in favor of a radical vision for movement and freedom. 

Vidya Kanuga stayed in the international scene for several more years, until she returned to India in 1949 where she moved to Kolkata in Bengal, far from her home city in Maharashtra. After the London conference, she went to internationalist youth, student, and women’s conferences, as a delegate who represented the voices and hearts of many others in her movement, as a worker in the international central offices to create linkages among many different young people around the world, and also to organize other international conferences for young people fighting imperialism. Esther Cooper organized closely to organize popular front movements that organized communists together with liberals in neighborhoods, towns, and cities to advance far-reaching goals for another world. 

After the founding of WFDY, Esther returned to her movement on the knife’s edge of racist oppression. She organized among ordinary people and built coalitions with more reformist organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to build a united front against the racist fascism that structured the USA. In the Southern Negro Youth Council, she orchestrated labor struggles among domestic workers and tobacco workers, the organized refusal to accept segregated buses and restaurants, and the demands for citizenship rights against poll taxes at voting booths. These varied campaigns were coordinated with this larger aim to dismantle cultural, economic, and civic racial apartheid, and were later known as the civil rights movement. All dangerous work, particularly in small localities like Birmingham, patiently dulled the well-honed blade of American racial capitalism. 

Cooper had tried to attend the next communist-led conference that was held the next month in Paris, to found the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF); but the US government denied her a visa to travel to France. The sustenance of her conversations in London, one witnessed by this photograph, suggests why another leftist conference – this time one of leftist women from around the world – was one too many for the US officials in the State Department. But if they sought to drain her energy, they failed. Her comrade from the CPUSA and in the SNYC, Thelma Dale, did attend and brought back her conversations, her lessons from that gathering. Vidya Kanuga also attended the WIDF founding conference – this time she represented not the Indian students in England, but the ten thousand female students who were members of the communist-led All-India Student’s Federation. The British colonial government made sure that passports and visas were impossible to come by, so no one from India was allowed to attend. Vidya went in their stead. 

Paris, Vidya remembered, had its coldest winter in years, so she kept her overcoat on throughout the meetings. Together, with comrades from Vietnam and North Africa, they successfully joined forces in Paris to demand a women’s internationalism that recognized the fight against colonialism, racism, and imperialism as integral to the fight against fascism. Vidya remembered the moment:

What did we Indian delegates say in our report to that first WIDF Congress? We spoke of the effects of two centuries of British colonial rule and its dismal record of impoverishment, illiteracy, incredibly high rates of infant and maternal mortality. When we said that more than six out of ten children born in Calcutta and Bombay slums never reached their first birthday, those present could hardly believe us. They shuddered to hear Ela Reid describe the Bengal famine which had taken the toll of over three million lives in 1943. We told them of the part Indian women had played in the struggle for independence and above all, stressed that neither equality nor women’s rights could have any meaning for us until our country became free from the British yoke. The few other delegates who had come from colonial countries – Algeria, Morocco, etc. – also spoke in a similar vein. There were also some young Vietnamese girls, students studying in Paris, who attended the Congress and distributed pamphlets among the delegates describing the struggle of their peoples against Japanese fascism and French colonialists. In those days, most of us knew of their country only as French Indo-China. Vietnam was a new and unfamiliar name in the geography of 1945.

In part because of the US State Department’s surging anti-communism, Esther Cooper went back to Alabama after the conference in London, but not before she spent six weeks traveling in the Soviet Union. Her experiences, in Erik McDuffie’s words, “convinced her as never before of the importance of appreciating women’s issues in a global context and in forming transnational political coalitions with women across the world.” The localized struggles she organized in Birmingham resonated in those wider movements, not simply as one site for international solidarity, but intrinsically, since they refused the same systems of exploitation and oppression. 

In part because of the British government’s terror of anti-colonial communist militancy, Vidya went further abroad to join the international communist movement. After Paris, she worked at the central offices of WFDY that soon moved its headquarters from Paris to Prague to evade the rise of anti-communism in France. It is no accident that Vidya’s name, albeit spelled in various different ways, emerges in the secret service accounts of the United States and England from this time. While Vidya worked in Prague at the central offices of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the communist international organization lit a spark for the anti-imperialist movement. Delegates like Suripno, an Indonesian communist who joined the Communist Party of Holland, founded Surapati during the war, an armed, anti-fascist resistance force of Indonesian students that stole its weapons for anti-fascist resistance from the occupying German forces in the Netherlands. Suripno worked for the International Union of Students, also located in Prague. Together, these two international networks fired up the conference for youth and students of South-East Asia hosted in Calcutta in February, 1948. 

The conference title said it all: “The Conference for Youth and Students of South-east Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence.” For the revolutionary movements in Vietnam and in Indonesia, this conference marks the turning point from armed negotiation with colonial powers to an outright refusal to recognize their validity on any terms. The demands of radical youth and students erupted in Calcutta, as they advocated armed takeovers to end colonialism around the world. One month later, in March, 1948, communists led an insurrection in Burma (now Myanmar); in June, Malaya (now Malaysia and Singapore); in September, Indonesia. The demands of anti-colonial youth and students were never tame. In 1945, they sought the release of political prisoners held in India, Indonesia, and elsewhere. By 1949, the Colonial Students Affairs council demanded the end of colonial rule: “Withdraw! Indonesia for the Indonesians, Holland for the Dutch.”

If Esther Cooper and Vidya Kanuga met for the first and only time in London in 1945, their impassioned conversation remembered by a photograph holds their stories of visionary activism together. Their story is not a blueprint for our own. History never is. We must answer for ourselves what kinds of gatherings will forge our own shared understanding of how this world allows violence to seem inevitable if it is recognized at all. What are the concepts we need to dismantle the status quo and make better common goals? If we attend conferences and do not represent organizations with two hundred or twenty thousand members, why not? An emancipatory language is built from the aspirations of people, from their struggles. Whether our practice is localized or taken farther afield, our gatherings should clarify what must change. Even in the face of utter environmental depletion, these conversations can give us the courage to imagine another future. 

To Cite: Special issue, Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries, editors, Alina Sajed & Sara Salem, Kohl:A Journal for Body & Gender Research 9:1(Winter 2023)

Adi Cooper and her research on the Tebhaga and Tanka Movements (1946-50)

Adrienne’s Book

In 1988, K. P. Bagchi of Kolkata published Adrienne Cooper’s Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal, 1930-1950. The book is now long out of print. A Bengali version of the book was published in Bangladesh, but this version tells only the economic history, not the political history of rural people’s lives. In Economic and Political Weekly, Ranajit Das Gupta reviewed the English edition favourably. To tell the story of the 1946-47 Tebhaga movement in Bengal, Das Gupta wrote, “Adrienne Cooper combines the methods of oral history, particularly interviews with leaders and activists of the movement, with conventional ones like consultation of archival materials.” Das Gupta highlights the second section of Cooper’s book – which deals directly with the Tebhaga agitation of 1946-47 conducted by sharecroppers and their allies. “With a wealth of evidence,” Das Gupta writes, “Cooper highlights the tensions and conflicts existing between landlords (jotedars) and sharecroppers for many decades and shows that the latter resorted to diverse and myriad forms of protest and struggle much before the historic tebhaga movement and the formation of the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha in 1936.” In other words, agrarian workers set an agenda, which was consolidated in the Kisan Sabha and in the Communist Party.

1940s Bengali poster from G.P. Dutt’s papers in the Labor History Archives, Manchester, UK.

Communists from that era – Abani Lahiri, Renu Chakravartty, Manikuntala Sen and Sunil Sen – have left us with powerful testimonies about being communist militants in Bengal during the British-induced famine that tore apart the lives of the rural poor in the early 1940s. What Adrienne Cooper provides – in addition to these books – is her 180 interviews of peasants and peasant organizers about their lives and their struggles. She collected these stories between 1976 and 1978 from across West Bengal and Bangladesh. These interviews are a precious record of the memories of those peasant communists who developed and sustained struggles in the countryside.

Cooper’s book came out in the era when the Subaltern Studies group held the attention of Indian historians. Volume 1 of Subaltern Studies had come out in 1982 and by the time Cooper’s book appeared in 1988, the sixth volume was being prepared. Cooper’s work would have been ideal for this series, since she had done field-research amongst the agrarian proletariat and had shown that it was this section that had developed its own struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. For a brief time, Cooper had been doing her Ph. D. with Ranajit Guha, the editor of the series. He would have known of her work. But he had not excerpted her book in the series. Why?

What distanced Cooper’s work from that of Subaltern Studies is that she tracked the movement of agrarian workers, with a revealing (and rare) attention to both women and men, into the Kisan Sabha and the Communist Party. She did not see this as reason to disqualify these struggles from the category of ‘subaltern’. This is what interested me about her work – the meticulous way in which she followed the development of peasant struggles through its organisations. I had read her book, but realized from her notes that she had much more material. I was eager to meet her. But how to find Adrienne Cooper?

Finding Adi

Adrienne Cooper left the academy shortly after her Ph. D. was completed under the supervision of Dr. Terence Byers, the founder of the Journal of Peasant Studies (1973). I emailed Dr. Byers. It was a brief correspondence.

Dear Dr. Byers,

My apologies for troubling you -- but I'm having difficulty finding any contact information for your thesis student from the early 1980s Adrienne Cooper who wrote Sharecropping and Sharecroppers' Struggles in Bengal, 1930-1950. As you know, she conducted extensive interviews of Bengali activists in the Tebhaga movement. I was wondering if these interviews are archived somewhere or held by Adrienne Cooper.

Do you have any contact information about how to reach her? I would deeply appreciate any help you can offer.

All best,

Lisa

******

Dear Professor Armstrong,

I have been retired for some time, and am afraid that I have long since lost contact with Adrienne Cooper.

I don’t know of the interviews being archived anywhere. It is likely that she kept transcripts of the interviews, but the problem is how to contact her.

Sorry that I can’t assist you in your quest.

Best,

Terry Byres

Terence J. Byres
Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, University of London
Emeritus Editor, Journal of Agrarian Change

I dropped my obsession for a year. One night I sat upright in my bed with an inspiration. I read Adrienne Cooper’s acknowledgements once more. There must be a clue there. I found the name of her daughter – Frania. It was through her daughter, who is a lawyer, that I found that Adrienne now uses the name Adi Cooper. Adi is now an accomplished Social Services director, who focuses on safeguarding adults. In 2016, she was awarded an OBE for her work in Adult Social Services. I found her email. I wrote to her. She replied almost immediately,

 Lisa

Thank you so much. Yes of course it would be amazing to talk to someone who shares this interest and passion.

I still have my notebooks from my interviews somewhere as I couldn't quite let them go.

When are you going to be in London?

I look forward to meeting you

Best wishes

Adi

Meeting Adi

Our meeting began badly. I had misunderstood where we were to meet at the London tube station of Manor House. She was at some turnstiles, while I was at another entrance. I rushed to a cafe to send her a message and found that my father had just entered the operating room for brain surgery to remove a large hematoma. I froze, emailed frantically, error prone as usual on my phone, but even more so from worry. Finally, I found Adi, we hugged, we took a bus and we got to her home. 

We sat with her materials. She told me about her work. Adi began her dissertation research with Ranajit Guha as her thesis director and inspirational undergraduate tutor. When she returned from West Bengal and Bangladesh after two years, however, they parted ways. She thought that this was because maybe Guha had difficulty in mentoring a woman through the process of writing a PhD, and suggested that perhaps she didn’t meet his high standards. 

She returned to England, as she put it, an international socialist feminist. While she conducted her interviews she read Alexandra Kollantai and Agnes Smedley. In Dinajpur (West Bengal), she remembered debating Marxism and feminism with her translator. She had been involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement since 1969 – and joined a consciousness raising group with Maggie Bowden, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. She helped organize the first sexuality conference in Brighton. Her feminism continued through her research. Adi interviewed peasant activists with her mind alert with such questions of Marxism, feminism and sexuality. She insisted upon interviewing women as well as men, asking how the entire family was swept up by the Tebhaga events.

How did Adi meet so many Indian communists in rural and urban India, I wondered? It had to do with her own roots in a communist family and their connection to the communists in India.

Adi was raised in a communist family – her mother had been a communist – and her father, a Polish tailor, had been a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He had heard Lenin speak in Paris. Adi’s father was also a life long communist. He had been involved in the Battle of Cable Street (1936) in London against the racists led by Oswald Mosley. He had run a leftist foreign film distribution company in New York till the family was deported to Britain for their communist sympathies. Adi was from a red family.

Adi’s family knew  Hannah Banerji, the Communist Party member from Wembley who had visited Kolkata shortly before she arrived. Hannah had links with communists in West Bengal. The volley of connections began there. It was easier to meet communists in West Bengal, where the Left Front gained power at that time. Matters were more difficult in Bangladesh, where the Communist Party of Bangladesh slowly came out from being banned, but the connections worked and Badruddin Umar, a political activist, writer and ex-academic accompanied her around the countryside acting as her interpreter. Among other places, Adi spoke to people in a village in Mymensingh that was a multi-faith village because of the legacy of Tebhaga.

Adi recounted her archival work in the Writer’s Building in Kolkata where she went through the archives including files of the Department of Agriculture and Land. She found the file from February 1947 file that contained all of the District Officers’ updates on the Tebhaga movement in their districts. She read speeches from the Assembly and all the newspapers in Bengali and English to gain a better understanding of how the movement unfolded, as well as communist party publications.

Adi said she’d lost the tapes a long time ago, but had her notebooks in the attic, so we went up to look for them. While she told stories, I photographed the pages on my ancient iphone until the battery died – and because the phone is old, she had no plugs for recharging. These notebooks, I reiterated time and again, are precious. They should be archived, perhaps in the P. C. Joshi archives at JNU or at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi. They should be digitized and shared.

Notebook cover, Adi Cooper

Tanka Movement

In Mymensingh district, East Bengal (now in Bangladesh), the Hajong adivasis rose up between 1942 and 1945 – the Tanka movement. There is no full book in English on this crucial uprising.

Adi told me stories of what she had learned. She talked about Kalyani Lilya Bagchi and the Tanka movement, led by Hajong adivasis in the early 1940s in the Mymensingh district of Bengal. Hajong women who were part of the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS) tried to stop the exploitation of women agricultural workers, where most of the cultivation work was done by women, with the exception of tilling the soil. Everything else was done by women: harvesting, husking, cooking, clothing production, weeding, and caring for children by wearing them on their backs while working. The Hajong women’s routine was endless: up before dawn to husk rice, stop at daylight, bring in food, clean it, crush it, cook it, take care of live stock, do the washing, work in the fields, and on and on. “This was changed by the Kisan Sabha (peasants organization, fostered by the Communist Party of India and MARS),” one Hajong woman described in her interview.

Beatings by their husbands were frequent, and men were drinking the alcohol brewed by the women. They drank and beat their wives, so we had to hold Kisan Sabha courts where women complain and MARS activists and my neighbour asked what party-work women could do if they were beaten like this. MARS and the Kisan Sabha came up with punishments for men who drank and men who beat their wives: social boycotts, the silent treatment, and changing men’s role in the working patterns. When the Tonka movement started, the systems of the village altered. The Kisan Sabha and MARS said that men were not allowed to sit idle when women were working – the harvesting work was distributed to both men and women – work that had earlier been women’s work.

The Tanka movement demanded this change since we had to complete the harvesting very quickly, at a speed that was impossible to reach individually. In 1945, we formed a cooperative system in the Hajong area of two to three villages who would cooperatively harvest all of the fields to do the work of three months in 15 days. The Kisan Sabha announced prizes for the first sowing – of course women won, since they had been sowing for so long and men were new to this work. But it felt good to have our expertise given a prize.

What Adi learned was that the Kisan Sabha court was run by the Kisan Sabha and handled problems with family affairs, theft and petty crimes, quarrels and to stop men’s habit of drinking. The social system changed. The thinking changed. The ideas of land, sense of cooperation, and sacrifice for others’ cause were all new. What Adi said as I left still rings in my ears.

What the Tanka movement and the Tebhaga movement developed are profoundly communist techniques. Middle class activists came from the cities of Bengal. They did not come to the countryside with answers. They came to listen to the problems, to listen to the analysis of the most disenfranchised people of the region, the landless workers, adivasis, Dalits and women. They then worked with the people to develop the demands and the visions for another future. Their politics truly came from the people.