The Autumn Of Thunder

At Naxalbari station, the last train bound for the terminus screeches to a halt at around 10:30 pm. Passengers tumble out onto the narrow platform and disperse in all directions. In the moonlit north Bengal night, one can make out the jungles that fringe the distance, dividing this dusty town from a cluster of villages called Ram Bola Jot by the edge of a typically spri­ghtly Terai brook. The town, together with the expanse of fore­sts and farmlands that surround it, is ground zero, the source from which sprung the Naxalbari rebellion, arguably one of world history’s biggest peasant uprisings of all time.

A 61-year-old man named Sadananda Roychowdhury is headed towards the jungle river, turbulent in this rainy month of May. He must cross it to get to his little hut in a hamlet beyond. “The only danger for us today is the wild elephants that come to drink at the banks,” he says, in a wry tone of mock-relief. “Fifty years ago, it was different. We were scared out of our wits. We would not dare to cross the jungle or the river even during the day, forget this time of night.”

It was 50 years ago, on May 24, 1967, that Sadananda’s grandfather, a powerful landlord called Nagendranath Roychowdhury, was dragged out of his house by nearly 300 peasants, tried in a kangaroo court and stoned to death, thereby sparking off the Naxalbari movement. Sadananda was just ten at that time but recalls the sequence of events with horror. “Most of the area was covered in dense forests or farmlands. Our ancestors were native to this land, we had lived here for hundreds of years. Over time, we had acquired a lot of the surrounding property…my grandfather and his brother were jotedars.”

Jotedars. The word that was spat out with much hate those days. These were people who had once created farmlands by clearing forest areas and thus come to own vast tracts—their long overlordship now suddenly challenged as they became prime targets of revolutionary fury from peasants who had thrown off the yoke. There were also zamindars, a bequest of the colonial era—landed gentry who collected, or rather extor­ted, taxes from local farmers and served their British masters.

Says Sadananda, “For some time, there had been murmurs about farmers revolting against those who held a lot of land. We were children but the elders, especially grandfather and his brother, often discussed the issue in worried tones. Gradually, it became more live and real. Reports came from different fiefdoms around us that peasants had begun to ‘loot’ the properties of landlords, destroying and confiscating documents, even snatching their lands and driving them out of their homes. They would then redistribute the lands among themselves. The peasants would become the owners.”

That May morning, around 10.30 am, news filtered in that peasants would target their house. Says Sadananda, “I remember we children ran around helping the adults hide all valuables because we knew these would be snatched. The women put on whatever jewellery they owned. All brass utensils were thrown into the pond and the courtyard well for safekeeping. We knew they would ransack the trunks, so we tried to hide the house documents and deeds by burying them in the ground. Like most landowners who cultivated paddy, we too had large containers for storing uncooked paddy and rice. We tried to put them in sacks and carry them out as much as possible.”

The Roychowdhurys—Nagendranath, his elder brother Khagendranath, their wives, sons and daughters—were then fleeing to hide in the jungles. “Aro­und noon, they started to arrive,” he recalls. “We could see them from the forest. Some 200-300 of them.” Suddenly, Nagendranath decided to shoo the peasants away by firing a shot in the air with his rifle, recalls Sad­a­nanda. The inc­ensed peasants chased him down as he ran and hid inside the house of a Nepali neighbour who had given him shelter. “They ordered the Nepali man to hand him over to them,” Sadananda says. “He was forced to do so.”

Nagendranath was marched off to a nearby meadow, where he was tried by a kangaroo court. Eyewitnesses told Outlook that he was stoned to death, but another son of his, who was four years old at that time, says Nagendranath’s “throat was slit and he was left to die.” The family says Nagendranath’s aunt apologised to the peasants on his behalf and pleaded with them to spare his life—as a man with wife and children—but they would not relent. “We got news that ‘all was over’ by evening but none of us dared to go out of the house. A day later, the police came and asked my grandmother to identify the body. She was taken there and all she could say was ‘haan, ei shei.’ (‘yes, that’s him.’)”.

Today the Roychowdhurys stare blankly when you ask them about the exploitativeness of their class. Wasn’t the uprising an outcome of years of cruelty and injustice? For the family of a man killed by the uprising, it’s a difficult question. Nagendra­nath’s wife has died long ago. “My father was not an exploitative man,” says Debendranath, the son who was a four-year-old in 1967 (six years younger than Sadananda, the grandson by a much older brother). “Our only crime was that we were rich. That we had more than they did.” Sadananda agrees. “No one has ever bothered to listen to our side of the story, how much we suffered. The fear, trauma and horror we faced. What wrong did these children do? What about his wife?” The peasants of Naxalbari are not so sure about that arg­ument. “The jotedars and zam­indars expl­oited us for as long as history can remember,” says Ghulam Munda, a 52-­ year-old villager. “Our ancestors have been landless farmers for ever. The landlords made them work the fields day and night and then gave them pittance from the produce, barely enough to keep them alive so they could keep working for them. They were almost no better than the bullocks tied to the carts for tilling. They would lend us paddy and seeds. If the crops did well, they took it. If it failed, we owed them money. We were bonded labourers.”

What Munda cannot forgive is what he calls the “extreme humiliation of our women at the hands of the landed gentry”. He says, “Zamindars and jotedars were notorious for rape. Whenever a new bride came to a household, they would have her kidnapped before she spent the first night with her husband. Once she was ‘defiled’ by the feudal lord, she would be returned. It was a reign of terror. It was as though the country’s laws didn’t apply to these remote jungles. The only time the administration remembered us was when we had to pay taxes. So we took the law into our own hands.”

Khudan Mullick, a peasant leader who had worked closely with Kanu Sanyal and Khokon Majumdar, explains that the peasant movement had been brewing much before the May 24 incident, since the early 1950s in fact. “Soon after Independence, the poor peasants of Naxalbari had formed a group called the Torai Krishak Samity (Farmer’s Union of the Terai region).” However, it was only nearly two decades later, when the Siliguri-based scholar Charu Majumdar wrote a ser­ies of articles on it, including eight treatises, that the Naxal spirit really took off. It was infectious, spreading over the country, consuming Bengal, linking up peasant struggles elsewhere in a common narrative, firing up youth in faraway zones.

While the movement reverberated through the land, now gaining momentum, now abating in intensity, getting crushed, then re-emerging, adapting, mutating, reinventing itself, in Naxalbari itself it exists like diffused light, refracted through the prism of multiple memories. “Almost every family here was involved in the uprising one way or another,” says Nathuram Biswas, a merchant at the busy Naxalbari market. He too had signed on, as a young student of a Naxalbari college. Nor was it ever a singular, unifying thing. “Naxalism is now divided into many different pie­ces,” says Dipu Haldar, a state secretary of the CPI(ML), the party formed by Kanu Sanyal. She speaks about the many differences, the fragmentations. But what bothers her most is the “compromised positions” of many leaders today. “I won’t name them but some leaders who once fought for peasants’ rights are today Naxalbari’s landsharks, hobnobbing with promoters and developers.”

Many are proud of the heritage, the quaint halo of political lore that surrounds their land. Jaydip Pramanik’s grandfather owned a roadside tea stall below their house in the Naxalbari market, where “Charuda and Kanuda used to come regularly and have chai in clay cups over heated arguments.” Pramanik has converted it into a modern knick-knack store selling everything from local sweets to branded MNC fruit juices. “We can’t get stuck in the past even though we know how Naxalbari has changed the world,” he says, while simultaneously advertising the fact that Jyoti Basu, long before he became the first Communist chief minister of West Bengal, had made the mezzanine floor above the store his hideout when he was on the run from police. “The Naxalbari market was a hotbed of politics. Charuda and Kanuda would descend on the weekly village haat here...it was the best way to reach out to the villagers.”

As for the Roychowdhurys, they have long made peace with the realisation that the only way to exist in Naxalbari is to fit in. Sadananda claims he subsequently joined hands with Kanu Sanyal and even took part in the movement. “All this used to belong to us earlier,” he says, sweeping his hand in the general direction of the horizon. “But now it has been taken over, div­ided into equal portions and distributed.”

A family living close to the Roychowdhury household—now “a mere shadow of its former grandeur”, by their own admission—is a little defensive when we ask about their relationship with the neighbours. “It has been a long time,” says an old man, petting his goat. “Fifty years. I was then a 20-year-old boy. We were very poor. Didn’t get even two meals a day. Worked hard day and night on someone else’s field and, in the end, owed him money for the paddy he loaned me. But today I’m a landowner. I cultivate this little patch and I can feed my family.”

A Naxal leader who presided over the kangaroo court on May 24, 1967, refuses to go anywhere near the house of the Roychowdhurys. Does he feel remorse? “No, why should I? It was the peasants’ decision. He had no business firing on the peaceful procession of farmers. No one died but it showcased him as the quintessential class enemy.”

In hindsight, do the leaders of Naxalbari see the movement as a success or a failure? ”Of course, no one quite knew at that time that the local uprising would gain so much prominence all over the world,” says Avijit Majumdar, a Siliguri college professor and, incidentally, the son of Charu Majumdar. “The fact that it generated so much thought, provoked so much debate, influenced so many lives and, really, changed the political course of the country, is a tremendous indication of its success.” As the train chugs out of Naxalbari, the faraway forests and rippling rivers, reflected in the moonlight, no doubt appear exactly the same as they did fifty years ago. But in the surrounding space, a revolution hovers like an old folk tale.

By Dola Mitra in Naxalbari