Saroj Dutta (SD) was a well-known leftist literary figure in post-independence and post-partition Bengal, whose political and literary columns under the pen name of Shashanka in the Bangla Communist journals of the time were eagerly awaited by readers. His death in the early morning Kolkata maidan in a fake encounter by the Kolkata police, who had picked him up from his hideout, forms part of the urban folklore of both Kolkata and a turbulent period in its history. Although no official acknowledgement of his death has ever been made by the state, ‘eyewitness accounts’ of this ‘encounter’ have been making the rounds in public consciousness for over 45 years now. SD: Saroj Dutta and His Times, directed by Kasturi Basu and Mitali Biswas, explores the life of the Communist poet Saroj Dutta, and the turbulent days of the Naxal movement in Bengal in the sixties and the seventies, where the poet and his context become inseparable from each other.

For many of the city’s youth today, battling with the same questions about political solutions to inequity and exploitative development that engaged Saroj Dutta, the history of this period as well as certain lives that were centre stage then, hold a particular fascination. It is this that has motivated the young researchers and directors of this film to undertake the journey culminating in this film.

A committed Communist thinker since early youth (although he became a formal member of the party only later), SD chose the field in which he could put his talents to best use: culture and publication. He worked as a full-time journalist in the leading daily newspapers of the time before giving it up to work full time on the editorial boards of the Bengali party organs Desh Hitaishi, Swadhinata, the party-led literary magazine Parichay and later the CPI (ML) paper Deshabrati. SD is said to have sold the jewellery of his comrade and partner, Bela Dutta, to finance a new printing machine for Swadhinata.

SD was a passionate writer with a sharp political sensitivity, deep sense of history and vast knowledge of Indian and international art and literature. He was also an avid translator, and had translated classics from Russian and other languages into Bangla. He was one of the first writers to introduce Pablo Neruda and Patrice Lumumba to Bengali readers. As if all of this was not enough, he led the debate on possible trajectories for a revolutionary cultural movement in Bengal and felt strongly that this had necessarily to connect with ongoing class struggles. An animated debate with Samar Sen, the iconic editor of Frontier, is part of this episode in his life.

Post-Independence India was also a time of great churning for the Communist movement. The party had led major peasant and rural struggles in Bengal, Bihar and Telangana, in all of which the question of land to the tiller was central. However, the CPI retracted support to Telangana under pressure from the international Communist movement to support the national government of free India. Telengana was retracted before the 1952 general elections. The fractured Communist party in East Bengal had continued the struggle for some time before bowing before severe state repression. In Indian Bengal, there was a deep disquiet about these and other strategic issues, particularly in the areas of action. The divisions in the unified Communist movement during the decade of the sixties followed these fractures in the party’s praxis, and the CPI was officially divided into the CPI and the breakaway CPI(M), in 1962.

However, the dissatisfaction of the people and the ground cadres continued, as was evinced by a further division in the CPI(M) and the birth of the CPI (M-L). In 1967, police firing in Bangaijote on protesting peasantry killed eleven people, including eight women, two of them with children strapped on their backs. Following this, the peasant revolution in north Bengal and Bihar flared up again that year, with the support of many dissident Communist cadres. Nationally, India was dealing with major food shortages and economic stagnation.

Internationally, this was a time when the students and youth came on to the streets to express their anger against the ruling classes and governance system – against the cold war, the Vietnam death factory, the archaic education system, and the simple lack of political will among the rulers to solve basic existential issues. In Bengal, all of this culminated in the expulsion from the CPI(M) of dissident leaders like Charu Mazumdar, Sushtal Roy Chowdhury, and Saroj Dutta. Since they no longer had access to the pages of the Desh Hitaishi, a new paper, the Deshabrati was launched. Articles covering movements in North Bihar, Bengal and Telengana published in the Deshabrati were hugely popular.

There is no reason to assume that the ferment within the Communist movement was unilinear; in fact, there were different strands of thought, and further fragmentation on issues of theory and action. For example, a leader like Saroj Dutta, who became a leading theoretician of the movement, firmly believed that a new culture could only emerge if the old was forcibly destroyed. The murti bhanga andolan (breaking of statues of reformist leaders), boycott of classes doling out bourgeois education by students in schools and colleges, and violent killings of political opponents led to a general chaos, and brutal state repression killed many youth and jailed and tortured thousands of others. Several leaders like Sushital Roy Chowdhury opposed the slide into anarchy in writing. SD opposed this publication on record, on the ground that the youth’s enthusiasm and energy would be impeded by these debates.

SD: Saroj Dutta and His Times takes us over this tumultuous and buried history, and is successful in capturing this remarkable narrative of a man and his time to a very large extent. The film generates ample original archival material through interviews with Kunal and Bela Dutta (SD’s son and wife respectively), although one wishes Bela Dutta had spoken about her own active political life and and provided some theoretical insights. The film also includes testimonies of Deviprasad Chattopadhyay and his wife Manjusha, from whose home Saroj Dutta was arrested, and who were possibly the last friends to have seen him alive. The film also includes a brilliant analysis of the genesis of the Naxalbari movement that belies much of the current statist misinformation about this ‘greatest threat to the country’s internal security’ being the creation of certain malevolent and crazed minds. It is important that we understand the historical legacy and complexities of the movement today.

On the whole, the film, scripted by the director duo and Dwaipayan Banerjee, does a remarkable job of recreating the history of the turbulent sixties in Bengal. The film ends with the voice over that the dream for which SD and others gave their lives has not been realised but that this does not mean that the dream been lost. There are of course no easy answers to this proposition, but one wishes that there was an analysis of the complex challenges that the movement for social justice has faced at different junctures in the last forty years. Also, one is not sure if ‘the movement’ was ever one undifferentiated whole. Unfortunately, there is no critical analysis of the roadblocks and bumpy trajectory of the movement after its initial days of triumph. Unless we are able to engage critically with this important history – a history that took so many lives and so much blood – Saroj Dutta will remain a romantic figure, and we will have learnt nothing from the sacrifices he and others made for a better world.

At a very personal level, I also had a desire to get to know the man behind the legend, the human figure with his courage, passion and quirks. If the film has any shortcoming, it is really this inability to blend the personal and the political to arrive at a human retelling of this story of hope and pain.

Ilina Sen

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