The Class Character of Sexuality: Peasant Women in Manik Bandopadhyay

Author(s): Malini Bhattacharya

Source: Social Scientist , Jan., 1987, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 46-59
Published by: Social Scientist

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3517401

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 MA LINI BHA TTACHAR YA*

The Class Character of Sexuality:

Peasant Women in Manik Bandopadhyay

'TO WRITE stories about peasants and such people for the delectation o
the 'babus," who having easier access to means of subsistence for the bo
can find leisure for the cultivation of emotions-to provide aesthe
pleasure merely on the basis of the sexual relationship between two h
starved bodies, while suppressing, out of deference to that leisure-seek
reader, the fact of the unremitted, unspeakably harsh struggle for existenc
in which the peasant man and the peasant woman are engaged-this fo
of literary hoax does not hold water any more, although it has not be
completely called off yet. To exploit the literary marketability of
sexuality of peasants and workers in this way, is to concede, in
literary sphere, to the same kind of sick voyeurism that derivcs titillat
from the observation of the sexual acts of birds and beasts'.
The above is a quotation from Manik Bandopadhyay's contribution
to the debate among Bengali Marxist intellectuals in 1948 constituting t
'self-criticism of progressive writers'. Without going into the circum
tances and the details of this debate, we may observe a couple of poin
about this passage. Manik here is talking of the literary conventi
operating among a predominantly urban middle class readership of ficti
He also points out how the integrity of these literary conventions is sou
to be kept intact, even while introducing a new, potentially disturbin
element into this fictional discourse-namely the figure of the peasant m
and the peasant woman.
The kind of realism in which Bengali fiction had already achieve
certain mastery, according to Manik, rendered the representation of
peasant possible in fictional discourse. The rough skin of the peas
woman, the smell of coconut oil in her hair, the filth and raggedness
village life integral to economic deprivation, the crude picturesquenes
local dialect-all this may be presented in fiction in minutest detail
provide a novel attraction. A new kind of sexuality, acceptable on
because it is supposed to be quite outside the purview of middle c
norms,-analogous to the sexuality of 'birds and beasts'-may be impute
to the peasant man and the peasant woman. In this way, the integrity
*Jadavpur University, Calcutta.

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 47

middle class norms of sexuality may be rendered safe. The exquisite and
self-deceptive pleasure of 'slumming' may be reproduced through fiction
methods.
However, this symptomatic reading of a particular genre of Bengali
fiction which was becoming popular in the 1930s and 1940s2 does not lead
Manik to the too easy conclusion that the structure of fiction, because o
its class-basis, will always tend to a 'deferral' of signification which goe
beyond the interest of the dominant class, that the 'peasant' as fictiona
construct will always be an abstracted alienation from the peasant i
actuality.
He rather sees the experiments of the above-mentioned naturalistic
school in Bengali fiction as symptoms of the possible onset of a change in
the structure of fictional discourse-a change responsive to certain changes
in the objective historical situation. The fact that the representation of
the peasant, the artisan, the factory worker or the fisherman, becomes such
a crucial challenge to writers of fiction, itself shows a certain responsive-
ness, willy-nilly, to social change. What Manik is more concerned with is
the function that such representation might serve within the over-all
structure of fiction. The new fictional construct, by its rootedness in
extra-fictional reality, may be made into a device for looking at the total
structure from the 'wrong' end, for looking at it upside down, and thus
disturbing the ideological relations which hold the edifice together. It may,
in other words, in changing extra-aesthetic circumstances, resist absorption
into the ideological ambience of bourgeois fiction. The problem that
Manik faces as a writer is: how to make this new fictional construct,
namely 'the peasant' perform this subversive act ?
In the same article a little later, he makes a reference to a specific
crisis in the life of the peasant, which the naturalist writer makes extensive
use of. The peasant woman sells off her body to a willing customer.3
Circumstances, which I will discuss later more specifically, had made this a
relatively common phenomenon in Bengal in the 1940s. But the naturalist
writer, with his deep but restricted acquaintance with the moral and
emotional ambiguity of petty bourgeois life, transforms this problem into
a purely moral and emotional one, while suppressing unwittingly the total
interaction of social relations which forces the peasant woman towards
such an exigency. Thus we have an expurgated version of peasant life
where pathos is created exclusively out of 'the rape of moral values'. 'The
tragedy of land relations' being enacted in the 1940s in rural Bengal, the
general pattern of economic and political oppression, embodied in the
phenomenon of the peasant woman selling her body, is expunged from this
reductive, abstracted presentation of peasant life.

Ideological Conventions
In his short stories, written in the 1940s, Manik tries to use the
figure of the peasant as an analytical tool, to question the ideological

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48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

conventions of contemporary fiction ; and this requires the concre

of the production relations which the peasant embodies. This alon
guarantee against the incorporation of the constructed figure
peasant into the ideological edifice of fiction. Manik shows th
concretisation of the relational position of the peasant is possible
while using the highly-developed realistic techniques of the fiction
own time.
Take the case of the peasant woman. The idea of 'a woman's
chastity' can be said to be historically linked with the phenomeno
the commoditization of women. The moral and emotional enormity a
ciated with the loss of chastity has developed on this basis. It has co
to be regarded as having universal, aprioristic implications, and this
of looking at such an incident conceals the dynamics of the commodit
tion of women. The naturalistic writer's treatment of the incident m
be rich in physical detail and yet be nurtured by this aprioristic attitu
the notion of the loss of chastity. This suppresses the historic specifi
of the situation where the peasant woman of Bengal offers her own b
as a commodity. She becomes but a disguised representation of the v
of the dominant classes in a semi-feudal society. The accumulation of
realistic details becomes a self-defeating exercise, surrendering to the ideo-
logical limits of fiction.
But Manik would make the same realistic details serve a different
purpose. See how the sexuality of the peasant woman is represented in
the story: 'Why did they not Grab and Eat ?'4 (Chhiniye Khaini Keno ?)
This story was probably written in 1945, though published in 1947. It was
written against the background of the 1943 Bengal famine which might
have been checked but for the rapacity of hoardeis and the ineffectuality
of the food policy of the government.5 It perhaps takes its cue from a
question which Nehru, exasperated by the passivity of the starving population
of Bengal, reportedly asked. Even at the stage of the plotting of the story
Manik was clear about the answer: 'When the body is weak with starva-
tion, the natural instinct for survival is also deadened; people canno
unite, they cannot flare up . .6 But we are interested more in the way in
which this conclusion is reached in the story. The first person narrator is
presumably a middle class political worker who has come to the village,
after the ravages of famine are over and people are returning to their
homesteads to settle down again. There is, however, a story within the
story to which this narrator is a partly silent listener, asking questions o
commenting in asides only occasionally. The main story which directly
explores the reasons for the passivity of a starving population is narrated
by Jogi, a low-caste peasant who also has the reputation of turning t
banditry from time to time. The famine is just over and Jogi who has just
completed two years in jail for having looted a government consignment
of rice and is now a settled peasant again, recounts his experience of going
to the city in search of food.

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 49

When the famine began, he had taken to looting rice from hoard
and distributing it among the hungry. The effort was short-lived bec
who would agree to loot rice only to give it away ? Later, he goes to
district town and joining the herds of beggars who flock to the reli
kitchen run by the government starts counselling them to grab and eat. Bu
he finds them too lethargic, only waking up to push and jostle each o
when time for the distribution of watery 'khichuri' arrives. Then one
a big consignment of rice comes for the relief kitchen. Before this ca
spirited away to be sold in the black market, Jogi manages to create
furore at the railway station with the help of a few 'anti-socials', so t
those in the management of the kitchen, temporarily baffled, are for
to deposit all the rice at the godown of the relief kitchen. Following t
for a couple of days the 'khichuri' becomes more substantial and even
potato per head is added to it. This creates an astounding change amo
the recipients, who acquire a sudden militancy and start urging Jog
lead them to grab and eat. But Jogi is not just a robber, he is an org
nizer. And he takes time to make plans for launching the attack. In
meantime, the black-marketeers are not sitting idle. At dead of night
the rice vanishes. Next day, the 'khichuri' is more watery than e
Initially this provokes wild anger, but Jogi still needs time, still holds the
back, and by the time he is ready, his companions, back to their usu
watery diet, have sunk into the depth of lethargy again.
Jogi mocks at the usual explanations given by 'babus' to
question why they did not grab and eat, explanations such as: peasan
being naturally law-abiding, did not want to do anything illegal or t
they were, by training, fatalists and accepted death as their fate, or t
they were used to starvation. Jogi exposes the silliness and self-decept
involved in such arguments. No doubt he would also have mocked at
version of the so-called 'entitlement thesis' supplied by foreign academ
of more recent times such as Greenough, according to whom the trad
nalism of the Indian peasantry was such that they morally accepted
situation where food was denied to them by feudal or patriarchal
superiors : in other words, cultural conditioning, (apparently some-
thing unchangeable) was a crucial factor in multiplying the number of
starvation-deaths.7 I am referring to Greenough's thesis here because it
shows how apparently objective scholarship, even today, absorbs without
demur, long-standing myths regarding the cultural staticness of the
peasantry in what was in fact one of the stormiest periods in its history.
What was the mental state of the Bengali peasant when he was starving to
death in 1943 ? A much more plausible reconstruction of this is to be
found in Manik Bandopadhyay's short story than in Greenough's work.
For Manik Bandopadhyay, Jogi is a narrational device exposing the
limitedness of the petty bourgeois understanding of the life and the
moral values of the poor peasant. But Jogi's extraordinary articulateness
is not purely a matter of external authorial intervention, it is a case of

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50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

highly creative response to a political-economic situation where the

peasant may become as articulate as Jogi and analyze his own situati
as clear terms in a language which it might be possible for him to u
is an exploration of the possibilities of change in the traditional per
lity-pattern, in reaction to a certain specific historical situation. It is
resting that the theme of sexual behaviour should be interwoven with
theme of starvation in Jogi's narration.
Militancy requires a material basis as well as sexuality, says Jog
Lack of food saps this material basis in both cases. To explain the dest
tion of militancy in peasants, he retells in the fashion of a folk-tale, a
myth about the destruction of sexuality through starvation. A herm
emaciated by long penance, married a princess and was naively surpr
that his wife did not produce any children even after a couple of yea
married life. Rebuked by his wife, he proceeded to fortify him
with ample and rich food and soon recovered from his induced impot
Similarly one has to eat in order to be militant. The myth of the des
tion of sexuality through starvation has been evoked not without re
This is one of the themes of the story and it is brought in to m
mockery of the unholy excitement of the middle class reader over t
unfamiliar sexual charms of the village damsel.
In another story 'Dhan Jan Jouban'8 written slightly earlier N
malendu, a landowner-cum factory owner, baffled by the coy chastit
the upper class girl he might have married, visits the passively acquie
Sumati, the wife of a small tenant of his. He supplies the weaver-hus
with yarn from his factory, and the wife with his sexual favours, bu
terrified of the dirt and murk of his tenant's cottage, suspicious
Sumati might give him some disease. Yet he keeps on using Sumati, w
his ingrown respect for the chastity of the upperclass girl keeps him
violating her. Manik makes the narration a device to point out that
middle class reader shares with Nirmalendu this combind fear of
fascination for poverty. The former's attitude to the sexuality of the
peasant woman is by training a specific manifestation of this. Suma
submissiveness-the fact that she prizes the attentions of the zamind
son higher than her virtue-gives Nirmalendu a self-confidence and a
of power. Her sexuality for Nirmalendu exists in so far as her chastit
so easily violable, in so far as it can be bought in lieu of small presen
taken away under threat. On the other hand, the sexuality of the u
class girl consists precisely in that her virtue is so precious. Manik sup
in Nirmalendu, a terrifying mirror in which the middle class reade
see his face.

The mode of narration in 'Why Did They Not Grab and Eat ?' is
different, but not less effective. Here the sexuality of the peasant woman is
explicated from two separate angles of vision: (a) through the eyes of
Jogi, (b) through the eyes of Jogi's visitor who makes Jogi tell his story;
both different from the point of view which exploits her as a commodity.

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 51

Jogi recalls the destitute women he met at the relief kitchen, w

who solicited him, because he looked more well-fed than the others.
few sharp dispassionate phrases the peasant himself describes how s
tion has almost destroyed the sexuality of the peasant women: 'On
like crying to see the women carrying on. Women indeed ! Dried-u
stretched on a few bones, full of sores at that. Madly scratching stra
matted hair for lice. Dugs no dugs, but shrivelled nipples: buttocks
buttocks, just sharp bones sticking out. And how awful they smelt
dead snakes, or rotting mice. And all their effort was to hook a ma
might provide a full meal ! All her sexuality now lies in that she sel
self cheap- just for a full meal.' Jogi's dispassionate manner of spe
purges the language of any moral undertones connected with the no
chastity. The tragedy here does not lie in the loss of chastity, but
loss of sexuality which runs parallel to the woman's getting cheape
cheaper as a commodity.9
With an intricate sense of the dynamics of this situation, the a
brings into the story the image of another peasant woman, Jogi's
who flits in and out of the frame of narration. First she comes out with a
lamp in her hand, then brings Jogi his 'hookah' at his behest. Casually,
Jogi says, 'This is my wife. She got lost. Went looking for her in the
district-town after my release. Found her after a month or so'. lhe visitor
is shocked into silence as he realizes the implication of Jogi's words. Jogi
goes on to his main theme, but the visitor starts looking at the wife with a
new curiosity. Her face lit up by the glowing embers of the hookah, is
slightly elongated, with no prominent features. It is a calm and relaxed
face, without any traces of the life lived as a 'bad' woman in town-slums.
She is tall and lean, but in good health. The folds of her unbleached saree
cover her small breasts, 'which would fill up readily with nectar with a
child on its way.' She can be seen smiling when the visitor says he would
have something to eat, brings him a whole pile of titbits, gets mildly rebuk-
ed by Jogi for this uncalled-for extravagance and then as Jogi turns
slightly apologetic because he has not gone out to get fish. she turns upon
him and retorts, 'As if I am dying for fish ?'
Each detail, seen through the eyes of the middle class visitor, is an
assertion of her sexuality and a contrast to the image of the starved
peasantwoman. This visitor, however, sees her in her context. He knows
that after Jogi went to jail, in her helplessness, she might have starved and
become like the women Jogi saw. But even at the onset of that process
of the loss of desirability, she was picked up and forced to sell her body,
so that she was saved from starvation. Not to have done this now would
not have saved her chastity later. On the other hand, that she did not
starve immediately does not mean that, having been devalued as a com-
modity, she would not do so later. Her rescue by Jogi was just a timely
one. She might have lost both her virtue and her life because she is a
victim of forces too strong for her. Through Jogi, the middle class visitor

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52 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

too gets a new perspective to the problem. As he notices that Jogi's

a few months' pregnant and observes that she cannot be carrying
child, he understands why the couple are accepting all this withou
fuss. The thesis of the traditionalism of the Bengali peasant ce
does not explain this apparent resignation in the face of disaster.
not, in fact, resignation, but indicates a deliberate rejection in
situation of standards of value which are false so far as the peasan
concerned. It is only by admitting the historically conditioned
commoditization not only of the peasant's labour power, but also
body of the peasant-woman, that a concrete view of this problem
arrived at. 'Did not his wife disappear because she could find noth
eat ? Did she not save herself by getting food somehow ? Wha
there in it to make a fuss about ?' It is this new perspective into tr
moral values that emerges out of the moral lassitude which ine
follows destitution and starvation.
In 'Dhan Jan Jouban', which describes a pre-famine situation an
the alignment of dramatis personae is somewhat different. Ragha
his wife and says somewhat melodramatically: 'He took away your c
Why could he not kill you ?' He suspects, quite rightly it seems, that 'C
babu', did not have to threaten Sumati to possess her sexually. No
she starving when this happened. But, in fact, the coercive eleme
much present here as in the case of the destitute peasant woman se
body as a 'free agent.' This is emphasized in the sharp image at th
coconut oil produced in Nirmalendu's factory is sold in the village
This is part of Sumati's usual toilet, but now she blends a bit of t
fumed oil presented to her by Nirmalendu with the coconut oil a
that in her hair and their hut is filled not with the stench of rotti
but with the pervasive oppressive smell of hair oil. This becomes a
olfactory image of Nirmalendu's power over both husband an
Whatever they use, buy or sell, they cannot escape his power. Sum
Raghab not to make undue fuss, but to come to bed and sleep,
has not this kind of thing been happening for ages ? To Raghab's e
tion of impotent anger: 'You think I am ever going to touch you
she retorts : 'You don't have to touch me. I will put a pillow in
between.'

Mechanics of Consent
It is clear that the focus here is not on the supposed philosophical
resignation of the Bengali peasant but on the mechanics of consent in a
semi-feudal society. During the famine ('man-made' not in Greenough's
sense, but in the sense that control over the market was maintained by
landlords and by profiteers big and small) middle and poor peasants,
artisans, fishermen, sharecroppers and landless labourers were not only
forced to live in marginal conditions dictated by the dominant classes, but
they were also forced to die in dictated conditions. Greenough's attempt

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 53

to put the responsibility of starvation-deaths on the putative 'Ben

who regulated entitlements to food by exercising his authority, is rid
to say the least, because it makes the husband in the poor peasan
hold responsible for withholding food from women, childre
people. It is true that households broke up; men left their famil
disappeared; mothers left their children to die.'? But this is not
the adult male in the household was withholding food, but beca
was no food to be withheld or distributed. The highest perce
deaths occurred among age-groups with the least mobility and w
most vulnerable digestive systems-namely old people and children
of women from peasant households generally started only when th
of starvation had begun. Their mobility was less than the m
men.l1 But once the peasant woman was outside, she had one th
to sell than her male counterpart-not just her labour-power
sexual services.
It is by being rooted in this context that Jogi's wife becomes more
concrete than she would have been made by mere meticulous details of
squalor and degradation. She calls into question the entire framework of
moral and emotional assumptions on which bourgeois fiction is based.
And Sumati's situation is not unrelated to hers. The apparent submis-
siveness of Sumati itself becomes a destructive critique of the hierarchy of
the chastity in which women of different classes are placed in the ideological
framework of bourgeois fiction. Sumati's consent becomes an inevitability
in her situation, while in the situation of Jogi's wife, consent becomes
irrelevant.
The response of the husband in each case, is a significant part of the
total context. Raghab's role as the figure of authority within the domestic
sphere is expressed in his melodramatic assertion that he is not going to
touch his defiled wife again. But this role is gradually made to disintegrate
in the story. He is clapped in jail by Nirmalendu on a false charge at the
end of the story-revealing that it is not up to him to decide whether he
would touch his own wife or not. Jogi's role as a domestic authority-
figure is developed on a much lower key from the very outset. The tone
of rebuke changes to a tone of apology as Jogi tells his wife that he had
not been able to go out and get fish that day. Her retort: 'As if I am
dying for fish !' is poignant. She can afford to say this with confidence
today, because at one time she might have indeed died for lack of food,
but decided to save herself anyhow. Jogi's acceptance of his pregnant wife
is his own way of showing respect to this will to live. In fact it is a new
relationship of mutual respect between husband and wife.
This reconstructed relationship is so concrete not because it neces-
sarily corresponds to the average actuality, but because it is able to suggest
a total context of relations in which it is embedded. Similarly in 'Dhan
Jan Jouban', the hackneyed, sometimes titillating myth of the lecherous
land-owner is converted into a ruthless exploration of the political economy

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54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

of such lechery. This does not mean that Nirmal's lecherousness

have a logic of its own, that he is lecherous because he is a land-ow
that mentally his lechery does not extend to the upper-class girl
to marry. It means that this lechery is conditioned by the concre
relations within the social structure. In this sense, the notion of 's
sarily acquires a classcharacter in these stories. This totalisation as
device is proved to be an opening out rather than a closing
relations emerge in their dynamic historical entity moving withi
complex of relations. The reductionism of naturalistic fiction is thus
withstood.
My last example of Manik Bandopadhyay's portrayal of the sexuality
of the peasant woman is a story with the title 'Mangala',12 set in the
period of peasant upsurge in Bengal in the 1940s. The militancy of women
in the peasant movements of the 1940s is a well-known historical fact13;
what is important for us today is a proper contextualized analysis of this
militancy and an important aspect of our problematic would be the inter-
twining of the women's question with the peasant's question. It is
generally agreed that participation of women in a massstruggle also tends
to enhance their awareness of patriarchal oppression within the family and
the social structure; women may emerge in new roles which are in conflict
with the settled patterns of domestic oppression in the course of the
movement. Confusion abounds however as soon as we forget that these
patterns are not identical at different levels of the peasantry; they also
differ radically from patterns of domestic oppression to be found in urban
middle class society. Neglect of such related specificities in the name of
discovering the autonomy of women's consciousness causes the power-
relationship between men and women to be regarded as something absolute
and unvarying. The complexity this power-relationship acquires within
the total framework of other relations is lost: the women's question be-
comes an abstraction hanging in an intellectual void.14

Impact of the Peasant Movement

In 'Mangala', as in more famous stories such as 'Haraner Natjamai',
set in the period of the Tebhaga struggle, the characters are sharecroppers
or poor peasants. They are mostly either 'low-caste' Hindus, or Muslims.
Manik's stories seem to be set more often in the southern parts of rural
Bengal with which he was more familiar. The element of local colouring
is minimal, however, and this economy is part of the author's emphasis on
the specific logic of the participation of women in a peasant insurrection.
'Mangala' for instance was presumably written slightly before the
Tebhaga movement was launched-either late in 1945 or early in 1946.15
It might have been inspired by the earlier struggles against eviction (24
Parganas) or against illegal taxes and interest imposed upon sharecroppers
(Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri).16 It might also contain some reverberations of the
August Movement of 1942, which in spite of being politically misguided,

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 55

unleashed the fighting spirit of peasantry. It does not really matter

the immediate inspiration of the story was. Its portrayal of severe re
sion, and of a movement in retreat might even be taken to anticip
course of the Tebhaga struggle.
Similarly, the characters are thumbnail sketches. We are not e
told what the marital status of Mangala, the central figure, is.
know is that she is a single childless woman living with her young br
and taking a leading part in the resistance. We also know that she
have 'willingly surrendered her chastity' to Golok, one of the p
militants who has gone into hiding; instead her chastity was forcibly
away from her by the police, who also mercilessly whipped her on
naked buttocks to wrest a confession. Her buttocks still ache as she
thinks of her own humiliation and the frustration of her love.
Mangala's specificity lies not in the author's recounting of this or
that particular episode in the history of peasant militancy of the 1940s but
in the analytical insight which the story gives into the complex relation-
ship between the peasant-women's consciousness and her world. Notably,
Mangala's conscious struggle against her class-enemies and her struggle to
fulfil her sexuality are aspects of the same system of social relations. The
decision of the militants to surrender to save the village from harrassment
is followed by Mangala's personal decision to wrest comfort out of defeat,
to keep the police at bay for one night while she, like others in the village,
may be together with her loved one. The brief moment of luxurious
abandon in a lifetime of exploitation and repression is also a political gesture
of defiance against the powers that be. A sharp and clipped account of
the 'luxury' Mangala can afford also reveals as in Jogi's story, the pos-
sibilities of a new man-woman relationship. The wound under her foot is
infected and she has fever. But she pulls herself together and goes on the
'manly' errand of tackling the village spy so as to ensure that the police
would not be informed of the arrival of the militants in the village before
dawn. She comes back and lies down contentedly, directs her brothers to
start cooking what little there is, for 'we have a gu:st for the night, he
must have something to eat, mustn't he ?' and then she turns to Golok and
quite unashamed, confers on him a 'womanly' errand of love: 'You, why
don't you massage my legs a bit ?' With this, the story ends.
This, in fact, offers a fine counterpoint to the first sequence in
the story, where, with the police raid over, Mangala emerges from
her hiding-place in the pond with her feet bleeding and legs aching.
It is these suffering legs which carry her unfailingly to her tasks, domestic
and extra-domestic, and again it is her legs hanker for the caring touch of
her lover. In the first sequence she had shed bitter tears as she remember-
ed the violation of her chastity; and as she thought: Who was she to
Golok ? Why should he come to see her ? The story ends with a surge of
exaltation even in defeat--an exaltation that Mangala feels both as a
woman and as a political worker. Mangala's legs become the image of her

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56 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

astonishing vitality, political and sexual.

The reversal of gender-roles in the story does not represe
average actuality but a new possibility.17 With the minimum of w
Manik establishes how this is historically plausible. As a woman be
to the 'low caste' poor peasantry, she may have participated in the ec
activities of the family and have shared a certain 'equality in oppr
with her male counterparts.l8 Of course as a woman she was also v
able to sexual violence from the class-enemies but for her this was not a
moral disaster, but a mode of political oppression through humiliation. So
when the moment of struggle comes, it is directly her struggle too. He
demand to be liberated from her role of subservience within the family
can only have meaning within this special context. It is in the interest
the struggle against the class-enemy that this liberation acquires urgen
for her. But this liberation also has a logic of its own. Mangala vind
cates her sexuality in two ways: by achieving equality with her ma
comrades in the struggle and by winning her lover if only for a
night.
As for the men, their acquiescence with Mangala's demands is not
merely a special concession to her strong personality. It is also an outcome
of their struggle. Mangala's brothers are mildly apologetic that they cannot
save her from harassment. But it is more an expression of their sympathy
for a co-fighter based on implicit mutual understanding than of the typical
'machismo' of the family man. What Golok leaves unexpressed as she
places his cool hand on Mangala's feverish body is a similar sentiment.
Mangala removes the hand from her body but places it at her feverish
brow, thus suggesting without a word that she understands and appre-
ciates.
Thus in these constructed relationships class-hatred and class-sym-
pathy constitute the concretizing principle. 'Class' is not here a blanket-
category, a mechanical schema to wipe out the variety and multiplicity of
real life, but an analytical devise to make this variety intelligible. Set in a
dynamic historical situation, Manik Bandopadhyay's studies of sexuality
show how the notion of class can help a creative writer to subvert bour-
geois naturalism while taking account of the most intricate human
relationships that such naturalism professes to excel in portraying.

1. Manik Bandopadhyay, Granthabali, Vol. 12, Calcutta, 1975, p. 581.

2. This came to be known as the 'Kallal'- phase in Bengali literature after a
group of writers who, inspired by the naturalistic writings of Zola, Hamsun
and Maxim Gorky, sought in their own way, to make a niche in Bengali
literature for the oppressed classes.
3. Granthabali, Vol. 12, p. 584-5. The reference is to a story by Achintya Kumar
Sengupta called 'Mulhi Bayen'.
4. Granthabali, Vol. 8, p. 634-643.
5. Agrarian Relations in India 1793-1947, Sunil Sen, Delhi, 1979, p. 151. P.C.

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 57

Joshi's 'Behind the man-made famine', an article published in the organ o

Communist Party People's War (14 Nov. 1943), is a valuable early analys
the role of hoarders and of the policy-makers of the 'imperialist bureauc
in aggravating the famine.
6. Aprokasbito Manik Bandopadhyay, ed. Jugantar Chakrabarti, Calcutta, 1
p. 11. The passage appears in an entry for the 1945 diary of Manik Band
dhyay. Beside the plot of the story is written in 1945.
7. Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal, The Fam
1943-44, N.Y., 1982, E.G. p. 265: 'In a direct, political sense the epithet "m
made" [in relation to the famine] was an accusation, a shaft directed a
officials, politicians and merchants popularly [!!] held responsible for
famine. But the fuller implications of calling the famine "man-made"
that it was not a result of natural disasters or organic pathologies, that i
shaped by purposeful human conduct, and that the chief actors were-lite
Bengali men, whose actions reflected Bengali values and Bengali conceptio
what was ultimately at risk. In short, the "man-made" famine was cultu
patterned in its onset, crisis and denouement.'
8. Granthabali Vol. 5 p. 421-30
9. People's War Dec. 5, 1943 contains the sketch of a peasant woman f
Satkania who lay dying at the Chittagong Relief Hospital. An English tr
tion of some verses in the Chittagong dialect describing her life story i
own words appears with it. Loss of chastity, in her case too, is mere
episode in a tale which ends with death from starvation. See 'NERI' Gran
ball. Vol. 6 p. 330-333. In this story, which starts in Sataikhuni village
famine first strikes at Tara's hair, which was her chief pride as a woma
the course of the story, she loses all her hair and her reason with it, th
emphasizing that loss of chastity here is but one aspect of a total proces
dehumanisation.
10. Renu Chakravarty gives some of the statistics of devastation in her Commu-
nists in the Indian Women's Movement, Delhi, 1980 (p. 28). See also Reports in
People's War November 14, 1943 ; May), 1944.
11. Due to the acute cloth-famine, of which Greenough says nothing, in some
cases, women could not even go to the relief-kitchens because they had
nothing to wear. Report from Noakhali Peoples' War Sept. 5, 1943.
12. Granthabali, Vol. 6, pp. 292-96.
13. A report of Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti activities during the famine period in
Rangpur, in People's War (Jan. 9, 1944) speaks 'of a very militant, entirely
new, type of womanhood among the peasants, who upto now, were backward
and ignorant.' In Sunderdighi in Debigunj thana, the women took a leading
role in preventing the 'aman' crop from going to the hoarders. In the Tebhaga
period, women's Volunteers Corps were formed in Rangpur, as elsewhere,
using traditional domestic instruments for weapons (Rangpur Jelar Krishak
Andoloner Itihas 0 Party Sudhir Mukhopadhyay, Nripen Ghosh and Mahitosh
Nandi, Calcutta, 1986. p. 110). It may be observed, however, that the militancy
of women was never entirely a spontaneous, volcanic eruption, but had some
minimal organizational effort behind it. The militancy of Hajong tribal women
of Mymensingh in the 1940s had its roots in the attempts of the Kishan Sabh
in the late 1930s to organize them. It was in the Hajong area that for the first
time, women attended classes arranged by the AIKS for political-organisationa
training (Krishak Sabhar Itihas, Abdulla Rasul, Calcutta, 1980, p. 122). Rasu

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58 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

in this book and Manikuntala Sen in her reminiscences (Sheidner Kath

mention how much more difficult it was to organize Muslim peasant
observing 'purdah'. Tribal and 'low-caste' Hindu women were general
in touch with the outside world in their daily lives.
14. Peter Custers' 'Women's Role in Tebhaga Movement', EPW, Vol. XX
Oct. 25, 1986, is an example of this kind of research. The article proc
the assumptions that.
(a) women's participation in the Tebhaga movement was entirely spon
(b) The 'opportunistic' leadership of the Communist Party thwar
development of women's initiative because of its 'patriarchal prejud
(c) but for this 'opportunism' the uprising would have contributed
supposedly revolutionary situation at the national level. As for th
assumption, Custers' evidcnce is very meagre and mostly base
hearsay. The widespread popularity of Congress leadership and
phere of communal tension are but two of the well-known factors
cating the national situation in 1946-47, but Custers does not see ev
As for his belief that the Tebhaga Movement might have turne
revolutionary war, Custers has rushed in where better-equipped
have trodden warily. D.N. Dhanagare, for example, provides ample
for rejecting Hamza Alavi's thesis which is on similar lines (P
Movements in India 1920-1950, OUP, 1983, p. 192). But Custers' sim
account seems to have but one purpose: to foist the entire respons
of betraying the supposedly 'revolutionary' situation on the
Communist Party.
The political-organizational weaknesses of the Tebhaga Move
have been extensively discussed. In fact, some of the criticisms gi
by Custers to be whispered confessions can be found in elementary t
the movement. These weaknesses surely derived at least partly from
nesses of the Kishan Sabha and of the Party. Moreover a party
of people, these people come from a particular social situation and
generally give up overnight the prejudices- even patriarchal pre
which they bring with them from their lived life. This requires a pro
ideological battle of which the Tebhaga situation offers one inte
example. It is one thing to analyse the course of this ideologica
and another to regard the party-str cture as a straitjacket impose
above and perpetuating traditional hierarchies. This is a totally me
view of party-organization to say the least. But Custers must uph
mechanical and simplistic notion since he has to counterpose the'sp
ous' militancy of the women against it.
Tebhaga mevement supplied a platform for different interest-
from the most oppressed sections of the peasantry to come to
Women joined hands with men, and agricultural labourers put dow
lives side by side with sharecroppers, although the movement star
specific issues involving the sharecroppers only. That more s
demands for women (e.g. equal wages for equal work) and for t
cultural labourers, were not raised during the movement is no
symptomatic of its weakness. But the suggestion that organi
leadership deliberately suppressed such demands and abandoned th
ment in the face of danger is totally unwarranted. This attitude a

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 THE CLASS CHARACTER OF SEXUALITY 59

to recognize what the principal contradiction was-what made w

agricultural labourers join a movement which underplayed, It wa
issue, a class-issue, which brought them together.
Custers' total obliviousness to this makes his reconstruction of the
episodes in the Tebhaga struggle colourful and melodramatic, but hardly
realistic. The 'brave' 'militant' women are set against the dithering men
and the unscrupulous and inefficient party leaders. The historically spesific
character of women's bravery is entirely lost in his portrayal. It seems to
be something instinctive, apriori. To make up for the invisibility of
women in history, Custers has succeeded in making invisible all other
social relationships apart from the patriarchal. Thereby the reality of the
partriarchal relationship itself gets completely fuzzed up.
15. Granthabali, Vol. 6, p. 262.
16. Krishak Sabhar Itihas. pp. 82, 100.
17. An example of increased organizational activity among women making them
question the domestic role of subservience is given by Renu Chakravartty in
Commnmuists in the Indian Women's Movement, Delhi 1980, p. 156.
'An old kisan hearing all the talk of women participating in the work of the
Kisan Sabha asked: "How can the Kisan Sabha help you ?" Pat came the
answer : "Your members can stop beating their wives."
18. The term is used by Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class (N.Y. 1981, p. 19)
to denote the similar standards of treatment meted out to the male and the
female black slave in America by their owner.

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