A Hundred Years of Pauline and C.R. (Dick) Hensman

The birth anniversaries of Pauline Hensman (née Swan) and Dick Hensman occurred over the course of the past year. This attempt to provide an overview of their life and times will inevitably suffer from gaps, since neither they nor most of their contemporaries are alive. It will therefore have to draw on the imperfect memories of their children and younger friends, who would have to rely on hearsay for the parts of their lives from which they were absent. Nevertheless, the main events and themes of their lives emerge quite clearly.

'The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary' Intertwines the Personal with the Political

Review of Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy, New Delhi: Navayana, 2022, pp. 431.

The personal and the political are intertwined so tightly in Gita Ramaswamy’s Land Guns Caste Woman: Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary that it would be impossible to separate them. Another running thread is intersectionality: the way in which different axes of privilege and oppression interact, sometimes reinforcing each other but also sometimes working in opposite ways.

Manufacturing Offence - The Cartoon Controversy

Background

When the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power, it revised school textbooks published by the National Council of Educational and Research Training (NCERT) in accordance with the ideology of Hindutva. After the NDA was defeated in the elections of 2004, the NCERT under Dr Krishna Kumar began working on the National Curriculum Framework, which came out in 2005. One of the main issues discussed was whether to go back to the pre-NDA texts or design new textbooks altogether. The decision was in favour of the latter course of action, for two main reasons: one, new research and knowledge that had emerged since those textbooks were written needed to be incorporated, and two, the educationists wanted to encourage students to engage in more analytical thinking and debate rather than rote-learning (Menon 2012). ‘The gist of these debates – in which more than 3,000 scholars, teachers, civil servants, activists, students and parents participated through various means – was that the knowledge imparted in schools fails to inspire children, hence any new educational initiative should first worry about reconceptualising the knowledge that different subjects comprise’ (Kumar 2012, p 13). The textbooks came out in 2006, and while they were far from perfect, the new pedagogical approach was widely appreciated by both students and teachers.

The controversy

The cartoon by Shankar Pillai that caused such pandemonium in parliament when various Dalit and non-Dalit members demanded its deletion on May 11, 2012 was published in 1949, and depicted Ambedkar with a whip riding a snail entitled ‘Constitution,’ and Nehru, also with a whip, looking down at the snail from behind. It was entitled ‘Snail’s Pace,’ referring to the slow pace of the drafting of the Indian Constitution, and appeared in a Class XI textbook. This was read as an insult to Ambedkar by Dalit activists, led by Thirumavalavan of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and Ramdas Athavale of the Republican Party of India, who protested against it (Vijapurkar 2012). Thirumavalavan is a Tamil nationalist who extended full support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) even while the Tamil Dalits of Sri Lanka felt that ‘the social movement against caste discrimination has been silenced and more or less co-opted by the LTTE. Caste is seen as, at best, an unnecessary diversion and, at worst, a threat to political and social unification of the desired Tamil nation’ (International Dalit Solidarity Network: 2008, p 7). Athavale (who fought the last municipal elections in Mumbai in alliance with the anti-Dalit Shiv Sena and BJP) demanded not only the withdrawal of the textbooks, but also the arrest of Prof Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, who were advisors for the political science textbooks and resigned in protest. He even condoned the vandalising of Palshikar’s office by four activists of the Republican Panthers of India.

Wage-Labour: Trade Unions and the Struggle to Determine the Value of Labour-Power

Preface

This article was published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform No.2, June–September 1978, as a contribution to an ongoing discussion on trade unions that was being conducted in the Platform Group. We read and discussed Marx on trade unions and their role in determining the value and price of labour power, in converting workers from atomised individuals to an organised force, and in creating the conditions for more human relationships in the family as well as a more healthy and educated working class. Among many other texts, we read Vladimir Akimov’s A Short History of the Social Democratic Movement in Russia 1904/5 and The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1904), and fully agreed with his critique of Lenin’s assertion in What Is To Be Done that ‘Spontaneous development of the labour movement leads precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. The spontaneous labour movement is trade-unionism, it is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei (mere trade-unionism), and trade-unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie’. We read and discussed Franz Neumann’s European Trade Unionism and Politics, in which he notes the link between the triumph of democracy and the recognition of trade unions, and the inherently two-fold aim of the unions ‘not only to secure high wages and decent conditions of work for the worker but also to win for him a new social and political status,’ which is why unions have to be destroyed under fascism.

The practical outcome of these discussions in Bombay was what we called a ‘workers’ inquiry’ into the existing condition of the working class, and the formation of the Union Research Group (URG). We moved widely around Bombay and its surrounding areas meeting worker-unionists in factories and offices, bringing out a Bulletin of Trade Union Research and Information for them, and organising workshops and conferences in which the specific problems they faced and possible responses were discussed. Two of us, with help from other women activists, also conducted research into the condition of working-class women who were not employed in large-scale industry, and tried to help them to work out strategies to tackle the numerous difficulties they faced.