Bengal's Politics Was Always Tumultuous, Samaresh Majumdar Had Once Traced Exactly Why

Beneath the high-pitched electoral contest being witnessed between the ruling Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) before the upcoming West Bengal assembly elections, lie serious concerns which have far-reaching impact on the state’s population, including those involving the disenfranchisement of 27 lakh voters – especially Muslims – from the state’s electoral rolls, the continuing phenomenon of political violence and the plight of the poor and working class population, to which subsequent governments in the state have turned a blind eye.

What has led West Bengal to the current juncture? To understand, one has to examine the history of the state’s tumultuous political arc since independence, wherein each time an existing system crumbled, its vestiges latched on to the new rulers, till they too were swept away by another tide of change.

Literature remains a powerful mechanism to chronicle journeys stretching across decades, and the fact that numerous works in Bengali literature have been influenced by politics, these stories serve as apt examples for charting the trajectory of the state where the personal and political are inextricably linked.

One such epic work in Bengali literature is the Animesh quartet, four books – Uttoradhikar (1979), Kalbela (1983), Kalpurush (1989) and Mousholkal (2013) – written by renowned Bengali writer Samaresh Majumdar.

The four books take the reader along a journey spanning seventy years, through the many contours of the uneven political milieu of West Bengal as we see the state through the eyes of labourers, politicians, the educated but unemployed youth and the musclemen who help regimes consolidate power over the years.

Majumdar’s ingenuity lies in his ability to tell the reader about the larger picture through his portrayal of flawed, yet oddly endearing people whom we encounter everyday, characters whom we see waiting in queues to fill water buckets in slums with open drains, or standing over the footrest of a crowded public bus on their way to work.

The continuing phenomenon of tea garden workers’ plight

In Uttoradhikar, the first book of the series, Majumdar tells us the plight of tea garden workers in Swargochera, a small tea estate nestled in the picturesque North Bengal, where the main protagonist Animesh Mitra grows up surrounded by the incessant hum of crickets, where the setting sun disappears behind the Angrabhasa river, as the shadows cast over the dense forest – home to wild elephants – announce the end of another day.

Uttoradhikar is set at a time when the popularity of the Congress was at its peak, even as supporters of the communist party were preparing to throw the grand old party its first electoral challenge in newly-independent India.

The state has come a long way since then, with both the Congress party and the left no longer among the top two political players in West Bengal.

And yet, the poverty and exploitation of tea garden workers that Majumdar describes in Uttoradhikar is not a thing of the bygone era. It was very much real when 51-year-old tea worker Gunjan Naik took his last breath in June 2025, after spending his life in penury.

Even half a century after the book was written, landless farm labourers in Bengal continue to live under poverty and the uncertainty of not being able to arrange the next meal of the day.

Uttoradhikar effortlessly fuses the ruminations of an adolescent boy – his trysts with the complexities of a joint family, grief of losing his mother and getting acquainted with the pull of romantic attraction – with the politics of those nascent years after independence.

While Uttoradhikar spoke of the rapidly changing rural landscape of West Bengal and the problems faced by its exploited workforce, Kalbela, the second instalment of the quartet and arguably the most famous creation of Majumdar focuses on the urbane, educated middle class, their contradictions and also on human relationships.

Majumdar’s books give a glimpse of the ideological flexibility among the state’s political class

Set at the end of the 1960s, when a coalition of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) and the Bangla Congress – a breakaway faction of the Indian National Congress – governed the state, Kalbela talks of the failed Naxalbari uprising of the late 1960s and 70s, also giving a glimpse of the ideological flexibility that the state continues to see among its political class till this date.

In Kalbela, Animesh is now studying in university and after dabbling with the politics of the CPI (M) leaves democratic politics with the hope of engineering an armed revolution in the aftermath of the Naxalbari violence.

By the time the Naxal movement is brutally crushed by the state and Animesh finds himself maimed and rendered handicapped, many of Animesh’s former comrades have switched sides, comfortably ensconced in their ideological flexibility, a phenomenon which is common till date, whenever Bengal politicians switch parties with little regard for their opposing ideological positions.

The only person who stands by him is Madhabilata, whose unwavering love for Animesh is one of the most defining elements of the book.

While love and revolution is a common theme for many epic works of literature, Majumdar, with his craft puts the characters of Animesh and Madhabilata in stark contrast to each other, despite the fact that they are lovers.

Animesh realises that while his revolution has been unsuccessful after being marred by mindless violence and a lack of connect with ground realities, Madhabilata had waged a lonely, and yet successful battle as a single unmarried mother of their child Arko, disowned by her family, tortured by the police for being in love with a Naxalite leader, and yet still very much the woman who never stopped loving her.

One of the recurring themes in Majumdar’s books is the culture of political violence in West Bengal and how both the ruling and opposition parties rely on goons and musclemen to consolidate power, a phenomenon that remains unchanged in present day.

In Kalpurush, his third book of the quartet, with enviable detailing and precision, Majumdar weaves and unravels this structure of intimidation and collusion between politics and goons who serve as a means to garner votes. His prose is pointed, with a matter-of-factly succinctness, which sticks out, at times jolting the reader.

Growing up in a slum, amidst people whose lives never quite transcend beyond the quagmire created by lack of money, Arko, the son of Animesh and Madhabilata, witnesses friends killing each other with bombs and knives just to gain the favour of politicians and the larger-than-life role of the “party” in the daily lives of people.

When we read reports about the 2021 post-poll violence in West Bengal after the victory of the Trinamool Congress, it doesn’t appear that the state has changed much since Majumdar wrote Kalpurush in the 80s, talking about bike-borne gangsters who work for the ruling party.

Three decades since Kalpurush, despite the Trinamool Congress taking the place of the Left and the BJP emerging as the principal opposition party, neither succeeded in giving the state an alternative to this tradition of political violence.

How the author’s predictions came true

Majumdar finishes off the quartet Moushokal, the last part of the series. The name of the book, which was published in 2013, is based on Mausala Parva, the chapter of Mahabharata that pertains to the destruction of Krishna’s Yadava clan in a civil war.

The name of the book chronicles the last years of the Left rule in Bengal and their subsequent decimation in wake of a rising Trinamool Congress.

Mousholkal veers away from ideological discussions and intricately weaves its plot around a giant political system created in the last three decades in the state, wherein the ruling party’s cadre has invaded every walk of life – from earning commissions on sale of buildings, to providing illegal electricity connections in slums.

In the end, Majumdar leaves the readers with an ominous warning with the question – what if those who promised Parivartan (change) end up only furthering the existing status quo, wherein the change is only in terms of the ruling party and the deeply ingrained corrupt system remains unchanged?

Majumdar expresses caution by invoking real incidents, the Mamata Banerjee government’s reaction to the 2012 Park Street gangrape case and the alacrity with which the chief minister in her initial years responded to most criticism by branding the critiques as CPI (M) agents.

By the time Majumdar passed away in 2023 – ten years after writing Mousholkal – most of his predictions about the unchanged nature of West Bengal’s politics had come true.

While the story of Animesh, Madhabilata and Arko ended with Majumdar’s passing away, the four books continue to serve as iconic works of Bengali literature, which through the prism of incredibly humane characters, tell the story of one of the most interesting the diverse states of India.

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