Kolkata’s Vietnam Connection: A Forgotten Chapter of Familiarity

Kolkata: For any city, the past is an echo of the times it has lived through. Fifty years ago, in 1975, May Day in Kolkata had transformed itself into a spontaneous and triumphant celebration of the defeat of US imperialism and Vietnam’s victory, celebrated as the reunification of the two sundered parts of the country, was declared official.

From a show of working class solidarity and strength, which is how Kolkata has always celebrated May Day, it became both, the city’s salutation to the “sheer human courage and resilience” of the people of Vietnam as in iconic director Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary), 1970, and an occasion for yet another remarkable show of solidarity.

On April 30, 1975, the day North Vietnam Army’s troops and tanks rolled into Saigon –  now Ho Chi Minh City – Kolkata, the only city that could, hit the streets as news spread of the US defeat. Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Rabin Deb recalled he was also on the streets, participating in a rally of celebration. 

On May Day, apart from the Left trade union leadership, the CPI(M)’s leadership were at Sahid Minar, the favourite rally ground of the city; it was large, well-connected to public transport and accessible from both the railway stations – Howrah and Sealdah. It was not as challenging and vast as the sprawling Brigade Parade Grounds. The crowds spilled out of the Sahind Minar grounds and among them were students, like now-retired professor Pranab Basu; distinguished scholar of films, theatre and the performing arts like Samik Bandopadhyay, and Professor Tridib Chakraborti, an expert on Vietnam-India relations.

There were thousands of others, those who were inspired by the slogan “Tomar Naam, Amaar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam,” (Your name and my name is Vietnam, Vietnam). Or, they had read the poetry of Beerendra Chattopadhyaya, a fiery radical poet and Mangal Charan Chattopadhyaya and one of the foremost poets of the 20th century in India, Subhas Mukhopadyaya, also known as “padatik kobi” (footsoldier of poetry). 

Or, they were people who probably watched the iconic theatre personality Shombhu Mitra’s version of Badal Sircar’s The Rest of History. Master of his craft, Mitra substituted Vietnam as an example of The Rest of History, because the name, place and the people and their heroic struggle were proximate, immediate, familiar and significant for Bengali alternative theatre goers. In the original version by Sircar – a pioneer of street theatre in India, an experimentalist and a legend – he had used Congo as the example. The substitution was striking because Vietnam had become an unmissable part of the public discourse.

In Bengali imagination, the war in Vietnam was the most important event of the “past decade” – more important than Apollo 16 docking on the moon. The reason, as Dhritiman Chatterjee says in Pratidwandi, is that five years before Vietnam’s liberation, it was so “unpredictable.” 

Against US imperialism

In the late 1960s, especially after 1968, Bengalis talked all the time about Vietnam and its “heroic struggle” to defeat US Imperialism armed with inadequate fire power against B-52s flying carpet bombing missions, of helicopters with American soldiers armed with machine guns strafing the rice paddies, of the resilience and courage of the physically puny, rice-eating people who were fiercely waging war against a “superpower”. In Bengali imagination, there was a trace of identifying with the North Vietnam Army forces fighting, apparently, insuperable odds.   

A city and a polity that had coined “Tomar Naam, Amar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam” as a war cry against “US imperialism and neo capitalism,” where a street in 1969 was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani, only because the US Deputy Consulate Office was located on it, where a bust of Uncle Ho had been installed so that all manner of communists and emotionally connected individuals could garland the sculpture, made itself a distant outpost of a liberation movement in East Asia. 

Inside the National Library, India’s largest library by volume and for public record, there is a small corner, dedicated to Vietnam. It opened in 2016, as the first country-specific section within the National Library. 

And then there is Ho Chi Minh. Like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh’s face is familiar; it is printed on T-shirts and is always included in the line up of legendary communist leaders. He remains an icon even today, though the details of what he did beyond fighting French and US imperialism have been forgotten. 

Not all the cadres of the dwindling CPI(M) and the CPI recall that “Uncle Ho” visited Kolkata more than once; he made a halt in 1946 on his way to Paris to attend the preliminary round of negotiations for the peace accord, which incidentally collapsed. There is a plaque at the Great Eastern Hotel, described by Mark Twain as the “Jewel of the East,” installed after the grand building was taken over and renovated by the Lalit Group.

In 1958, Ho Chi Minh visited again, probably on a stop over on his way to Paris. That visit is significant; it explains why Ho Chi Minh is so much a part of the city’s history and its imagination. In 1958, Ho Chi Minh went to the office of Swadhinata, the evening daily of then undivided Communist Party of India, to meet Dhiraranjan Sen, who was injured in a rally organised in support of Vietnam’s struggle in January 1947. The British police had fired on rallyists and two people were killed. They were the first martyrs of the movement in India that supported Ho Chi Minh’s fight to liberate Vietnam from French colonial rule. 

When Madam Nguyen Thi Binh visited Kolkata in 2007, the public welcomed her with a massive rally. This was not her first visit. She had come earlier, probably for the first time in 1973. However, this time the turnout was huge; the enormous Netaji Indoor Stadium with a seating capacity of 12,000, was packed. People also gathered outside the stadium just to be in the presence of the lady who stood up to Henry Kissinger and was part of Vietnam’s negotiating team for the peace accord. She was inspiring. 

In 1989, Kolkata hosted General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who defeated the French army and ended its colonial rule by winning the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. He paid his respects at the Ho Chi Minh statue, met the leaders of then ruling CPI(M)-led Left Front, including chief minister Jyoti Basu, attended a public reception and dominated the headlines the next day in the Bengali print media. 

Since 1947, when the first rallyists of the Vietnam liberation died in police action, Kolkata’s relationship to Vietnam has been visceral. 

Samik Bandopadhyay is now 85 years old; his encyclopedic memory is awe inspiring. Even so, the vividness of his recall of the day Vietnam was liberated is remarkable. He says, “We celebrated on the streets, joined the rally and celebrated at home, too.” 

Vietnam was a place not out there somewhere in the vast world; it was a place to which the Bandopadhyay family felt connected with, much like many other Bengalis. However, there was a key difference: Samik Bandopadhyay’s eldest brother, Subrata Banerjee, was posted in Vietnam when he joined the British Army, post 1942, on directives issued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the world war had become a peoples’ war. 

Serving in Vietnam, Banerjee made friends; these friends then made tracks to visit him in Kolkata. The distance was bridged by the emotional attachment between spirited Bengalis inspired by the courage and resilience of the Vietnamese people.

Other notable visitors

Kolkata has hosted many visitors. Back then, after Independence and before globalisation and the digital revolution, the city was a magnet for a particular kind of world leader. 

Writing for the New York Times in 1955, the day General Secretary of CPSU Nikita Krushchev, who was Stalin’s successor, and Premier Nikolai Bulganin flew in, A.M, Rosenthal, who later became the newspapers managing editor, painted a picture of the city: “Late into the night, the streets of India's largest city were jammed with people hoping to get a glimpse of the Russians. This was by far the largest crowd to greet the Soviet leaders. Oldtime residents of Calcutta said they had never seen anything like it, not for Mohandas Gandhi or Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, nor for Indian Independence day.”

The reason why world leaders came to the city, then called Calcutta, was its “reputation of being India's most leftist and turbulent city.” 

The turbulence was packed away when the city played host; the people took over and transformed a formal visit into, as Rosenthal wrote, “the welcoming crush of one of the largest crowds in Indian history”. 

“More than 2,000,000 Bengalis turned out to greet Soviet Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin and Communist party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev and turned a day of welcome into a security officer's nightmare,” he wrote.

Calcutta-Kolkata’s police experienced in managing huge shoving, pushing, excited and determined crowds had to rescue Krushchev and Bulganin from the car in which they were travelling and put them into a secure police van. The crowds remained an index of the size of mobilisations by political parties for decades to come. 

Nelson Mandela also visited the city. So did Yasser Arafat. The public receptions were exceptional. West Bengal and the city always converged at the reception venues, regardless of the effort it may have been to travel from other districts into Kolkata, on packed trains – even the 27 special trains that ran for the Krushchev-Bulganin visit.

When the first democratic election, following the end of monarchy, in Nepal was won by the Left coalition headed by Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Prachanda, a contingent of its leaders had arrived in Kolkata to receive a hero’s welcome at Esplanade East on August 15, 2008. The victory was celebrated in Kathmandu and Kolkata, almost as though Esplanade East was a rally space in Nepal, except for the fact that the crowds who clogged the thoroughfare were Bengalis and resident Nepalese. 

Kolkata knew how to make itself a vibrant extension of whatever was happening in the world. It broke the tall window panes of the American Centre in 1968, as thousands of students and anti-American pro-Vietnam rallyists took to the streets, protesting the visit of Robert Mcnamara, then US Secretary of Defence, and a key figure in the decision to use Agent Orange, increase bombing and escalate the intensity of the war in Vietnam.

 It knew it had to make itself seen and heard when relief ships carrying wheat from Punjab – some donated and some purchased – were flagged off from Haldia port to Cuba after tougher US sanctions were imposed in 1992.

Like the characters in Badal Sircar’s play, the horizon of Kolkata, like that of its immensely aware, educated and conscientious middle class, seems to have closed in on itself. The tendency to behave like frogs in the well was always there. Vivekanda used the word Kupamanduka to describe the Indian condition, whereas conscience keeper and the voice of the Bengali spirit, Rabindranath Tagore lamented that Bengal as the mother had nurtured Bengalis, not humanity.

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