For Elora Shehabuddin, the history of communism in South Asia becomes most revealing when viewed from the ground up. In her Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) Friday Lecture Series presentation, Shehabuddin turned to Sylhet, Bangladesh, and to women such as Hena Das, whose political life stretched across anti-colonial activism, communism, Partition, teaching and feminist organizing.
Rather than beginning with party doctrine or Moscow, Shehabuddin is interested in what communism looked like in a specific place. “We sort of know what the official communist doctrine is,” she said. “But if you actually want to get things done, there’s no point relying on stories of what’s happening in Moscow or the Soviet Union. You need to deal with the issues in Sylhet.”
That local focus reveals a politics shaped as much by daily life as by ideology. For activists such as Das, communism offered a language for understanding inequality, but it did not arrive as a fixed script. Women worked with tea garden laborers, famine relief efforts, and local communities whose concerns often exceeded formal political programs.
Shehabuddin also complicates the idea of the activist as a heroic outsider arriving to organize others. In Das’ work with tea garden laborers, for example, the workers were already organizing and protesting. “She’s not there necessarily to organize them,” Shehabuddin said. “She’s there in support, as an ally.” And the relationship ran both ways. Workers protected Das when angry managers came looking for her. Political work depended on trust, solidarity and forms of care that rarely appear in official accounts.
Care also shaped women’s political lives in less visible ways. Many women activists were, as Shehabuddin put it, carrying a “triple burden”: activism, paid work and domestic responsibility. Collective childcare and networks of women helped make political work possible when men did not take on an equal share of care at home.
These histories also unsettle simple stories about Partition. For Das and her family, being Hindu did not automatically mean leaving Sylhet for West Bengal or Assam. Their political commitments produced a more complicated understanding of what Partition could – and could not – change. “For her [Das], becoming a communist means that they’re not interested only in anti-colonialism,” Shehabuddin said. “You can have a new country, but the haves stay the haves, and the have-nots stay the have-nots.”
Political independence did not settle questions of class, gender or belonging, and by following women’s lives closely, Shehabuddin recovers a version of radical politics that was not only ideological: It was local, social, and shaped by the work of living.
