Chapter 2 - Here and There: A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953

Summary

Abstract

The rise of a renewed women’s movement against imperialism and colonialism emerged in the 1940s. The Women’s International Democratic Federation provided the global network to allow local movements, such as the movement in Kolkata, India to strengthen their goals through international networks of solidarity across Asia and the world. Through the political life of Gita Bandyopadhyay, an Indian communist who worked in WIDF’s central offices in Paris and Berlin from 1948 to 1951, this essay explores the connections that dismantled colonialism through women’s solidarity of commonality that traversed the era’s geopolitical differences.

Keywords: internationalism, anti-imperialism, solidarity, colonialism, women’s activism, left feminism

Gita Bandyopadhyay was an exceptional activist: an early fighter for communism when the movement was still in its first decades. Her activism began when she was thirteen years old. She was born to a landed family in Shibnibash, Bengal. Her paternal grandmother, Katyayani Devi fought for the rights of young widows and deserted housewives in the locality, to the dismay of the other Brahmin families in the locality. As Gita described her, “she had such authority in the village that she could make a tiger and a deer drink from the same pond.” Gita was brave like her grandmother, and when she joined the communist movement in the late 1930s, she gave up an entire lifetime of comfort and ease. Her first protest sought the release of political prisoners from the jail in the Andamans and though arrested by the British authorities, to her searing disappointment, she was released because at thirteen years old she was considered underage.

Gita Bandyopadhyay joined the Communist Party of India through its cover: the Workers Party. When in college, she joined the Chhatri Sangh, the leftist women’s student organization linked to the larger All India Federation of Students. In addition, Gita was an early member of the famed leftist women’s organization, the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti, translated as ‘women’s self-respect’ and more commonly, ‘women’s self-defense’ organization. While still in her twenties, she joined the central organizational offices of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Paris, France to help build an anti-imperialist women’s movement.