An Education for Rita review: Brinda Karat’s total recall of her early years as a Marxist

The woman who we knew as Rita in her early years in Delhi, a pseudonym given to her by party comrades during the Emergency, would be very annoyed if anybody was unwise enough to compare Aruna Asaf Ali and Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, the heroines of the Freedom Struggle. But to two generations born after 1970, Brinda may well be the one name that would come to mind when a quiz master would mention “women politicians”. Her last major front-page picture was of Brinda standing in front of the ubiquitous “bulldozer” which sought to erase hutments in one of Delhi’s many slums.

Holding her own, in good times and bad

It is the woman that she is that makes An Education for Rita: A Memoir, 1975-1985 (Leftword) so interesting both to a new general reader, and to a political editor who has observed her for half a century. Her photographic memory, putting even small details in perspective, and her deep personal respect for her seniors, contemporaries, and juniors in the communist movement — first in Bengal and then on the national stage in Delhi — humanises what is also an important document of the party’s work in that tumultuous decade.

In that, it forms an important brace (of books) with fellow Marxist Prabir Purkayastha’s recent work (Keeping Up the Good Fight: From the Emergency to the Present Day) on his years between his two bracketing arrests, first in the 1975 Emergency, and then in the private emergency that Narendra Modi made of the last phase of his second term as prime minister. Both authors are a little similar in part of their early background, as in their easy charm and the ease with which they connect with people. Purkayastha’s book has been reviewed in these columns.

Brinda covers an important area on which little has been written, other than abuse and innuendo in gossip columns of magazines. This is the life and presence of the women in politics, their struggles, the real and perceived obstacles in their path, and the friendships that protect and nurture them. And, one supposes, the cool satisfaction they have when they prove their point that they can hold their own in good times and bad.

Times, places and people populate her book, painted in warm, racy, elegant prose shorn of any shadow of affectation. There is, in fact, often a funny, self-deprecating tone when she talks of, for instance, Prakash Karat, her husband, friend and comrade. But of that, a little more, a little later.

She paints in easy strokes her life in school and college in Calcutta, and London, where working at the Air India cubicle at Heathrow in the day and meeting in the evening at a friend’s home, meeting radical young women and men who triggered her return to Calcutta ‘to become a Communist’.

Back in Calcutta, an unorthodox ‘interview’ for entry into the Communist Party of India Marxist, her shifting to Delhi, and there to an almost instant marriage after falling in love with a comrade. Her baptism by fire as a trade unionist during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975 eventually saw her finally finding herself in the thick of national contemporary politics. She would eventually have a seat in the Indian Parliament.

A decade of a secret life under a pseudonym, spending long hours late into the night in slums organising mill workers, strikes, agitations, police action — her narration has the swiftness of a documentary film that is so singular to her and yet captures the life and times of young Communists in the 1970s and 1980s. But it is not a hagiography of the party, or the ideology, though it remains a loyal defence.

“In bourgeois political parties, family connections open doors. My class origin was the greatest disadvantage in my effort to join the CPI(M),” she writes early in the book. She quotes general secretary P. Sundarayya, telling her, “If you are serious about working on the trade union front, I suggest you shift to Delhi. I have spoken to (Major) Jaipal. He is sensitive and sympathetic to the young women cadre.” She writes how his words ring true even decades later: “It is easier for young women to combat patriarchal trends in society and within the Party when the leading functionary is sensitive and aware of the social and infrastructural support a woman activist requires.”

A capsule on the life of the female working class

Her chapter, ‘Women’s Work’, is a capsule on the life of the female working class, in particular, and life in the tenements and slums connected with the large mills of Delhi in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. She mentions her women comrades with great warmth. Many of them remain close to her decades later, as does the memory of those who have passed on. An interesting nugget is of the many couples and siblings, from well-to-do and highly educated families, who joined the Communist movement instead of resting on their inheritance or building on their family assets. She called them her communist family, as close a bond as she has with her four siblings, of whom she and her younger sister remain.

Brinda was an important part of the trade union movement in the textile mills. She graphically explains how the movement was built, and more graphically how management and saboteurs tried hard to kill the unity. In Modi 3.0, when the ‘biggest’ trade union is run by his RSS, where contract wages are the norm, and labour courts all but defunct, the new reader will be intrigued by the power of trade unions that Brinda’s words evoke. “I often hear it being said that workers’ issues should not be politicised. This is utter humbug. If the government’s pro-capitalist bias is not political, then what is?” she asks.

This reviewer is not going to give a direct quote on her marriage with Prakash Karat, six months after she arrived in Delhi, met the trapping young comrade, and fell in love. She writes how her little niece, tutored by Bengali elders, gave a silver casket of sindoor, vermillion, to Prakash to put in the hair parting of his new bride, to give some cultural colour to a ceremony that saw a series of political speeches by senior members of the Marxist Polit Bureau. While one spoke glowingly of the wife of Karl Marx and her contribution as a ‘communist wife’, Prakash put the sindoor in the designated hair parting.

She says he gave him a look at the words “Communist wife”, and writes “that was the first and last time I wore the sindoor.” The couple also decided not to have any children. Those three pages would make a wonderful short film, preferably in black and white. Political gossip will have to rest with the statement that her rise up the political ladder has little to do with her husband’s own growing importance in the party. They were comrades, friends, and a couple, but their areas of work were very different. She was in trade unions, and then in women’s movements. He was at the head office of the party, so to say. No competitiveness. No jealousy. No easy ladders.

One wishes there would be more such intimate books on contemporary politics. They explain the ideologies, the mechanisms and of the political parties, and the persons in that swirling vortex, in a much better way than a dry political history of a party or a movement.