To my beloved ones
Shomee
Sevanti
Abhi
Apu
Reviewing the first volume of this book, a professor teaching history at a university correctly referred to me as "not a trained historian". But I hardly regret the fact, for if I had been what he called "a trained historian", I might have been one of his kind.
Like Jean Chesneaux, the French historian, I believe that history and historians are not above class struggle. As he put it, "Our knowledge of the past is a dynamic factor in the development of society, a significant stake in the political and ideological struggles of today, a sharply contested area. What we know of the past can be of service to the Establishment or to the people's movement". "In class societies", he said, "history is one of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain its power. The state apparatus tries to control the past at the level of both political action and ideology". "The revision of official history", therefore, "is regarded as one of the essential points of departure for the people's struggles".
The history of the `Gandhian Era' as well as of the earlier period, which is elitist, permeated with the ideology of the ruling class and full of half-truths and myths, needs to be re-written.
I remember now, as I often do, the debt -- that can never be re-paid -- I owe to those who, sharing my ideas and braving immense risks, gave me shelter and food when shelter was more precious than food. But for them this book could never have been written.
In the course of preparation of this book many friends have helped me with books and journals. Among them are Amit Sen, Asit Majumdar, Nimai Adhikari, Dr Muktesh Ghosh, Prof. Amit Bhattacharya, Tarun Bose, Anu Bose, and Amit Banerjee. For Communist Party publications or xerox copies of communist documents I am in deep debt to Ranjit Mukherjee, Samarendra Lochan Mitra, Professors Amitabha Chandra and Hari P. Sharma, and some former students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I sincerely thank Sri Chittaranjan Bhattacharya, in-charge of the Library, Indian Statistical Institute, who kindly permitted me to use the library even when I was not a member of the Institute. Besides the above friends, I owe much to several others, some of who prefer to remain anonymous.
I cannot adequately express my thanks to the Research Unit for Political Economy, Bombay, specially to Rajani X. Desai, who kindly relieved me of the burden of publishing this volume and took it upon themselves.
Several of my articles published in Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Colorado), Frontier (Calcutta) and Kalam (New Delhi) were early, concise versions of what appears in some chapters of this volume.
SUNITI KUMAR GHOSH
10 Raja Rajkrishna Street
Suite 8, Calcutta 700006