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Subhas Chandra Ganguly
A Commemorative Collection of Life Sketches in English and Bengali
Edited by Frontier Collective
2024, GERMINAL PUBLICATIONS PVT. LTD., Pp 319, Price Rs. 500/-
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Most schools in India have a Principal’s room and a hall – particularly in South India where investment in schools is better. Both the rooms carry galleries of portraits of freedom fighters. The Principal’s room will have Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Netaji Subhash Bose whereas down the hall there will be revolutionaries – Bhagat Singh, Chnadra Shekhar Azad etc.
Nowhere have I seen a portrait of a revolutionary of the late 60s – the Naxalites! In spite of several studies by the state and universities about the socio-economic character of the movement, the state continues to treat them as a ‘security’ issue and wants to gun down their leaders!
In spite of that the State could not prevent publication of several memoirs, books, films, theater and songs! This book is one such publication!
There are several special features of this book. First of all it is fairly large. Then it is bilingual – there are 19 pieces In English and 35 pieces in Bengali!
Since so many people have written, obviously there will be repetitions!
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Subhas was a postgraduate student of statistics in the Kolkata University. What emerges is a portrait of a complete revolutionary.
He was a good student organiser. A good teacher. A good field worker. Extremely well read person. A good theoretician, a good author and a good translator!
Timir, the present editor of Frontier, was a student of Geology in the same hostel. They combined their energies and emerged as good organisers.
In the later half of the 70s both were arrested. They came out after a year and Subhas got engaged in the release of political prisoners forming APDR – Association of Protection of Democratic Rights. Since then civil rights has become a major movement in India!
Subhas also engaged in school maths curriculum with the HSTP program.
Thus he was a many sided personality – a sophisticated individual! That is how revolutionaries are!
Subhas passed away on November 6, 2023.
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T Vijayendra (1943 – ) was born in Mysore, grew up in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s.
Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left-wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left-wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last ten years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. In 2017 he spent a year celebrating the Bicentenary of the Bicycle. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving license nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel-based vehicle.
He divides his time between Hyderabad and organic farms at several places in India, watching birds and writing fiction. He has published a book dealing with resource depletion, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella, an autobiography and a children’s science fiction story on the history of the bicycle, apart from booklets on several topics. His booklet, Kabira Khada Bazar Mein: Call for Local Action in the Wake of Global Emergency (2019, https://archive.org/details/kabira-khada-bazaar-mein) has been translated into Kannada, Bengali and Marathi and is the basic text for the emerging Transition Networks in these language regions. His last book ‘Vijutopias’, which has 12 short stories, is an entertaining book full of hope and energy in these dismal times.
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