IN the dead of night on July 20, some ‘unknown miscreants’ made away with a full-size statue of Rahul Sankrityayan which had been standing at a major crossing of Ranigunj, an industrial city in West Bengal. In the morning, nothing was left of it but some scattered bricks and stones. Shocked residents immediately reported the matter to the adjacent police station, but since then the police have not been able to identify even a single culprit. You may take it as a terse comment on the law-and-order situation in the new BJP regime in West Bengal that the local administration has refused to be bothered by it, neither the Chief Minister, nor any of the local MPs/MLAs have expressed any concern, or condemned the incident or offered reparation. But some BJP goons have come and threatened local CPI(M) workers with dire consequences because they organised a protest meeting together with many concerned residents at the site condemning the vandalism.

Such behaviour is not entirely unexpected since after all, the new regime started with defacing statues of Gandhiji and Lenin and demolishing an installation on the Indigo Rebellion in Bengal in the 1860s elsewhere in the state. Even before BJP came to power, some years back, ABVP cadres, in one of their lively skirmishes with their counterparts in the ruling TMC, had demolished a bust of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar inside the campus of the very college named after him. Now that they are in power, they will of course seek to capture all public spaces by destroying public icons which signify alternative hegemonic presences; the next step, as is the case with all Fascist forces, will be to fill up these gaps in history by other icons more to their liking, to rewrite history at local levels just as they are doing at the national level.

HISTORY OF THE STATUE AT RANIGUNJ

The statue of Rahul Sankrityayan at the Ranigunj crossing, however, has a very special history of its own. Complaints are sometimes made, perhaps with some justice too, that an extraordinary scholar, intellectual and activist in the Freedom Movement like Rahul Sankrityayan has not been given sufficient space in its annals. However, in 1993, the year of his centenary we do observe many efforts in West Bengal to celebrate his life and his work and to make proper assessment of his contributions. In Ranigunj, placed in the coal-belt and with a large industrial population, many labour leaders came together with progressive writers, artists and teachers to organise a year-long programme to observe the centenary. The idea was to highlight Rahul’s role not just as an exceptional scholar, philosopher and linguist, but as a man of the people, an inveterate traveller among the people, constantly seeking to probe the depths of the exploitation and the oppression they faced in society and to understand the way to social emancipation. These searches led to his engagement with the materialist aspects of Buddhist philosophy and its theory of compassion, and then to his research into historical materialism and Marxist theory which he sought to apply to the Indian situation.

The Ranigunj team sought to highlight this concern as displayed in Rahul’s life and works, and the activities planned by them included meetings and discussion sessions in the workers’ mohallas and with groups of peasants. Thus, these programmes sought to popularise Rahul’s life and works as significant for such labouring people. At the end of the centenary year, in 1994 when the statue came up at the Ranigunj crossing as planned, Benoykrishna Choudhury, veteran leader of the peasant movement and at that time a minister in the Left Front Government inaugurated it; Rahul’s family and many dignitaries, writers and intellectuals were present. But together with them a large crowd of ordinary working people also gathered there because the event was of significance to them. Since that time, Rahul’s birthday, the ninth of April has been observed each year at the same spot by the Pashchimbanga Ganatantrik Lekhak Shilpi Sangha.

RAHUL – PEOPLES’ SCHOLAR

Rahul’s name at birth was Kedarnath Pande and he was born to a traditional Brahmin family in the remote village of Pandaha in Bihar. But the social churning which intensified with the broadening of the Freedom Movement in India in the early decades of the 20^th century caught him up and shaped the sharp and inquisitive mind to aspire continually to know and understand the changing world around him. His scholarship came from his engagement with many traditional institutions over the years; while he never got any degrees from ‘modern’ educational institutions, this never could pose a barrier to his voracious desire for knowledge and even when he went through the traditional educational systems, he was able to bring his critical mind to them and further made himself acquainted with traditions of dissent. He was thus, pre-eminently a modern man, a product of the stirring times in which he grew up. He chose the name Rahul Sankrityayan for himself as an itinerant Buddhist scholar and earned wide repute and respect as such when his quest for knowledge took him to Tibet, to Sri Lanka and to Soviet Russia. At the same time, he first went to jail in 1922 as an activist in the Gandhian movement. Later in 1938, he joined the Kisan Sabha and even became the President of AIKS. He went to jail several times while engaged in peasant movements. He was also among the founder-members of the Monghyr unit of the Communist Party of India which started in 1939.

One wonders whether the goons who removed the Ranigunj statue knew about all this or whether it was more of a mindless act of vandalism at a site generally used for left and progressive gatherings.

RSS HOSTILITY

There is no doubt that RSS ideologues have already identified the Left, and Left ideology, as their prime enemies and, if those in power and their cadres take it seriously, it is left public icons that will be constantly targeted from now on in West Bengal too.

But for us, today, Rahul Sankrityayan’s name has more specific resonances. The militant materialist position he took, for instance in his refutation of attacks on historical materialism by ‘sanatanis’ like Karpatriji in his little booklet ‘Ramrajya aur Marxvad’ is of particular relevance today. His brilliantly sarcastic comments on the use of religious faith to establish all exploitation as ‘maya’ and irrational submission to the rich and the powerful as human destiny, Brahminical rule as ethical and dying on the husband’s pyre as the duty of women—have to be read from today’s perspective where fascist unreason is being unleashed to enslave the minds of the exploited and the oppressed. Yes, Fascists have need to fear the untrammelled human mind that Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan represents.

[The details about the history of the Ranigunj statue have been taken from a Bengali article by Anup Mitra, published in Desh-hitaishee, 17 July, 2026]