Tebhaga today: Re-reading Adhi Noy, Tebhaga Chai

Hey, sharpen the sickle,
Get it ready to reap the paddy.
We pledge our lives, we pledge our honor,
We will give no more, no more—
This blood-grown paddy is our very life.
I know you, yes I know you,
I recognise you well—
You are not the dark mahout of a white elephant.
In ’50 we gave a hundred thousand lives,
We gave the honor of our mothers and sisters,
You are not the one to light up the black market.
We will not raise crops for others’ granaries,
We will not die of hunger anymore, no more.
We plough the land we’ve borrowed,
We have endured enough—no longer will we bear it.
We will not forget the oath of these firm hands that hold the plough.

Lyrics & tune: Salil Chowdhury

Adhi Noy, Tebhaga Chai, a curatorial exhibition conceived by the students of ‘Modernisms and Critical Revisions’ at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, emerged from a sustained engagement with primary archival materials, oral testimonies, and cultural responses to the Tebhaga movement. Reconfiguring the social and political histories of one of the most significant peasant uprisings in late colonial Bengal, the exhibition attempted to investigate the continued resonance of the movement across changing historical contexts. At its core lies a central curatorial question: how does the positionality of a social movement shift within the socio-political discourse of a different historical moment? This inquiry shaped a month-long curatorial workshop conducted by DAG Museums, which sought to develop new modes of research and interpretation while laying the groundwork for a discursive engagement with the defiant collective power of the peasant-led Tebhaga movement.

The workshop was envisioned to introduce students to the tools and methods to re-conceptualise and reimagine what an exhibition based on the archival material of the Tebhaga movement could look like. The students interacted with a wide range of primary sources, including colonial police records of surveillance preserved in the West Bengal State Archives, newspaper clippings, audio recordings of activists, artists’ testimonies, recollections of the Communist Party of India’s (C. P. I.) workers, diaries, popular songs and poems, slogans that documented different aspects of the peasant movement and unravel the layered and often overlooked histories of collective solidarity deeply embedded within the movement. In doing so, it foregrounds the tensions established between the official archival documentation and lived experiences, memory and cultural expressions as competing yet parallel modes of historical reconstruction. The objective was to develop conceptual tools and methodological frameworks through which the movement could be re-read from various lenses, interspersed with the questions of class, women’s role, organisational politics, left mobilisation and subaltern reading of the movement. Moving away from the purely textual reading of a social movement, the workshop prompted the students to consider the importance of memory, artistic production, oral narratives and local histories in shaping the trajectory of the movement.

The workshop began with a three-day programme introducing students to the methodological frameworks that shaped both their understanding of the Tebhaga movement and their approach to exhibition-making as a critical and relational practice. Conducted across the School of Arts and Aesthetics, J. N. U., the P. C. Joshi Archives, and DAG Museum, the sessions examined how history is interpreted, remembered, and exhibited, while foregrounding the voices and experiences often excluded from dominant historical narratives.

Rather than treating Tebhaga as a singular historical event, the workshop approached it as a complex social process situated at the intersection of agrarian relations, colonial power, peasant consciousness, and everyday lived experience. Students were encouraged to question the conditions under which archives are produced, preserved, and displayed, and to consider how exhibitions can transform historical materials into accessible and meaningful public experiences.

Three interrelated methodological paradigms guided these discussions: the class paradigm, the paradigm of memory, and the subaltern framework. Together, they offered distinct disciplinary perspectives for interrogating dominant nationalist and economic narratives and for reimagining Tebhaga through multiple, often overlooked, histories.

A key aspect of the workshop was treating the archive not as a static repository of historical facts but as material whose meanings shift through exhibition and public engagement. Students reflected on how documents, photographs, testimonies, songs, and other archival records are transformed through display, and how curatorial practice can reshape their interpretation.

The workshop also adopted a relational approach, encouraging students to draw connections between the Tebhaga movement and their own experiences of protest, collective action, and political participation. This process required engaging with the perspectives of historical actors while remaining attentive to the silences, absences, and exclusions that structure the archive. Rather than viewing these gaps as limitations, students explored how they might be made visible through curatorial interpretation. These inquiries culminated in a range of responses—including performance, video, sound, text, drawing, and installation—that reimagined the histories and contemporary resonances of the Tebhaga movement.

Questions that emerged surrounded the diverse ways of reading archival materials and identifying the resonances and gaps within the existing body of knowledge on the Tebhaga movement. These approaches took the form of conceptual assemblages and curatorial operations such as parsing, layering, juxtaposing, playing, situating, annotating, flipping, dismembering, remembering, narrating, reconfiguring, obscuring, immersing, drawing, animating, sequencing, drawing hierarchies, and unravelling. Conceived as methodological tools rather than fixed outcomes or processes, these modes of engagement enabled one to intervene in the archival material, weave new narratives around Tebhaga, and experiment with alternative forms of display. The emphasis was not on what historical material communicates, but also on how it is presented, reassembled, and activated within the exhibition space to generate new meanings and contemporary resonances.

The archive occupies a central place in the conceptual framework of Adhi Noy, Tebhaga Chai, functioning both as a metaphor and a practice through which histories are produced, organised, and remembered. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conception of the archive as the system governing the appearance of statements, the exhibition treats the archive as a site where knowledge and erasure coexist. Rather than focusing solely on archival contents, it asks how archives are constituted and how institutional and state structures shape historical memory.

This approach opens onto the idea of the counter-archive: a set of practices that challenge dominant regimes of knowledge by recovering histories excluded from official records. The exhibition draws on materials from diverse repositories, including the West Bengal State Archives, with its police and administrative records, and the P.C. Joshi Archives. Following Allan Sekula, these materials were read against the classificatory logics of archival documentation, particularly photography, exposing the power relations embedded within visual and bureaucratic systems of governance.

The exhibition also draws on Hal Foster’s notion of the ‘archival impulse,’ which understands archival practice not as the recovery of a fixed past but as an active reconstruction of history from fragments, absences, and overlooked traces. In this sense, archival materials are treated as both found and constructed, enabling the exhibition to reconfigure, rather than simply recover, the histories of the Tebhaga movement. A key premise of Adhi Noy, Tebhaga Chai is the emergence of the exhibition as a counter-archival space. Rather than treating archival materials as stable historical evidence, the exhibition approaches documents, photographs, oral testimonies, songs, and literary fragments as materials to be juxtaposed, annotated, and reinterpreted. In doing so, it challenges dominant historical narratives and addresses the silences and exclusions embedded within official archives.

Counter-archival practice begins from the recognition that institutional memory has often failed to account for the complexities of collective experience. Histories of peasant solidarities, women's political participation, everyday labour, oral traditions, and informal modes of organisation have remained marginal to state-centred accounts of the Tebhaga movement. Instead of viewing these absences simply as gaps in the archive, the exhibition treats them as productive sites of inquiry. Protest songs, oral narratives, rumours, gestures, memories, visual fragments, and local histories become alternative archives that complicate and expand the historical record.

This approach is grounded in oral history as a distinct way of knowing the past. Oral narratives reveal not only the events of Tebhaga but also the lived experiences and political imaginaries of those who participated in it, particularly women whose contributions remain underrepresented in documentary archives. Unlike official records, which privilege chronology and factual verification, oral histories preserve emotion, contradiction, silence, and reinterpretation. As Alessandro Portelli argues, oral history tells us not only what people did but what they believed they were doing and what those experiences have come to mean over time. Memory therefore functions not simply as evidence but as a mode of historical interpretation in which forgetting, inconsistency, and silence are as significant as recollection itself.

The exhibition also recognises memory as a social and political process, continually reshaped through collective narration, relationships, and changing historical contexts. Echoing Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections on memory, it understands the past as extending beyond the institutional archive into experiences that remain dormant until recalled through new encounters. The exhibition thus positions history not as the recovery of a complete past but as an ongoing process of reconstruction through multiple, often contested, forms of remembrance.

Within the exhibition, memory was translated into curatorial form through an intimate archive dedicated to women's experiences of the Tebhaga movement. An audio booth brought together oral testimonies of women participants, allowing their voices to become primary sites of historical knowledge. Rather than privileging factual chronology, these recordings foregrounded pauses, laughter, contradictions, and the affective dimensions of remembrance, documenting forms of political labour that remain largely absent from conventional histories. Accompanying the recordings was a photobook reconstructing the histories of leaders such as Bina Guha and Ila Mitra, drawing extensively on Kavita Panjabi's research on women in the Tebhaga movement.

The exhibition approached memory as a collective social practice through which identities and political subjectivities are formed. Women's recollections revealed the intimate relationship between the personal and the political: for Ila Mitra, remembering became inseparable from her enduring bond with the Santhal community, while Anima Biswas's memories were shaped by loss, political disagreement, and disillusionment. Equally significant was the absence of visual documentation itself. Against official archives that cast women as peripheral figures, the exhibition recovered stories of Ila Mitra as ‘Rani Maa’, rural women sheltering underground organisers, and networks of solidarity sustained through domestic labour, care, and everyday acts of resistance.

Memory also unfolded through protest songs, which functioned as a parallel archive of the movement. Adapting local folk traditions, these songs circulated political ideas through everyday activities such as cooking and agricultural labour, extending political expression beyond public meetings. Storytelling and song positioned participants as narrators of their own histories, creating an alternative archive grounded in lived experience, affect, and collective memory rather than written documentation. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounded forms of historical knowledge that exceed the limits of the institutional archive.

The exhibition's engagement with visual archives similarly challenged dominant histories of the Tebhaga movement. Canonical representations have largely been shaped by the social realist works of artists associated with communist organisations and the Indian People's Theatre Association (I. P. T. A.), including Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore, and Zainul Abedin. Alongside these, the exhibition presented paintings by Haren Das, whose idyllic rural landscapes largely omitted the class conflict and agrarian violence that defined the period. Juxtaposing Das's pastoral imagery with Chittaprosad's famine drawings revealed competing visual constructions of rural Bengal, demonstrating that archives are also ideological ways of seeing.

The counter-archival framework extended beyond Tebhaga to contemporary movements. Archival materials were placed in dialogue with documentation from the 2020–21 farmers' protests and recent student movements, tracing continuities in the visual and political languages of resistance. Particular attention was given to Trolley Times, the newspaper produced during the farmers' protests, as a contemporary counterpart to the Communist Party's People's War and People's Age—alternative print cultures that challenged dominant media narratives through grassroots documentation. Photographs of student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University and other campuses were displayed alongside Tebhaga archives, where torch processions, banners, and public assemblies echoed the imagery of Somnath Hore's woodcuts. These juxtapositions suggested that contemporary movements, like Tebhaga, remain vulnerable to institutional forgetting, while demonstrating how exhibitions can reactivate political memory through new archival constellations.

Taken together, these interventions invite a subaltern reading of Tebhaga. Drawing on Ranajit Guha's insistence that peasant insurgency be understood on its own terms, the exhibition shifts attention away from Communist Party-centred narratives toward the political agency of peasants, women, sharecroppers, agricultural labourers, and other marginalised actors. Reading the colonial archive against the grain uncovers not only its silences but also traces of collective solidarity and everyday resistance. Oral testimony, memory, rumour, songs, domestic practices, visual fragments, and embodied experience emerge as legitimate historical sources that challenge conventional accounts of leadership and political action. Rather than simply recovering forgotten histories, Adhi Noy, Tebhaga Chai reconstructs the archive itself, positioning memory, affect, and subaltern experience as central to both historical knowledge and exhibitionary practice.