A Tribute

Dipankar Chakraborty
Subhasish Mukherjee

In 1964, a quiet suburb Baharampur in the district of Murshidabad, about 100 miles away from the state capital, Kolkata, some young enthusiasts, decided to confront the then prevalent decadent culture of Bengal, formed a literary-cultural group, Punascha. The person nucleating the uphill task was a frail individual, teaching economics in the local K N College. His name was Dipankar Chakraborty—a person who could attract personalities like the poets Bishnu Dey, Alokranjan Dasgupta, Manjubhas Mitra on one hand and would be famous writer Udayan Ghosh, Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray, on the other.

Those were the days when the country had plunged into a debt-trap, PL-480 playing havoc and fissure was forthcoming in the left movement of the country. Dipankar was an activist in the student movement in his student days, was also shaping the disoriented teachers’ front at the district level. Punascha, the literary effort was soon to spread in other areas of culture, a cultural society, a debate society and a vibrant film society were also created. The driving engine was always Dipankar, who by now developed a team around his magnetic personality to spearhead all the activities seriously and with alacrity. Without caring for any accolades, Punascha was an instant success. The left movement had its split and Dipankar and his group supported the faction vouching for a radical social change. During this period, the quarterly Punascha had to change its name to Aneek (soldier), thanks to Registrar of Newspapers in India’s dictum. After this new incarnation, Aneek under Dipankar’s able stewwardship, never looked back.

During the India-Pakistan war in 1965, the societies guided by him played a crucial role in maintaining peace and harmony in the district which has borders with the erstwhile East Pakistan. During Naxalbari days, Aneek welcomed the peasant uprising and made the journal a forum for healthy debate around the questions confronting the Indian Communist Movement in those days.

When West Bengal became the hunting ground of the S S Ray’s police and when being an youth was a ‘crime’, Aneek squarely criticised the Police Raj, while remained critical about the ‘annihilation’ line propagated by a section of Naxalites. The seventies saw Dipankar at the forefront of the civil liberties movement and he became an active pillar of the Association For the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR).

Aneek became very much critical about the Indo-Soviet Treaty, India government’s stance on Sikkim, Kashmir and the North-Eastern states. During the Bangladesh liberation war days, Dipankar took an active role in exposing the sham Bengali sentiments publicised by Mujibur Rahaman.

He visited Bangladesh in December 1972 and penned two brilliant reports on the state-of-affairs as regards the stance of various left groups over there, which as of date stand as one of the most authentic historical pieces on the subject. He was described as a ‘person posing a serious threat to Indo-Soviet and Indo-Bangladesh Friendship endeavour’, by the Government of India and was grilled on the Indo-Bangladesh border. During the emergency, when censorship was imposed on newspapers and magazines, one fine day in June 1975, he was arrested, not for any ‘annihilation’, nor for instigating ‘riot’, but for editing a legal, registered literary magazine Aneek. No other editors of any journal of any standing had been booked. Incidentally, this was the second event in which an editor is booked for ‘sedition’ of some kind. (Any thing of that kind goes back to British Days!)

He was released after the emergency was lifted. He became very active in the movement of releasing the political prisoners, who were serving in the jail as undertrial prisoners for six-seven years or more, those who were booked on flimsy grounds. He reorganised the magazine Aneek, and made it a social-political-literary monthly which continues to attract the best minds of the day.

He wrote brilliant pieces of critical essays on Netaji which had generated a stir in the academic circle. Apart from the two dark years of emergency, he saw to it that the journal would never miss a single issue. This year the journal turned 49.

After his retirement he was settled in Kolkata and became very active in people’s movement. During the Singur and Nandigram days, he was very much vocal. He had visited the affected areas several times, was a member of people’s tribunal and obviously was man-handled and detained for some time by the authorities.

His health could not permit the demand of the activities he indulged himself into. He was a chronic patient of COPD, a disease which had reduced his energy to a great degree.

In his last few days he was busy in editing a collection of essays, translated from the Monthly Review in Bengali, to be published in the forthcoming Book Fair. He never left any job half-done.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 30, February 3- 9, 2013

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