‘The Cyclist is No More’

[T Vijayendra [82], a long-time associate of Frontier is no more. He was a shareholder of Germinal Publications Pvt Ltd, the owner of Frontier. For some time he was a director of ‘Germinal’. He passed away on September 9, 2025.It was a great shocking news to his innumerable friends and well-wishers across the country. Many failed to express their feelings and some reflected passionately on universally admired Viju.

His association with the Naxalite Group ‘National Liberation and Democratic Front’ in Kolkata didn’t get much currency. This group had serious ideological differences with the mainstream CPI-Ml, on a number of issuesincluding principal contradiction, mode of production, tactical line, proletarian internationalism and CPC and mass organisation.

Vijayendra was a prolific writer. Most of his political and thought-provoking articles were published in Frontier, mainly in Autumn Numbers. Even in the Autumn Number 2025, there is a fine piece by Viju on ‘Collapse of Capitalism’. It’s titled ‘A Glimmer of Hope’. He used to dream of a world free from capitalist exploitation.

We publish below some of the reflections made by his friends. —Fr]

Sorry to convey the news of passing away of our friend Vijayendra yesterday [Sept 9] afternoon. Just the previous day he was taken to Sangatya farm (a commune) in Karkala from his nephew’s place in Honnalli. He happily met his end in the company of two of his closest friends. He was buried in the farm and a jackfruit tree has been planted. Messages from huge number of friends of Vijayendra had made are pouring in. He had his faults but he was a great soul with lot of wisdom. His hope and optimism inspired many a young.  
Dileep Kamat [10-9-25]

Just when we were remembering Two brave Souls, DilipHota and Sher Singh this last Sunday [September 7], another heartrending news. 

The ever-mirthful T Vijayendra has seen everything on this mother Earth and his final shelter is to her only. i came to know the sad demise of 

Viju Ji from the email of Dileep Kamat, Belagavi this morning [September 10]

Viju Ji was a regular contributor to Countercurrents. He participated off and on in Marx Forum discussions. 

Like many of his generation, his baptism in revolutionary politics was through the fire of imagination from NAXALBARI. Viju Ji graduated from IIT Kharagpur in Electronics Engineering, possibly in 1968. He was in Kolkata in those turbulent days of ‘revolution in the air’ of Kolkata.
Arun Kumar Sinha

It is difficult to think that Viju is no longer among the living. Of course he lives in our memories (he had a great sense of humour) and in his writings, but we will painfully miss him. His campaign to promote bicycles as a viable means of transport was ecologically very relevant, but was not taken forward with the required energy. We are all outwitted by ruthless motorbikes. His publication of popularising materials on Marxism and on ecology will be remembered, appreciated and hopefully be put into practice by younger generations. We are very sad now, but we remember how much we laughed together. In solidarity,
Gabriele Dietrich

Very sad news indeed! He was an open minded, bold, creative, very intelligent, widely read Marxist who tried to go beyond traditional Marxism in theory and practice.
Red salute to Vijayendra!
Anant Phadke

Very sad news. Our condolences and thoughts are with the friends and family. Who is in their house? No personal information is available. But ending it in the dirt is not a good decision for a comrade.
Vinaya Datta

A few days ago Dileep [Kamat] had briefed us about his last days, that had already made us anxious and very concerned. Losing such creative comrades at this moment is a great loss to all of us.
Datta Desai

I spoke with him a couple of times when Dilip [Hota] was not well and kept him updated. Another brave soul!
Ann, Pune

Another sad news [ afterDilipHota]. Biju just passed away in his sleep.
Ranjan Ghosh,
Jan ChetnaManch, Bokaro

My Heart-felt Condolences.
Dr Ram Puniyani

[I] had met him in person perhaps only once–most likely in 2007 December in Bombay. Or maybe twice. Yet, it feels like we were quite known to each other. In fact, I had been sort of familiar with him since. Well, before happening to actually met him. In terms of age, slightly senior to me. A very earnest and lively person He was deeply engaged with the issue of ecology. He lived a life in accordance with his ecological philosophy. That’s how he was opted to go back to the embrace of “Mother Earth”. So, yet another friend and comrade gone.
Sukla Sen

Death is part of life. In the past 4 months Viju’s condition went from bad to worse and he was wishing for death so much that one couldn’t but join and wish it for him. That in his last moments he was in a place where he has often lived long stretches, written some of his books and was among friends and that he passed peacefully and was buried in Sangatiya... feel like great blessings.
Usha Rao

Esther, Usha S, Mohit, Murali, Shantha, Bhagya, Suresh, Priyanka, Rukmini, Saranga, & I met this evening [10-09-25] and shared our thoughts & feelings about Viju for 3 hrs. People talked about how they first met Viju, his multi-faceted talents, his outrageous bluffs, & the many hilarious moments with him. The evening was very lively & lovely. Outrageous bluffs, yes! That was quintessential Viju.
Sagar Dhara

I’m failing to accept Vijuda’s absence. It’s painful to me. Days back I recollected his works as I saw ad of his book in Frontier. A sorrow has cast shadow in me. Within a short time we turned close, and we’re exchanging ideas. He was always active, full of life and activities, and building up a new generation. I had a desire of visiting him. My deep condolence. Please, convey my feelings to family, to his dear and close persons, and if possible, to the young learners he was building up to carry on his work with ecology and environment, for humanity.

Yes, to me, it’s a grave tragedy. I feel–I have lost a friend, a person honest and simple.

I feel the editor of Frontier should write a piece on Vijayendra–the person, the Kolkata of ‘70s and activism of that turbulent period and with this at least something of the Naxalite group he belonged to–dream, efforts, hardships, sacrifices of those brave souls. These will be raw material for some future historian composing people’s struggle.
Farooque Chowdhury, Dhaka

Sorry to hear about Viju’s passing away. The last time I met him was a year or so ago, when one day he dropped in at my house in Hyderabad, and we chatted about old times and discussed current politics.

One by one, all my friends are passing away, some of them much younger than me. I am 89, and I am still surviving, like an old Yaksha sitting over a chest of treasures, preserving memories of old friends.

Congratulations on your achievement in carrying on the legacy of Samar Sen, and bringing out Frontier regularly.
Sumanta Banerjee

A good man, a good life and now a good death (Viju passes away in his sleep). I met him first in 1983 when he came to DalliRajhara. He was extremely well read, and always willing to share. I wanted to build a toilet. He told me about Bindeshwar Pathak and the Sulabh movement. With that I was able to construct a toilet seat with my own hands, and fix up a toilet in a worker’s quarter. A man with varied interests. He first told me about Anton Makarenko–the famous Soviet Educator. Also about a Letter to a Teacher–the school of Barbiana started by Father Don Milani. I learnt a great deal from Viju. I will always remain indebted to him.

Viju introduced me to many wonderful people, because he himself was a wonderful person. Once I went to meet him in his Barsati in Saket, New Delhi. And look who was there––Mahaswetadevi! After food she said that she wanted to go to the National Book Trust for governing body meeting. I told her that I lived in SDA very close to NBT, Green Park and could easily drop her. The sprightly Mahaswetadevi hopped pillion on my scooter and I dropped her to NBT.
Arvind Gupta

Remembering T Vijayendra (1943–2025)
Sagar Dhara

Every generation produces a few individuals who live so closely to their convictions that their entire life becomes a testament to thought and action in perfect sync. T Vijayendra was one of them.

A social thinker, political commentator, and ecologist, he leaves behind not only his writings on Marxism, ecology, and people’s struggles but also his lived example of simplicity, natural farming, and unwavering integrity.

An IIT graduate of the 1960s, Vijayendra could easily have made his way into the nation’s nuclear or engineering establishments. Instead, he chose a very different path–a life of questioning, teaching, organising, and living gently on the earth.

That conscious choice defined him, and it set him apart from many of his contemporaries who pursued conventional routes of professional success. For him, the worth of an education lay not in personal gain but in how it could illuminate people’s struggles and strengthen the search for justice.

I had the privilege of knowing Vijayendra since the 1970s. Our friendship was built not on occasions but on habits–when I visited Hyderabad, our plan was already fixed. The venue was known, the menu unchanging, and I never planned anything else for that afternoon. Those lunches were nothing short of rituals, conversations flowing across politics, literature, movements, and life itself.

Our association grew deeper when, from Patna, he wrote urging me to publish Where There is No Doctor. It was not just advice but an act of comradeship—grounded in his conviction that people must have access to knowledge that improves their lives. Later, when he joined me at VHAI as a colleague, I discovered that he was more than a collaborator: he was a wellspring of thought, always pushing me forward by reminding me of the books I should have read but hadn’t yet.

Vijayendra’s intellectual rigor was inseparable from his ethical lifestyle. He didn’t just argue for ecological sustainability–he lived it. He cycled rather than drove, planted rather than preached, and practiced natural farming with devotion. What made him extraordinary was his refusal to separate ideas from action.

For me, Vijayendra was not only a thinker but a friend whose presence enriched the common afternoons we shared. His ability to converse across disciplines, his wide reading, and his gentle humour reminded me that true companionship rests as much on silences as on words.

As we bid farewell to T. Vijayendra, we do not merely mourn the loss of a scholar and activist. We celebrate a life that stood as an example: a brilliant mind that could have been a scientist steering machines of power, but chose instead to walk alongside people, grow food with his own hands, and live simply so others could also live.

T Vijayendra
Sajai Jose

T Vijayendra, veteran activist, trade unionist passed away on 9th September, 2025 at Sangatya Commune in Karkala, Karnataka. He was 82.

A Mysore-born Kannadiga who grew up in Indore, Vijayendra joined IIT Kharagpur in 1961. Having completed his engineering course, he worked briefly at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics around which time he was pulled into the swirl of radical left politics that was sweeping the country at the time.

As a young activist, he ended up working closely with several movements and causes in the period that followed, including Shankar Guha Niyogi’s Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh (CMSS) in Chhattisgarh, and the fight for justice by the Bhopal gas victims. He was one of the many professionals from prestigious universities and colleges across the country who were drawn to Niyogi’s vision of ‘Sangharshaur Nirman’, that is, ‘Struggle and Build’. His close associates and friends from the time include such highly regarded names as Dr Binayak Sen and his wife Dr IlinaS en, Dr Asheesh Kundu, Dr Punayabrat Gun, Dr Shaibal Jana, Sudha Bharadwaj, lawyer and IIT Kanpur alumni, Vidyadhar Gadgil and his wife, Mariette Correa, of TISS, Bombay, Arvind Gupta of IIT Kanpur, the trade union journalist, SitaramS hastri, and the educationist Dr Anil Sadgopal. Later he developed close personal friendships with the writer Mahashweta Devi and the activist Aruna Roy.

While in Bhopal in the late 80s, he along with friends like Lorry Benjamin of the Friends Rural Centre in Hoshangabad, helped found the Sir Albert Howard Memorial Trust (SAHMET). Sir Albert Howard was a Raj-era agricultural scientist who spent many years in India in the 1940s, who is regarded as ‘the father of organic farming’, and it is this method that the Trust sought to popularise, at a time when most people in India were not even familiar with the concept.

Another Raj-era figure whose ideas he sought to popularise was the Scottish sociologist and polymath Patrick Geddes, and a pioneer in people centric urban planning and regional planning. Joining hands with the late K K S Murthy of Select Books in Bangalore, he was instrumental in reviving the conversation around Geddes’ ideas when he took the initiative to reprint the volume Patrick Geddes in India.

This readiness to engage with unconventional ideas remained with Vijayendra throughout his life, as his later involvements amply revealed. While he started as a Marxist, and remained a loyal left -winger throughout, he always stayed open to the ebb and flow of history and the constant changes that the political discourse underwent. Describing himself in his typically lighthearted manner as “some kind of political-social activist” throughout his life, his self- declared brief for himself was activist education, specifically “the education of Left wing cadres” for which reason he almost exclusively published his writings in non-mainstream publications like Frontier, published from Kolkata, and Countercurrents.org.

In the later years of his life, he was very much concerned with the structural global crises that have been building up over the decades, particularly that of shrinking resources and the ever-worsening conditions of the natural world which he foresaw as bringing about an inevitable end to the fossil fuel driven industrial world of mega-consumption and excess that people inhabit today. His efforts in this area were not confined to raising awareness about these issues through his writings, but also practical initiatives such as the Transition Town experiment in Kinwat, Maharashtra undertaken with a young colleague Yogesh, the series of camps conducted as part of the Ecologise collective in different parts of Karnataka, the attempts to bring back the bicycle as a sustainable mode of transport undertaken as part of Ecologise Hyderabad, and so on. He was also a moving spirit behind such pioneering political initiatives in this area such as the pan-India Platform for Sustainability in Bangalore, and later, the South Asia People’s Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC), a South Asia wide rainbow coalition of organisations which for the first time managed to bring together trade unions and environmental activist groups under a single umbrella for climate action.

Marxist that he was, an anarchist streak ran through his spirit, which was palpable to all those who interacted with him and read his exuberant writings, which ranged from the origins of Indian languages (A fluent speaker of Hindi, English, Marathi and Bengali, he was very much interested in the history and evolution of languages) to classical music, to long forgotten but vitally important thinkers, to humorous and edifying fictional stories featuring his real life friends and unusual themes which he nevertheless linked to his political imagination.

Ultimately, what will endure in his legacy is his sizeable body of published work. His political writings were a guiding light for many activists who were too caught up with their everyday struggles to pay attention to larger issues.

[Countercurrents.org. Sajai Jose is an independent journalist. (abridged)]

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 18, Oct 26 - Nov 1, 2025