Comrade Sankar Mitra
Even as the whole Party was observing the 14th death anniversary of Comrade VM on December 18 came the shocking news from Kolkata of Comrade Sankar Mitra’s passing. Veteran Party leader Sankarda breathed his last at 2 PM in his Kolkata home. He was 73. He had undergone bypass surgery in the 1990s and a few months ago he was diagnosed with cancer in one of his kidneys. He had successfully undergone surgery for the kidney cancer but succumbed to cardiac arrest. Comrade Mitra is survived by his wife Anu and son Arnab and his countless comrades and friends all over the country.
Born in 1940, Comrade Sankar Mitra was the youngest among the three sons and four daughters of his parents Prafulla Mitra and Sisirkana Mitra. His eldest brother Pabitra Mitra was a well-known Bengali lyricist and a music composer for modern Bengali songs. Comrade Sankar Mitra had joined the communist movement in the turbulent 1960s. When Naxalbari happened, Sankarda, then a militant leader of LIC employees, was quick to respond to the revolutionary call and soon he became a fulltime worker of the CPI(ML).
Arrested during the infamous regime of Siddhartha Shankar Ray, he defied state repression during his long stay in the Medinipur jail. After coming out of the jail in the late 1970s, he played a key role in reviving and reorganising the Party in West Bengal, working in rural pockets of Medinipur, Bankura and North Bengal. In the latter half of the 1980s he was in charge of the Party organisation in Delhi. His next assignment was as Party in-charge in Tamil Nadu before he returned to his home state West Bengal. After the first sign of peasant revolt in Nandigram in January 2007, Comrade Sankar Mitra led the first fact-finding team to Nandigram. The Medinipur police dubbed him and other members of the fact-finding team as Maoists and put the entire team in jail. Even after Mamata Banerjee came to power riding on the Singur-Nandigram wave of peasant protests and popular upsurge, the false cases were never withdrawn.
Comrade Sankar Mitra was elected to the CC by the Third Congress of the Party. Between the Fourth and Fifth Congress he also served on the Polit Bureau. During the transitional phase before the Party came overground, he was the central spokesperson of the Party and also President of the West Bengal unit of the Indian People’s Front. He was also a member of the Party panel entrusted with the project of documentation of the history of the Indian communist movement. Between the Fifth and Seventh Congress of the Party, Comrade Sankar Mitra headed the Central Control Commission.
He was a hard-working communist known for his simplicity, modesty and human warmth. Committed to the basics of Marxism, Comrade Mitra also took great interest in the study and investigation of the socio-economic conditions, historical traditions and cultural environment of every area where he worked as a Party organiser and leader. Comrade Sankarda was one of the last few living links with the historic period of the communist movement of the 1960s and the birth of the CPI(ML). His death is a great loss and leaves today’s generation of comrades with the responsibility of carrying forward his revolutionary mission.
Red Salute to Comrade Sankar Mitra!
Nehru of Indian Sitar Passes Away
S.Gopalakrishnan
There was a spot of darkness in the music conscience of the sub-continent when the news about Pt Ravishankar’s passing away came in. Whether one loved his music or not, whether one loved his life or not, there was a moment of sadness in everyone with a little exposure to any branch of music of this region. He could be termed as Pt Nehru of Indian music considering his image among the middle class in the country.
Pt Ravishankar’s music was emotive in nature, especially his post-success period. It is essential to mention here that his vilambit alaps and druts and dhuns of 1960-70 periods are considered his best by people who had followed the maestro closely. But the image that he carried over five decades was not of a traditional, professional Indian classical musician, but of a cultural ambassador of his nation, who was romantic, liberal, secular and over everything, a human being of finer qualities. This image gave him the tag of a ‘Nehruvian Sitarist’ in the mind of the Indian middle class. We can draw a lot of similarities between the Indian fascination for Pt Nehru and Pt Ravishankar. If we look at the social patterns whereby Nehru emerged as the icon of the modern Indian secular democracy, a similar line could be drawn in the case of a new icon emerged since 1970s in the music sensibilities of Indian middle class. However, it was not just his mesmeric speed on Sitar that made his iconic stature possible, it was the totality of that colourful and eventful life made him a romantic Gandharva of the Indian middle class inland and abroad.
It was in 1945, that 25 year old Ravishankar had given the tune for Muhammad Iqbal’s patriotic song for an undivided India, ‘Sare Jahan Se Acha’. In those days Ravishankar was associated with the Communist Party’s theatre wing IPTA. The Iqbal song was for a drama titled ‘Amar Bharat’ and another musician in the group composed it in a slow speed; and Ravishankar felt it evoked pathos. Here are his own words, as told to Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express:
“For one year I was a music director for IPTA. And I did some ballet- India Immortal. It happened then, someone made me hear the song. ..I felt it very sad. How to make it a song that you can walk to or you can feel more vibrant towards? So it came spontaneously.”
The inclination for ‘drut’ (speed) was visible in Nehru and audible in Ravishankar throughout their lives. Both of them enjoyed the status of eternal romantic dreamers in public life. That was the reason why Nehru remained as the ambassador of the new Indian liberal secular democracy and Ravishankar remained as the cultural ambassador of the Indian middle class aspirations.
When we look at their Gurus, we see another kind of similarities. If we look at the life of Ustad Allauddin Khan, we can easily see a lot of Gandhi in him. As a disciplinarian in life, he was as strict as Gandhi throughout. Both of them had maintained an ascetic austerity in their lives. Both Baba and Bapu were not very supportive when it came to their kin. Ustad Allauddin Khan had maximum followers and disciples in the history of Indian music talim and only Gandhi could match it though in another sphere of activity.
Lastly, Nehru and Ravishankar, disciples of two ascetics always remained secular like their teachers; though it remains a fact that unlike their gurus both of them had a liking for addressing galleries very often than their conscience.