![]() We look at a selection of his texts at some length and discuss how they were trying to making sense of the question of class in the Indian context, and activating a new kind of self-making in the process. This essay recalls that history, with the example of a Bengali author, Manik Bandyopadhyay, one of the best representatives of this tradition but relatively less known outside Bengal. The astonishing bodies of work by a large number of artists, writers, poets, actors, and critics who took part in the progressive movement illustrates this in instructive ways, giving shape to what I describe here as communist aesthetics. At other times it invited a deeper engagement with what Raymond Williams described as structures of feeling, wrestling with elements of folk tales and mythologies, with indigenous tropes of transformation, with motifs of creativity and notions of labour. ![]() At times, this translation involved a literal representation of Marxist thought in the different languages and sensibilities of a colonial context. ![]() ![]() Consigned to margins as petty bourgeois indulgence by doctrinaire Marxists, it reveals a creative translation of Marxism taking place that has been neglected for long. This essay is a fragment of a larger history of communist cultural engagements in twentieth century India. ![]()
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