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Charu Mazumdar
Charu Mazumdar
চারু মজুমদার
General Secretary of CPI(ML)
	In office; 1969–1972
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office dissolved
Darjeeling district secretary of CPI(M)
	In office; 1964–1967
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office dissolved
State committee member of CPI; for West Bengal
	In office; 1943–1964
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Office dissolved
Personal details
Born	15 May 1918; Siliguri, Bengal Presidency, British India
Died	28 July 1972 (aged 53); Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Political party	Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
Spouse	Lila Mazumdar Sengupta
Children	Abhijit Mazumdar
Alma mater	University of Calcutta; North Bengal University; Siliguri College; Pabna Edward College
Criminal status	Death in jail
Criminal charge	Criminal conspiracy
Penalty	Jailed

Charu Mazumdar (Bengali: চারু মজুমদার; 15 May 1918 – 28 July 1972), popularly known as CM, was an Indian Communist leader, and founder and General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).^[1] Born into a progressive landlord family in Siliguri in 1918, he became a Communist during the Indian Independence Movement, and later formed the militant Naxalite cause. During this period, he authored the historic accounts of the 1967 Naxalbari uprising. His writings, particularly the Historic Eight Documents, have become part of the ideology of a number of Communism-aligned political parties in India.^[2]

Biography

Mazumdar was born in Matualaloi, Rajshahi (now Siliguri) to a zamindar family.^[3]^[4] His father Bireshwar Majumdar was a freedom fighter and president of the Darjeeling District Committee of the Indian National Congress during the Indian independence movement.^[5]

In 1930, as a student in Siliguri, he joined the All Bengal Students' Association, which was affiliated to the underground anti-colonial organisation Anushilan Samiti, at the instance of Sewmangal Singh and Brojen Basu Roy Choudhuri.^[6]

Having graduated from his ‘Matric’ exam in 1937 with a First Division, Mazumdar took admission to Edward College in Pabna district (present day Bangladesh). However he returned to Siliguri after sometime, having quit his formal education, in order to join the independence movement. In 1938, at the age of 19, he joined the Congress Socialist Party.^[7]

The next year when the Communist Party of India (CPI) was organised in the neighbouring Jalpaiguri district, Mazumdar joined the then-banned party to work in its peasant front. Soon an arrest warrant forced him to go underground for the first time as a communist activist. Although the CPI was banned at the outbreak of World War II, he continued CPI activities among peasants and was made a member of the CPI Jalpaiguri district committee in 1942. The promotion emboldened him to organize a 'seizure of crops' campaign in Jalpaiguri during the Great Famine of 1943.^[2] In 1946, he joined the Tebhaga movement in the Jalpaiguri region and embarked on a proletariat militant struggle in North Bengal.^[8] The stir shaped his vision of a revolutionary struggle. Later he worked among tea garden workers in Darjeeling.

The CPI was banned in 1948 and he spent the next three years in jail. In January 1952 he married Lila Mazumdar Sengupta, a fellow CPI member from Jalpaiguri.^[9] The couple moved to Siliguri, which was the center of Mazumdar's activities for a few years. He was briefly imprisoned in 1962.

During the mid-1960s Mazumdar organized a leftist faction in Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) in northern Bengal. In 1967, a militant peasant uprising took place in Naxalbari, led by his comrade-in-arms Kanu Sanyal. This group would later be known as the Naxalites, and eight articles written by him at this time—known as the Historic Eight Documents—have been seen as providing their ideological foundation: arguing that revolution must take the path of armed struggle on the pattern of the Chinese Communist Revolution. When the Naxalbari uprising was crushed in 1967, Mazumdar said: "...hundreds of Naxalbaris are smoldering in India....Naxalbari has not died and will not die".^[7] The same year, Mazumdar broke away and formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries which in 1969 founded the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist)—with Mazumdar as its General Secretary.

Death

He was captured in a state of bad health at his hideout on 16 July 1972 at 3 AM by Calcutta Police officer Ranjit Guha Niyogi (alias Runu Guha Niyogi) and his team. The official police response was that Mazumdar died of a massive heart attack at 4 AM on 28 July 1972.^[10] All the Naxalite factions disputed this however, and instead said that it was a custodial murder and that he was killed by not being provided medicine in the police lock up.^[11] His body was cremated at the Keoratola crematorium under the watch of armed police and paramilitary forces.^[12]

The radical leftist movement in India has seen many ideological splits since Mazumdar's death.^[13] The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation observes Martyrs' Day on the anniversary of Mazumdar's death. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) observes Martyrs' Week in the last week of July in remembrance of Mazumdar's death, where members revisit his ideology and memorialise his influence on their movement.^[14]

Books on Charu Mazumdar's life

Charu Mazumdar: The Dreamer Rebel, written by Ashoke Mukhopadhyay, published by Niyogi Books in June 2022. ISBN 978-93-91125-03-5
India after Naxalbari: unfinished history, written by Bernard D'Mello, published by Monthly Review Press New York in 2018. ISBN 978-158367-706-3, 978-158367-707-0