At the entrance of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Art and Aesthetics, red flags carrying Bengali slogans hang across the room. Hand-painted in the style of campus protest banners, the slogans recall 1940s Bengal, a time when Bengal’s history was led by Leftist struggles and resistance.
“Adhi Noy, Tebhaga Chai” — “We don’t want half, we want two-thirds” — was one of the central slogans of the Tebhaga movement, one of India’s largest peasant uprisings… Built through a collaborative workshop between students and DAG, the exhibition, ‘Langol Jar, Jomi Tar: Call for a Red Harvest’ revisits the 1946–47 Tebhaga movement through archival newspapers, protest songs, woodcuts, oral histories, poetry and recreated artworks from the P.C. Joshi and DAG archives.
Re-reading Tebhaga
“Tebhaga” means “two-thirds” in Bengali. The movement emerged in Bengal in the 1940s, when sharecroppers — known as bargadars — demanded two-thirds of the produce they cultivated, instead of the half they were forced to surrender to jotedars or landlords.
Speaking to TMS, one of the student curators, Shivangi Saha said, “We needed to find our own voice in it. We needed to see why Tebhaga is relevant to us.” The connection, they explained, emerged from recent campus protests at JNU itself. “We had these recent protests regarding issues happening on campus. Classes were shut down. There were strikes. All of us are coming fresh out of that experience.”
The curators realised that many slogans raised during recent student protests explicitly referenced older struggles. “It’s Tebhaga. Then it was Telangana. To the borders of Delhi,” explains Surjavo Sen Gupta, another student curator. “The ghost of Tebhaga never died. It’s still sort of living with us.”
Asking uncomfortable questions
A major section focuses on the visual culture of Tebhaga, works by artists such as Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Somnath Hore and Zainul Abedin, many of whom were associated with Left movements and organisations like IPTA (The Indian People's Theatre Association) and the Communist Party.
Woodcuts depicting clandestine night meetings among peasants form a recurring visual motif. The exhibition also foregrounds the gendered nature of these spaces. “All these men are the ones who actually lead these meetings, they address the masses,” a curator said. “Women do not lead the masses according to the artworks that we see.”
These questions become sharper in the section examining protest songs. Communist organisers travelling into rural Bengal adapted local folk tunes and dialects to mobilise peasants. “Songs have always been part of cultural production,” notes student curator Munjarita Mondal. “Labour and songs go hand in hand…The dialects and tunes were taken from rural Bengal, but they were still composed by activists.”
The exhibition also does a juxtaposition of artists who were not officially aligned with Communist movements. Works by painter Haren Das present pastoral idylls almost entirely stripped of conflict — a stark contrast to the famine-stricken urgency of Chittaprosad’s work. The devastating Bengal Famine of 1943 was one of the primary catalysts that triggered the Tebhaga Movement three years later.
The actual truth?
One section uses statistics from the 1940 Bengal Land Revenue Commission to show that the actual understanding of Tebhaga was more layered than the popular understanding of Tebhaga -- through visualisations inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s experimental data graphics from the 1900 Paris Exposition.
The infographic visualisations reveal that agrarian Bengal was not just about a landlord-peasant binary. Different groups occupied uneven economic positions that varied across districts, challenging simplified narratives of the movement.
Asked whether memories of peasant politics still shape Bengal’s political culture, one curator says, “The elections would kind of say otherwise,” they said. “We certainly hope that the spirit of Tebhaga still lives in us, and that revolutionary ideal continues in our daily lives.”
The student also drew attention to continuing inequalities around representation and land struggles. “The fate of the majority is still being decided by one minority elite,” they said, arguing that many peasants and marginalised groups continue to remain politically excluded.
Women’s stories
One of the exhibition’s strongest interventions lies in its focus on women’s histories. Women involved in Tebhaga are mostly invisible in historical documentation. Newspaper reports referred vaguely to “wives” and “daughters”, while canonical artworks often depicted women as supportive figures rather than political agents. “We had very little visual documentation of women,” explains Saha. “So we had to look beyond the DAG archive.”
The team turned to Bengali fiction and oral narratives to reconstruct these stories. One section revisits Ila Mitra, remembered as “Rani Ma” among Santhal communities, while another recounts stories of rural women sheltering underground organisers inside their homes.
The exhibition also explores how solidarity was built through domestic spaces — through gossip, songs, shared labour and collective memory. Protest songs sung while grinding rice or cooking become as politically important as public speeches.
From Tebhaga to today
Tying the decade-old exhibition into the present is the final section that draws from archival material and documentation from the 2021 farmers’ protests, including references to the newspaper Trolley Times, a four-page newspaper in Gurmukhi and Hindi launched in 2020. Curators frame it as a contemporary equivalent of People’s War launched by the CPI during WW2 which later became People’s Age — publications that countered dominant narratives during earlier movements.
Photographs from recent campus protests at JNU and other universities appear beside recreated murals inspired by Tebhaga-era art. Torch processions, protest banners and slogans visually echo the night meetings depicted in 1940s woodcuts.
“Bringing out these student movements from different universities was a way to connect them with the mobilisation that happened during Tebhaga,” notes Saha. “How people stand in solidarity with each other — that remains.”
In one particularly revealing moment, Mondal reflected on how these histories themselves are disappearing from institutional memory. “I grew up reading about Tebhaga in school,” they said. “But with the new curriculum, there is actually no mention of this movement anymore.”
In connecting Bengal’s sharecroppers to present-day farmers’ protests and campus movements, the exhibition suggests that political struggles survive through images, songs, slogans and memory. Rather than asking only what Tebhaga was, it asks what it still means.
On view at School of Arts and Aesthetics Gallery, SAA I, JNU till May 23