Articles by Sumanta Banerjee

Sumanta Banerjee What made Amiya Rao one of the most vigilant and conscientious leaders of the civil liberties movement was her determination and courage combined with a scholastic bent of mind.

Sumanta Banerjee Gobinda Mukhoty will be remembered for his success in hollowing out a foothold for the dispossessed in the solid conservative trunk of the Indian judiciary.

Explanation and Prescription Sumanta Banerjee Five Lectures in Marxist Mode by Randhir Singh; Ajanta Publications, Delhi, 1993;
IN an age, where non-committal ambivalence has become the sign of etiquette in debates in the academic beau monde, it is refreshing to find someone like Randhir Singh making his position clear at the outset without the post-modernist obligatory humming and hawing. What he said at a conference of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee in April 1991 (which is included in the present collection) is worth quoting, since it is the spirit behind that which inspires all the writings which make up this slim volume. While introducing the topic on which he was requested to address the conference (Terrorism, State Terrorism and Democratic Rights'), he said: "Mine will be in fact a straightforward political and partisan exercise in the sense that in a class divided, exploitative society like ours all worthwhile thinking is, inevitably as it were, political and partisan. In such a society, on all important issues, in philosophy as in real life, neutrality is an illusion. Here everything said or done, or left unsaid or undone, helps one side or the other".

In all its various manifestations, the profession of prostitution reflects the domination of the male over the female. This is particularly true in a capitalist society where, like other wage workers in a system that thrives on intensification of division oflabourand specialisation of skills, the prostitute is condemned to the exclusive role of a specialist in sexual entertainment. Stripped of all emotional and intellectual attributes, she becomes the female body. Reduced to a source of purely utilitarian needs, her body is required to produce the regular nocturnal fantasy of pleasure that deceptively fills up the vacuity of the soul of the alienated worker who comes to her as a client. This paper examines the transformations that the profession of prostitution and its clientele underwent with the introduction of new commercial and administrative relations in the 19th century colonial Bengal.

What is the priority expected from the Indian state which is constitutionally committed to democracy and secularism? To protect its citizens from the onslaught of forces which make no bones about their anti-democratic and anti-constitutional objective of persecuting a particular religious minority and establishing a theocratic state? Or to allow these forces to consolidate their base and power under the benign umbrella of democratic tolerance ?