Death of Indian Marxist Arvind N. Das
Distinguished Indian Marxist intellectual Arvind N. Das died on August 7, just a month before he would have turned 52, in Amsterdam's Free University Hospital. A fortnight earlier, he had suffered a cardiac arrest at the Amsterdam airport.
One of the most versatile and enterprising Marxist intellectuals of our times, Arvind Das was also a passionate activist. He joined the Naxalbari uprising among the landless rural poor that began in 1967 and which led to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), led by Charu Mazumdar.
Arvind Das was arrested and taken to Katihar jail. Released in 1971, he returned to academia, but his passion for Marxism and the revolutionary struggles of the rural poor continued to guide him all through his creative professional career. Transformation of agrarian relations in Bihar remained his core concern in most of his subsequent researches.
After getting his PhD from Calcutta University, Arvind Das' academic association took him to places as diverse as Pune and Patna to Surat and Delhi and to several research institutes in Europe, Asia and America.
But the explorer in him did not allow him to stay confined to academia and for seven years he served as senior research editor of the Times of India. With the arrival of the so-called information revolution, Arvind Das also directed his exploratory energy and penetrating gaze to the electronic media.
Apart from several academic papers and collections, Arvind Das will be remembered for his witty and insightful journalistic writings, books like The Republic of Bihar, India Invented and Changel (a biography of his native village in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district), a 13-part cultural history of India inspired by D.D. Kosambi's historical writings and produced for television and a unique book review magazine called Biblio.
The CPI(ML) will of course also remember and miss him as an ever-cooperating comrade. In the era of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when quitting communist parties became almost an intellectual fashion with many, Arvind Das chose to renew his association with the CPI(ML) and till his end he remained closely associated with many of the party's ideological-political endeavours, including the Indian Institute of Marxist Studies and the monthly journal Liberation.
Condolence meetings in memory of Arvind Das were held in Delhi, Lucknow and Patna, attended by CPI(ML) members, academicians, journalists, social and political activists as well as people from other walks of life.
Speaking on behalf of the CPI(ML) Central Committee at the condolence meeting in Delhi on August 13, general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said that Comrade Arvind Das was a versatile intellectual with a total commitment to the integral vision of a secular democratic modern India. He highlighted his contribution to creative applications of Marxism to the Indian context. "At a time when the Indian intelligentsia is exposed to tremendous pressure of saffronisation [Hindu chauvinism], Arvind will continue to serve as a great source of inspiration for every stream of creative resistance to fascism and committed defence of democracy", he said.
[From information in ML Update, the online news magazine of the CPI(ML).]