When was the last time Calcutta — or for that matter any Indian city — felt the need to express solidarity with a village? Most people point to the Naxal movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies, during which the armed struggle of peasants in a small village in north Bengal inspired a whole generation of young men and women in the city. Although it is largely accepted now that there was a great deal of misplaced romanticism in the movement in the way it was seen in Calcutta, those decades are still synonymous with agitations, processions and armed struggle.

For many, the citizens’ rally on November 14 against the state-sponsored atrocities in Nandigram brought back memories of this period. These were times when capitalist America’s attack on Vietnam would fill the streets of Calcutta with protesting people, many of whom had only just woken up to the existence of the tiny south-east Asian nation. Soma Mukhopadhyay, who last took part in a rally after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, recalls the visit of Robert McNamara to Calcutta in the early Seventies. McNamara, who was the US defence secretary during much of the Vietnam war, had recently left his federal post and joined the World Bank. For Calcuttans, he was still a “war criminal”, so they blocked his route across the city. He had to be airlifted from the airport to the roof of the American consulate. Before this, Calcutta had witnessed students’ agitations during the food movement in 1966.

The Fifties’ agitations too cannot be forgotten, says Sourin Bhattacharya, a writer and academic, mentioning the huge protest march against the rise in tram fares by one paisa in 1953. Jaya Mitra (the author of Hanyamaan, a first-person account of the Naxalite movement) sees the Nandigram rally as the legacy of the Sixties and Seventies, though with as much difference as, perhaps, similarity. In its magnitude, the November 14 rally is probably bigger than anything seen in the ‘revolution’ decades — or after the August movement of 1942, she feels.

Is the shape of the movement against Nandigram given by the intellectuals involved in it? Both Mitra and Mahasveta Devi disagree. For Mitra, the so-called intellectuals made up only a tiny fraction of the procession last Wednesday, and even they were not in it as intellectuals or buddhijeebis but as intelligent (buddhimaan) and sensible individuals. Mahasveta Devi does not care for such labels, since working for the people comes first for her. Bhattacharya is more interested in the older members of the rally as they represent the generation brought up on leftist ideals but felt bewildered by the blatant show of aggression and state power by a communist party. As for the differences, they probably deserve an entire sociological study. But the defining one, according to Mitra, is the shunning of party politics. In the Sixties and Seventies, joining political parties was the accepted, even endorsed, route to getting involved in a movement. Bhattacharya finds the young generation’s identification of the Left as the conductor of a repressive regime a significant difference from the earlier decades, when the Left was the source of most protest movements. For Mahasveta Devi, the departure was in the participation of the small traders and roadside channa-wallahs along with elite society in the mahamichhil.

The rally of November 14 could not have been triggered off by Nandigram alone, Mahasveta Devi says, and Mitra agrees. It marked a coming together of many wrongs — the mindless wooing of capital, corporatization of development schemes, the ration riots, the turning of the state administration into a puppet show and, more covertly, the rise of global capital. All this is reminiscent of how things had come to a head in the Sixties and Seventies.