Left Write Left an engaging conversation at the Tolly Club

  The Tollygunge Club hosted an engaging conversation, “Left Write Left,” featuring activist-author Saira Shah Halim and political scienti...

 

The Tollygunge Club hosted an engaging conversation, “Left Write Left,” featuring activist-author Saira Shah Halim and political scientist Prof. Zaad Mahmood, in a free-flowing discussion on Halim’s new book Comrades and Comebacks: The Battle of the Left to Win the Indian Mind. The evening was felicitated by CEO Brig. Ganapathy along with  Vishnupriya Sengupta, in charge of the Club’s Library Initiative.

The interaction explored Bengal’s long Left legacy, with both speakers challenging the simplistic narrative that its 34-year rule was only about decline. They examined the shift in political imagination, the cultural vibrancy that once powered the movement, and the moments when ideological rigidity narrowed its creative space.

Halim and Mahmood moved between history and the present, debating whether today’s citizen-led protests, student movements, and constitutional solidarities signal a new kind of Left resurgence or an entirely different civic awakening. Their exchange also touched on the responsibilities of the urban middle class in shaping political futures, questioning whether conscience can remain passive in a time of rising democratic anxieties.

Halim emphasised that the biggest misconception about the Left is the belief that it produced “only stagnation,” asserting that its social achievements cannot be erased by later political missteps. 

One of the most compelling parts of the evening interrogated the moment when the Left “lost its imagination.”

Drawing from her research, Halim described how rigidity crept into parts of the movement, narrowing debate and alienating the very artists, academics, and cultural workers who once gave the Left its ideological soul.

Prof. Mahmood added that the Left’s original strength was its deep engagement with culture—IPTA, literature, cinema, theatre—and that any future revival must reclaim that creative space.

Halim argued that contemporary resistance movements, from student mobilisations to constitutional protests, reflect revived Left values: solidarity, secularism, and democratic dissent. Whether this constitutes a political “comeback” or a new moral order was debated vigorously.

Prof. Mahmood noted the structural challenge: movements generate moral energy, but governance requires organisation. 

In a room full of educated, influential citizens, the discussion turned sharply introspective.

Halim challenged the comfortable detachment of the urban middle class, asking whether the privileged can meaningfully participate in rebuilding secular, democratic, redistributive politics.

“Conscience,” she insisted, “is not a spectator sport.”

The audience responded with thoughtful interventions, underscoring the need for renewed civic engagement that bridges class divides rather than deepens them.