Chandra Bhal Tripathi passed away at his New Delhi home on 20 September 2019. He was 88. Born on 29 October 1930 at Basti in eastern Uttar Pradesh, he was a social anthropologist, a social activist and a former prominent student and socialist youth leader. He belongs to a family of freedom fighters, litterateurs and scholars of ancient Indian history and archaeology. He took his Master’s degree in Anthropology from Lucknow University.
He joined the All India Students’ Congress at Basti in 1945 and took an active part in Congress activities for two years before Independence. At the age of 16 he attended the Meerut session of the Indian National Congress in 1946. At Allahabad he was actively involved with the Congress Socialist Party for two years in 1946–48 and later with the Socialist Party and the Praja Socialist Party (PSP).
He was one of the founders of the All India Samajwadi Yuwak Sabha, the youth wing of PSP at Kashi Vidyapeeth, in 1953. As President of Lucknow University Union in 1952–53 he earned a name for giving it a new orientation by attending to the needs of poor students and encouraging the cultural talent among the students. In 1953 he led a powerful student movement throughout UP for protecting the autonomy of student unions. Governor (Chancellor) K.M. Munshi and Health Minister C.B. Gupta were spearheading the move to finish the autonomy of the State Universities and the autonomy of the student unions. In the student agitation about 14,000 students were imprisoned and three persons were killed in police firing.
Tripathi remained underground and when the agitation threatened to take a violent turn he suspended the agitation as Chairman of the UP State Students’ Action Committee. His adherence to non-violent peaceful means won him admiration from all quarters and ultimately the UP Government led by Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant had to concede the legitimate demands of the students.
Dr. Rammanohar Lohia wrote an article captioned “The Lucknow Revolt” in the National Herald in 1953 wherein he analysed the mighty student agitation and, inter alia, praised the leadership of Tripathi.
In 1954 he led an Indian student delegation to the Indo-Burmese Students’ Cultural Festival at Rangoon. He also attended the Anti-Colonial Bureau meeting of the Asian Socialist Conference at Imphakhon in Eastern Shan States of Burma.
In 1956 he went to Bandung in Indonesia as a National Union of Students (NUS) delegate to the Afro-Asian Student Conference with a briefing by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In September 1956 he was a part of the three-member NUS delegation to the Sixth International Student Conference at Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
He taught Anthropology at Lucknow University in 1958 and worked in the Constitutional organisation of Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for thirty-one years.
A great champion of communal harmony, he was one of the organisers of a national conference in Delhi in March 1990 to consider the grave communal situation in the country after barbaric communal riots in Bhagalpur (Bihar). It led to establishment of a national level body known as as Society for Communal Harmony. It had Dr. B.N. Pande, Shri P.N. Haksar, Shri Sadiq Ali and Shri Rabi Ray as its Presidents. C.B. Tripathi worked as its General Secretary of the Society during 1997–2015 and was one of its Vice-Presidents till his death.
In 2006, he coordinated a historic International Conference on ‘The Heritage of Nalanda’ at Nalanda (Bihar). In 2007, he was the Academic Coordinator of the ‘International Conference on Buddhism and the 21st Century’ held at Bodhgaya. He was a hockey player, winner of prizes in several inter-university debates, broadcaster since 1950, performer in radio plays and stage plays, writer and translator. Besides contributing to anthropological journals and popular magazines both in Hindi and English, he wrote and edited many books.
(Qurban Ali is a senior broadcast journalist.)
