Charu Majumdar

About Charu Majumdar

Charu Majumdar was the revolutionary architect of India’s radical Maoist movement and the founding leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Born into a progressive landlord family in Siliguri in 1918, he abandoned his studies in the late 1930s to join the peasant struggles of the undivided Communist Party. Majumdar gained national prominence by spearheading the 1967 armed peasant uprising in Naxalbari, a watershed moment that challenged the state and fractured Indian communism. Between 1965 and 1967, he authored the foundational "Historic Eight Documents," which provided the ideological blueprint for armed agrarian revolution inspired by Maoism. In 1969, he formally founded the CPI(ML) on Vladimir Lenin’s birth anniversary, mobilizing thousands of urban students and rural landless laborers into violent guerrilla warfare. Captured by police in Calcutta, he died in custody in 1972, but his uncompromising ideology institutionalized the enduring phenomenon of Naxalism. Today, Majumdar remains a deeply polarizing yet undeniably transformative figure whose radical doctrine profoundly reshaped the trajectory of revolutionary politics, state security policies, and social insurgency across modern India.

Based on publicly available information.