ABSTRACT
The so-called Left bastion in West Bengal which survived almost unchallenged till 2011was not built in a day or by one spontaneous moment of popular revolutionary upsurge. Decades of dedicated mobilisation by Left parties laid the groundwork on which the Left citadel was built. Also, the radical period of revolutionary republicanism, the Naxal years, was not a pure moment of radical spontaneity as if with no historical forward or backward linkages. The present chapter, in focussing on the district of Birbhum, tries to make a case for subterranean material networks of continuity.
