CALCUTTA DIARY Ashok Mitra
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CALCUTTA DIARY Ashok Mitra Contents A Prefatory Note Section One 1. Calcutta Every Day 2. The Burnt-out Cases 3. The Country Will Not Miss Him 4. Take a Girl like Her 5. The Song of Mother Courage 6. The Story of Indra Lohar 7. All that Lives Must Die 8. An Historical Parallel 9. The Emancipation of Kamal Bose 10. Fascism Shall Not Pass ... 11. Suffer Us Not To Mock Ourselves ... 12. A Brief Whiff of Hope 13. The Planes Do Not Land Here Any More 14. A Revolutionary Handshake 15. The Legacy and the Led 16. A Wizened Crowd 17. A "Reserve Army of Poets 18. A Small Funeral 19. The Nationalisation of Akhtari Bai 20. An Ordinary Man 21. The Quashing of Many Dreams 22. Cometh the Goddess 23. Totems Are All 24. Guernica's Children Remember 25. He Had Picked the Wrong Target Section Two 26. A Two-Sector Model 27. One Dream Which Did Not Come True 28. The New Obfuscators 29. A Ritual a Day 30. Toward the Ultimate Solution 31. Two Bits of Extra Chips 32. We Have Been Here Before 33. The Species of Make-Believe 34. He Who Escapes ... 35. Let Facts Speak ... 36. The Jesting Pilates 37. A Gleam in the Establishment Eye 38. The Champion Pan-Handlers Section Three 39. A Diary from Nowhere 40. The Only Hindu Kingdom in the World 41. Plastic Surgery Gone Waste 42. The Rich Have Inherited the Earth 43. An Integrated Society ... 44. Lord Kitchener is Alive and Kicking 45. A Certain Charm in the Old Rascal 46. One Revolution is Enough? A Prefatory Note The pieces assembled here are the fruits of pseudonymous and acronymous journalism. The first and fourth pieces, written during 1968-69, are from Frontier, Calcutta; all the rest are from the Economic and Political Weekly — a random selection from AM's weekly column in that journal during 1972 -75. In the early part of 1975, friends had suggested the idea of a selection such as the present one. Even as the idea was assuming concrete form, Indira Gandhi's Emergency intervened. There was no question of a publication of this kind being allowed in the country during that period. A British publisher could however be attracted to the project. A matter of some historical curiosity, the London publication of the book coincided with the downfall of Indira Gandhi's regime in New Delhi in March 1977. But the nexus of the essays is that, at least in one part of the country—West Bengal—, Indira Gandhi's Emergency started much earlier, perhaps from 1970 onwards. To read the pieces today is, for the author at least, to experience a kind of retrospective catharsis. And it could be that, for some others too, the worth of these essays is not altogether dissipated: perhaps there is a certain significance in recollecting the terror and inhumanity which were the staple of the regime that was then abroad. The collection represents, I believe, a climate of mind which is essentially Bengali, or, should I be even more specific, Calcutta-nurtured. Not all the essays concern Calcutta and its immediate environment, A number of them, included in Section Three, do in fact discuss remoter lands and peoples Even so, the link, overt or otherwise, with Calcutta—and Bengal— is always there. The author of the pieces is a prisoner of Calcutta: this may be as much his pride as his tragedy. There is nonetheless no particular need to feel apologetic about the biases and the idiosyncrasies of the person who once wrote these essays. His biases are Bengali biases; his idiosyncrasies too are of local vintage. He is a part of his people; he has been reared by the squalor which defines Calcutta and Bengal. His loyalties are local, provincial, and perhaps even sectarian. At the same time, he can hardly disown the other stream of consciousness, which defines him the consciousness of belonging to the great, awkward, fuzzy Indian nation. This nation is a medley of confusion, but the dominating fact is still that of acute social conflicts and crass class exploitations. Never mind the contradictions and heterogeneities, the ruling classes, the prime political decision-makers, have a pervasive influence over the different segments of the country, including Bengal and Calcutta. This provided the backdrop, in the early seventies, for Indira Gandhi's cynical maraudings. By 1977, however, even she had proved a point of substance, namely, that the process of history is determined not by the whims of tyrants and about- to-be-ones, but by the people themselves. During that phase between 1972 and 1975, optical illusion being optical illusion, this truth was not immediately obvious. Perhaps some of the essays included in this volume reflect that mood of uncertainty. An Indian edition of the volume is now being arranged through the initiative of D. Mehra of Rupa and Company. On this occasion, I have to remember a number of friends who were responsible for the genesis of the Calcutta Diary pieces. It was Samar Sen who persuaded me to begin writing a weekly column, first for his Now, subsequently for Frontier. Hiten Chaudhury, the Managing Trustee of the Sameeksha Trust, and Krishna Raj, Editor of the Economic and Political Weekly, encouraged me to continue with the column in the EPW. Krishna Raj's colleagues in the EPW, Rajani Desai and Zawid Laiq, were early enthusiasts of the idea to put these pieces together. Others who had helped include Prabhat Patnaik, Govind Deshpande and Amit Bhaduri. It was however Hiten Bhaya who took the most trouble; he suggested the titles for each individual piece, which means that he had to go through the drudgery of reading the pieces over and over. Finally, two of my good friends, Terry Byres, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies, and Ranajit Guha, of the University of Sussex, were instrumental, during those fugitive days of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, in persuading me that the pieces be published outside the country. Terry Byres not only helped me to locate a publisher; he was also generous enough to write a most sympathetic introduction to the British edition. But, then, debts to one's friends generally belong to the unrequitable category. May 1979 Calcutta Ashok Mitra Section One 1. Calcutta Every Day Perspiration. The odour of it. A dilapidated CSTC bus emitting a morbid trail of black smoke. Burnt-out grass, dead grass, butts of crushed cigarettes, rags, pieces of paper, a quiet coexistence inside the two parallel lines of the tram tracks. A three-and-a-half storey building which perhaps had last got a coat of paint on the outside in 1938. a building which cannot quite decide whether it should crumble on to the pavement right now or three-quarters of an hour later. Revolutionary truth on the wall. Or at least a version of it. Beggars. A leper and his comely wife. Suddenly a tree, about twenty feet tall, thin branches all over, blushing with flowers. Home-bound schoolboys, pelting stones at one another. Market-place, the blended odour of fish and vegetables and unwashed human species. Some counter- revolutionary truth, this time plastered across a film hoarding. Hindi make-believes, possibly of Madras vintage, mini-cholis and mini- saris, breasts suggestive of infinite plasticity: Crows, statues with negative aesthetic quotient, statues which cry out for Lohiaesque removals. More poets per square kilometre than even football fans. A newspaper kiosk, poetry magazines by the dozen, more revolutionary truth. Revolution in the tropics, love in the tropics, insipid poetry in the tropics. The red triangle, the vulgar society, ethos travelling down from New Delhi. A ration shop, the Law of the Green Revolution, a morsel of another kind of revolutionary truth—the greater the success of the Revolution, the higher the price of wheat. Aspects of dialectics, facades, speeches at the Maidan and negotiations over lunch at the Calcutta Club. Painted women whom history has not yet caught up with, golf, Saturday nights, the oasis of shopping during the indolent afternoon hours around Park Street, cars installed with air- conditioners. Beggars, pickpockets, policemen in worn-out uniforms, a hydrant leaking since morning. A sharp nor'wester, flooding the streets, a couple of tired trees come down on top of the power line. Talk of over-utilisation of capacity, the civic facilities originally intended for eight hundred thousand now extended to eight million. Anti-thesis, human beings who are under-utilised, small engineering firms, retrenched labour, unabsorbed young engineers. Political parties who couldn't care less, incapable of caring more, the books speak of situations in Russia or China or Cuba, no clue to Calcutta 1969. Clenched fists, Mao's Red Book, violence in the air, to be met by matching violence, vapour, the meaning of meaning. Teachers in a procession, women with high fat content addressing shrill meetings, society for the protection of ersatz uteruses. Clerks equally incapable of maintaining the ledger or manning the barricade, lack of nutrition, yet the spouting of spitfire vocabulary. Wives alternating between kitchen and lying-in, several who die before reaching thirty, children who go astray. Lack of nutrition, but nervous energy comes marching in, nervous energy expended in abandon. Gang fights, the chasing of uncertain-looking, unsure girls, lack of food, but tea stalls abound, some migrate to local liquor. The youth have to be revolutionised, pocketful of Lin Piao, revolution in the revolution, other voices, other interpretations of insurrectionary truth. A bank gets looted, unscrupulous journalists, journalists parading as philosophers, journalists parading as statesmen, journalists who assume that between Tagore and them history was a vacuum.