Samaresh Basu
FEVER
Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha
Contents
About the Author
A Note on the Title
Introduction
Author’s Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Fever
SAMARESH BASU (1924–88) was an uncompromising chronicler of the working class. His gritty fiction featured workers, revolutionaries, and radicals who fought society and their own demons and disenchantment. A prolific writer of more than 200 stories and 100 novels, Basu also saw two of his novels briefly banned on charges of obscenity and one win the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award.
ARUNAVA SINHA translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English, and has thirty-four published translations to his credit. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and the winner of the Muse India Translation Award for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right (2013), he was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2009 for his translation of Chowringhee. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation.
A Note on the Title
THE TITLE WHICH Samaresh Basu gave his novel Mahakaler Rather Ghoda means ‘Horse to the Chariot of Time’. Besides time, ‘Mahakal’ also refers to the destructive force of the universe—the chariot becomes a vehicle not only of relentless time, but also of annihilation. And the horse that draws this vehicle—anonymous, harnessed to a cause that does not care for the freedom of the beast of burden—represents Ruhiton Kurmi, the protagonist of this novel.
When the novel opens, Ruhiton has for some time been afflicted by a low-grade fever and hoarseness. There is no apparent reason for the symptoms, mystifying the jailed revolutionary. The illness quickly becomes the symbol of the decay, doubt, and despair that assail Ruhiton, haunting him physically and emotionally till the end.
Encapsulating as it does the different kinds of sicknesses—in the socio-political power structure that Ruhiton and his comrades revolted against; in the gradual degeneration of the revolutionary movement; and in the betrayal of the toiling classes by the leaders of the revolution—the fever is the leitmotif of this novel. Hence, it is also the title of this English translation.
Introduction
THE TITLE OF the novel Mahakaler Rather Ghoda succinctly captures the brutal irony that is so central to its structure. The title literally means ‘Horse to the Chariot of Time’, and in combination with the prefatory poem referring to the countless anonymous soldiers without whom the historical transformation underlying the Mahabharata would not have been possible, it highlights the tragedy of the subaltern revolutionaries in the Naxalite uprising of North Bengal in the late 1960s. This class, like a beast of burden, pulls the chariot of history and its rebellion is a direct and spontaneous outcome of the daily exploitation that it suffers, and yet it is not given its due in history; nor does it reap any benefits from the revolution. When the Adivasi protagonist of the novel, Ruhiton Kurmi, is released from prison and returns to his village under strict surveillance, he does not meet any of the impoverished peasants; the people who welcome him back as one of their own are either unfamiliar or his former political enemies, trusted supporters of the rich. Even his family members have joined hands with the state machinery.
The Naxalite uprising of the impoverished peasantry was largely led by middle class Maoist intellectuals with remarkable support from the urban student community. These upper class revolutionaries were immersed in theoretical debates informed by the literature of communism while the illiterate, landless peasant understood the same historical situation from his practical experience. The bookish and theoretically engulfed intellectuals differed bitterly among themselves from the very outset—as, sadly, in the history of the international communist movement—exposing thereby fissiparous tendencies which destroyed the movement from within. The subaltern revolutionaries were trapped between the retaliatory violence of the state and the theoretical divisions of the ideologues.
In this sense, the novel brings out the inherently tragic possibilities within the uprising. The uprising gave rise to several first hand/autobiographical accounts like Communis by Raghab Bandyopadhyay and popular fiction like Brishtir Ghran and Shaola by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Kaalbela by Samaresh Majumdar. Most of the stories and novels, however, dramatized the disillusionment and psychological debacle of the urban educated youth. In contrast, Samaresh Basu focuses on the perception of the subaltern activist and his tragedy: he was in a way a pawn in the hands of the urban middle class subscribing to a specifically Maoist theory of revolutionary transformation. No doubt many of the elite representatives suffered imprisonment, torture, and liquidation but what happened to the peasants who were the foot soldiers of the revolution? In the ‘liberated’ areas, the nascent sense of a proletarian identity had been so infectious that the people had turned against traditional habits of drunkenness and wife-battering and the practice of witchcraft. But when Ruhiton returns in freedom to his village and family, he discovers that the community has lapsed back into superstition and obscurantism.
Actually, the movement may have begun in arousal of mass consciousness but not only did it fall apart because of the bickering of the middle class leadership, it also veered towards urban terrorism. As a result, it lost contact with the people to such an extent that it became extremely difficult to distinguish between genuine revolutionary and undercover agent. The underground nature of the movement made police infiltration easy. Thus in the very first chapter of the novel, we find Ruhiton bitterly ruminating about the large number of spies camouflaging themselves among the prisoners like green mountain leeches in the grass or earth-red snakes in the red earth. A greater threat, however, is posed not by disguised outsiders but by cynical and self-seeking insiders.
The author’s knowledge of these political realities surfaces at times in the novel; after all, he had played an active role in the undivided communist party before deciding to dissociate himself from it. For instance, he writes about Diba Bagchi—who first taught Ruhiton to dream of a revolutionary transformation—and his strategy of encircling the cities by the villages where ‘liberated’ areas would be created by a violent uprising. This is no doubt a reference to one of the strategies used in the Maoist revolution in China.
He also goes into some detail about the various categories of landless and semi-landless cultivators. But his focus is really on the changing experiences of the subaltern activist partly modelled on Jangal Santhal, the Adivasi Naxalite leader. He plays down the theoretical debates not in order to deproblematize the novel but to attempt to see the uprising through the eyes of the illiterate subaltern whose knowledge of exploitation is intermeshed with the very business of living. Ruhiton’s freedom of spirit is also indicated in his boyhood itself in his somewhat reckless life, often spent in gambling, wild drinking, or hunting wild animals in the forest. His affinity with the untamed primal energies of nature is suggested in the attempt to instill in his pet pigeons the hunting abilities of the hawk, but
the project failed because his intoxicated father had killed the birds for food. Does this episode anticipate the futility of the later attempt to create a revolutionary consciousness?
Barring a few exceptions, the educated bourgeois leaders were unable to overcome their class superiority, to give up their vanity of bookish knowledge and to develop a cohesive collective consciousness curbing their habits of possessive and competitive individualism. When Ruhiton is taken to a jail ward where he meets several other prominent Naxalite prisoners, his fellow warriors, the first reaction all around is that of solidarity. Some of the young prisoners openly show their enthusiastic admiration for Ruhiton. But chinks begin to appear as the imprisoned leaders inform him about developments in the outside world. Ruhiton is crestfallen to learn of the death of Diba Bagchi and then of the accusation that he had betrayed the cause of revolution and ultimately served the interest of his landowner father.
In contrast to the middle class leaders, Ruhiton’s faith in Diba remains unshaken and he begins to understand the time-serving and slippery tendencies of the educated middle class. The hollowness of the demonstrative solidarity is exposed brutally when the symptoms of leprosy on Ruhiton’s body are interpreted by the bhadralok leaders as venereal disease and they immediately want him to be segregated. But that is not enough. Despite their intimate knowledge of Ruhiton’s character, they jump to the conclusion that such a disease is not unexpected, given the sexual habits of the lower orders to which he belongs. The divide between elite and subaltern had been perceived even earlier by Ruhiton and his fellow peasants when they were taken to Kolkata to demonstrate mass support for the uprising. Once the show was over, they were simply forgotten and not even given any food despite the presence of many women and children. Mangala, his wife, had, out of her measly savings dating back to her premarital days, given Ruhiton some money to bring back a ‘token’ from Kolkata, but after this experience Ruhiton refused to do so.
One of the basic stylistic strategies of the novel is the use of laconic and staccato sentences to depict Ruhiton’s prison existence. The staccato style builds up an effect of brutality and cramped confinement in a world denying the minimum room required by a human body to remain as a body. It hovers obsessively on the damage done to Ruhiton’s body and physical movements by systematic third degree methods of torture. It also captures the disjointed coherence of the stream of reverie interrupted by pragmatic reminders of the present. This style is sharply opposed by the rather hesitant, relaxed sentences describing his life after release. But the opposition is far from the simple one of confinement and freedom. In fact, the stylistic contrast reinforces the irony I have referred to above. Accordingly, imprisonment is less destructive of Ruhiton’s spirit than his return into his milieu and family, now drained of all revolutionary consciousness. In the jail, both the policemen and fellow prisoners are in awe of him but once he is freed, Ruhiton finds himself a virtual non-entity at home, ostracized for his leprosy by even his wife and children despite being completely cured of it.
The confinement and the obsessive use of statistics (including the backward and forward movement of the time sequence of those seven days before his release) present the phantasmagoric in chillingly realistic terms, reinforcing, always with an underlying irony, Ruhiton’s sense of a rebellious identity and dignity. Life outside the prison becomes by contrast totally unreal and dreamlike, for Ruhiton virtually sleepwalks through this world to his eventual suicide. The taut staccato sentences and Ruhiton’s reflections on freedom and proletarian unity in a state of paralysed confinement build up to a climax and then there is a devastating collapse into actual freedom and economic security. Not only is this freedom put constantly under surveillance but Ruhiton had also never wanted freedom exclusive to himself. One might put the matter in a different way: when Ruhiton’s limbs are fettered, his mind is free and moving between nostalgic happiness, armed rebellion, and proletarian hope; when his limbs are freed, his mind is fettered by despair caused by the complete sapping of revolutionary ardour in his familiar milieu. Ruhiton’s body becomes a kind of text on which we may read the trajectory of the doomed revolution: leprosy thus becomes a submerged metaphor of the diseased body politic.
While Ruhiton’s world is drained of colour, the novelist plays on one colour, earth-red, and its suggestion of disease. It is, of course, the colour of blood and a bloody revolution. But it acquires a symbolic plurisignificance. It is the first light of dawn seen through the rear window of the jeep carrying Ruhiton on a mysterious trip that turns out to be an unreal freedom. It is the colour of the flame of the cigarette lighter which takes his mind to the colour of stale meat which in turn is the colour that he repeatedly sees in his fits of fever with blotches on it. His mind is taken back to a feeble snake he had seen long ago which had the same nauseating colour with blotches like sores. This iterative vision serves as a premonition of the tragic fate that manifests itself in the symptoms of leprosy on Ruhiton’s body.
In prison, Ruhiton’s life is dominated by physical sensations: the excruciating pain of torture, the confinement, the cool breeze of dawn (which he finds rather cold), the smells of damp, solitary cells and of familiar but not quite recognizable flowers, sleeplessness, and so on. In one view, this would suggest a reduction of the protagonist to a mere biological level of existence. But the way these sensations intermesh with his disjointed but never stifled reverie about the past and the future, nostalgia and hope suggests a direct and unmediated mode of knowing the world that is part of his illiterate Adivasi understanding. We may see at work here the relationship in Marxist theory of praxis—knowledge of reality acquired through a direct, transforming engagement with the material conditions of existence—and revolutionary consciousness but unfortunately remains confined to the books as far as the middle class activist is concerned. Ruhiton’s physical sensations also raise the revolutionary impulse above mere political calculation to the human instinct for freedom akin to the primal energies of nature.
The relationship with the police officer partially succeeds in breaking down Ruhiton’s resolve to a moment of weakness when he expresses anxiety about his family. The officer’s offer of a cigarette as a supposedly friendly gesture is repeated several times at different phases suggesting a strange bond between victim and oppressor. Such is the isolation of Ruhiton that the only human relationship left in his life before he meets the prison doctor is that with this police officer. The relationship between body and mind that is crucial to any human identity is also jeopardized. This is isolation reminiscent of the protagonist in tragedy. There are in fact other similarities with tragedy. When the doctor cures him of the disease, he feels that some of his leprosy-affected limbs have fallen off like the rotten branches of a tree but like the tree he will revive: this has the effect of a hope reversed, a peripatetic irony, extending to the futility of the revolution. Above all, Ruhiton partially fulfills the sacrificial role of the tragic hero, if we recall for a moment the anthropological roots of tragedy, wherein the hero takes upon himself the disease that infects society which is healed in his expulsion from community and death. The undermining of the mass movement causes Ruhiton’s identity to disintegrate because it was founded on a collective consciousness. Somewhat like the unknown soldiers in the prefatory poem, he performs his crucial role in historical transformation which then ironically relegates him to anonymity and irrelevance.
SHIRSHENDU CHAKRABARTI
Author’s Introduction
I DID NOT intend this to be a work of history. Nor of geography. Therefore, my book may have errors in these areas. Are the characters and incidents drawn from reality? No. From imagination? Yes, they are. This story comes from the same place that the writer’s imagination does; its outcome is just as fictitious, and entirely personal.
… Behind the Scenes
‘Charioteers dispensed advice
Leaders drafted policies
Generals adept at warcraft,
Flawless wielders of weapons,
Proclaimed heroically.
Others, wiser with age and experience
Stayed neutral, distressed
By the terrible war between brothers.
Ah truth! We salute you
Shame on you, you are false!
Each of them appropriated you
For their cause.
They’re exalted by history.
How are the armies at Kurukshetra judged?
Faithful to their principles,
To their leaders, they staked their lives
To fight. How are they described? As martyrs?
In the past too they fought, they died
Nameless. Thousands of years later
They keep carrying the flags
Of new ideas, new paths, new viewpoints.
They keep on fighting, the armies at Kurukshetra
Loyal, unquestioning, they battle on
History is created over and over again
Caught between destruction and renewal
What happens to the unsung millions?
Eternity marches on
Relentlessly. Under the yoke
Of time, the horses only
Pull their chariots forever.’
Chapter One
THERE IS A wind which blows in as night breaks into day. It is easy to tell for it has a distinct touch. One can feel it even with one’s eyes closed.
Dawn had arrived. It was an old, familiar sensation, for the wind blew through all the seasons. In summer, in monsoon, in winter.
Ruhiton was neither asleep nor drowsy. But his eyes were shut. Whatever sleep he had managed to get was in the first half of the night, on the office bench.
It had been going on like this for three nights. Not exactly like this, but in different ways. Last night he had been shepherded into a car soon after midnight. Yet he had been told earlier that they would leave in the morning. The previous night he had been told that they would depart at dawn.
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