Dipanjan said, ‘You don’t recognize him. It was presented by a Dr Bose, who was sent by Nehru to Chiang Kai-Shek in 1939, and ended up with Mao. The photograph is there because it was a gift. You mustn’t read too much into it, though I have a strong and healthy respect for the man.’
Among the newspapers on the bed was a financial paper. Dipanjan liked to follow the economic news. The Indian economy was fragile, and he said there could be another depression like the one in 1965, which had led to food riots and given an impetus to the peasant movement.
Arati brought out tea. Dipanjan poured a cup for the driver of the car that had brought me, and took it out to him; he was parked in the yard next door.
Arati said, ‘Are you staying for the summer?’ She hardly waited for my reply. ‘The heat is unbearable. There are so few trees now.’
I said, ‘Why do they cut them down?’
‘It’s because of the people. There are too many people. You can’t have people and trees. They’ve cut down so many trees, the weather is changing. We have colder winters and hotter summers.’
A woman neighbour called conversationally, across the short distance from the lane, ‘Arati?’ and almost immediately came in. At the same time a cycle-rickshaw went by in the lane, with many young children sitting on two facing benches below a little roof – young children going home from school in a toy-like contraption, reminding me of the baker’s cycle-vans I used to see as a child in Port of Spain.
Arati and her neighbour talked in the kitchen space at the back of the front room. Their words were very clear through the open door.
Dipanjan, when he came back from looking after the car-driver, settled himself on the bed, among the newspapers, and began to talk.
‘When I went to Presidency College I was not politically active. I sided with the left because of my upbringing, but the political activity in the college at that time was at a low level. Towards the end of my second year, when I was driving myself very hard academically, and it was becoming quite a strain, I began to wonder why I was doing it. I was also dabbling in poetry. My father never read my poems – I didn’t show them to him. My mother wasn’t interested. They thought it was perhaps a harmful diversion. They never encouraged me. I began to question why I was writing. Quite a few of us at college were assailed with similar problems and doubts, both boys and girls.
‘From this time I suddenly became aware of the poverty and misery around me. Until then I hadn’t been aware. I saw things and I accepted it as part of the scenery. I will tell you a little story. One day – I still remember – we were going, a friend and I, to see a showing of a picture made from a play of Bernard Shaw. I was about to go there. I had just left my house. And I saw this person – I wouldn’t say he was a beggar: he was in no position to beg.
‘He was lying on the curb. He was about to die, and fully conscious and silent. He was lying in front of a pathological laboratory. I asked the lab people to phone for an ambulance. The ambulance came, and I found that nobody was willing to accompany the person to hospital. So I had to accompany him. I wasn’t very eager to do it, but I accompanied him. He was indifferent. Absolutely. He didn’t talk.
‘We drove to a hospital. Doctors examined him and on his ticket they wrote that he should be admitted, and they stamped the ticket with a prepared seal: “There is no accommodation in this hospital. Try somewhere else.” The driver had to take him back in the ambulance. The driver asked me whether I knew this person. When I said I didn’t, the driver said, “We can take him to another hospital, but the same thing will happen there.” ’
I asked Dipanjan, ‘What did the man look like? You haven’t mentioned that.’
‘He was in rags, caked with dirt. The most striking thing about him was that he had hydrocel, an inflammation of the scrotum, caused usually by filariasis, a tropical parasitical disease. And when he walked he had to carry his scrotum in his hands, it was so heavy.
‘I asked the ambulance-driver how often this kind of thing happened, and the driver said often. He said that when they were asked to pick up people like that, they did, without making a fuss. But no one accompanied the person, so their practice was to deposit him on some other street, because they knew that no hospital would accept them.
‘Seeing that I felt in some way responsible for the man, the driver said, “There is one place I know where he might be accepted. I’m not sure, but let’s go.” He drove to this place near the temple of Kali, and there was this little space – just a long dark corridor, with perhaps just a tiled roof, and on both sides destitute people lying on beds waiting for death. So we left him there, and we placed the medical ticket near his head, and we came out.
‘This place was the beginning of the place Mother Teresa was building up for such people, and she was quite unknown at the time. I should make it quite clear that I am not making any comment on the utility or validity of Mother Teresa’s outlook or work. But I must say that even today there is no other place in Calcutta where a dying destitute will be accepted.’
At this point the electricity failed, as it often failed in Calcutta. Dipanjan’s first thought was for the Japanese mosquito-repellent, which depended on heat. Without that repellent, he said, we simply wouldn’t be able to sit and talk. He got up and got an oil lamp, lit it, and placed the blue gadget on top of the glass chimney. Almost at once the power came back, so he turned the oil lamp off. We also changed places. I sat on the bed; he sat on the cane-bottomed settee.
He said, ‘It was a Sunday morning. A fine day, but it rained in the afternoon, after we had placed the man at Kalighat. I missed the cinema show. I spent about three to four hours ferrying that man around.
This is just an example. Don’t think this is my road to Damascus. It stands out in my mind, but it didn’t mark my conversion. It was one of a host of things which were happening around me to which my eye was being opened for the first time. And I began to wander about the streets of Calcutta, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.’
Sitting on the cane-bottomed settee, thinking of the past, his eyes unfocussed, he raised his slender bare arms against the blue-washed wall.
‘From 1964, 1965, onwards, the way I was leading my life started appearing futile and meaningless. I retained a strong attachment to physics and poetry, but began to devote less time to it.’
In 1964 Dipanjan took his first degree from Presidency College, and began to do post-graduate work at Calcutta University Science College. At the same time there was a development in his personal life. He had met and proposed to Arati, and there was opposition from her family. Arati came from a distinguished brahmin family. Dipanjan was of the kayastha caste. Of this caste Dipanjan said, ‘The kayastha caste is technically a shudra, but in West Bengal and elsewhere their possession of land had effectively Sanskritized them. They are a clerkly caste, scribes since the Mogul times or even before.’
Parallel with this turbulence, there was the economic crisis he had spoken about at the start of the morning.
‘Since 1965 prices of rice and other foodstuffs had soared to unheard-of heights. Kerosene disappeared. Factories closed. Retrenched workers committed suicide. Even qualified engineers and doctors couldn’t find jobs. In West Bengal there was a great uprising. This movement of the people between 1965 and 1966 completely changed the outlook of our generation.
‘The people started off by confronting retailers in markets and insisting that they take their prices down. In places they looted godowns where grain was being hoarded illegally. When the government used the police against them, there was resistance by the demonstrators. From stone-throwing to setting public places and transport on fire – this has been a hallowed tradition of protest since British times. When someone sets a bus on fire, you know that now he means business.’
‘Was your family affected by the rise in prices?’
‘We personally – my family – could afford it. People were always talking about it – the prices, the crisis, the food riots, the failure
of the government, the police firing. The movement was always called the Food Movement.’
It was organized by the ordinary political workers of a communist faction, and not by any of the big men of the party. Then in 1966 the students of Presidency College, Dipanjan’s old college, formed a pro-communist movement for the first time. The leaders of this movement were expelled, and there was a six-month student agitation against their expulsion.
One night Dipanjan was coming back from South Calcutta by bus. He saw a crowd in the grounds of Presidency College. He got off the bus to see what it was about. He didn’t find anyone he knew, but the next day, when he went back, he discovered that the leaders of the student movement, and others, were his friends. He began to spend more and more time with those friends, in Presidency College, in the coffee house opposite, and in the college hostel.
He began to do political work among those students who were not committed. ‘There was a vocal minority who felt they had come to the college to study and build their careers. And we had to persuade them.’ There was a feeling that the activists organizing the students and the Food Movement were Chinese agents. Dipanjan had to do a lot of reading to deal with these accusations. He started reading Marxist literature.
This was the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, and it had tremendous influence in Calcutta – what the Chinese students were doing, and why they were doing it, and why there had to be a cultural revolution after a revolution proper.
‘I was very excited. I thought that now I could start making my life meaningful. I had no consciousness of my father’s political past in the party, or his uncle’s past as a nationalist and a Gandhian. My father had by that time become an ordinary householder; he kept no contact with the party. My mother had also stopped being a communist. My father’s nationalist uncle had become a bitter critic of the whole Indian polity. He never voted in his life, declaring that under no circumstances would he enter a process of choosing the least harmful among scoundrels.
‘But I still lacked an ideology or philosophy, though all my time was being taken up by politics. I didn’t return home some nights. Arati was getting extremely worried. My parents had almost written me off.’
‘What were you doing at nights?’
‘We would be talking with boys at the hostel until 11. We would then talk among ourselves until 12 or one. Then we would sleep on the lawn of Presidency College.’
This was how he was living in 1967, when he took his M.Sc. and got a job; and when – after all the turmoil with Arati’s family – he and Arati were married, four years after he had proposed to her.
‘It was a packed and exciting time, emotionally, intellectually. It was the start of my education in the world. I had been leading a sheltered life. I was academically minded. My mother was over-protective – I had this asthmatic condition. My mother cried a lot. It was her ambition for me that suffered greatly. My father, having been once bitten himself, was worried about the direction our movement would take.
‘In Presidency College we slowly developed one central idea. We felt that the Indian communist movement had failed because the leadership, which was composed of middle-class intellectuals, had made itself into a bureaucracy. The initiative of the masses had never been developed. And then in April 1967 the Naxalbari incident occurred.’
This was the incident, in North Bihar, after which the Naxalite movement was named.
‘I was reading the paper in the morning. I read this item on the front page. Peasants had surrounded a police party with bows and arrows and had shot down a police inspector, in the course of a struggle to occupy the lands monopolized by landlords, illegally for the most part.
‘This was a dramatic incident. I just couldn’t believe it – that this thing, which we had been reading about in our books, in Marxist literature, in history books, could really happen: that the toiling people could take up arms, and they could fight for their rights. And my mind was made up, and that of most of our friends at Presidency College: that this was the struggle with which we were going to link our lives. In Calcutta the first posters in support of the Naxalbari uprising were put up by us, on the wall opposite Presidency College.’
‘Who were your friends?’
‘Some had backgrounds like mine. Many of them were sons of impoverished gentry on this side of the border. We were all middle-class people.
‘We immediately decided to go among the toiling people. Some of us went back to their villages. And some of us went to the industrial slums. There was a major involvement with the workers of the Guest Keen Williams factory in southern Howrah. A trade union leader there had sought us out. Soon in the villages and in the factories the news began to spread that students were coming from Calcutta to talk to people about how to change their conditions.’
‘How did you fit this in with your work?’
‘I was working in a morning college. So the afternoon and evening were free.’
‘Weren’t you nervous about knocking on people’s doors?’
‘I wasn’t nervous about the industrial workers. I could tune to their wavelength. But later, when I left my job – I changed many jobs – and went to the villages, my experiences were traumatic. But that was much later, in 1969.
‘In 1967 we were still building up the student movement. I had to run to many places, taking political classes and having group discussions with students, equipping them with propaganda to fight the official party propaganda against the Naxalite movement. The party saw it as a threat to their organization.
‘For the year or two after that I spent much time in Guest Keen Williams. Arati went with me at times. My life at that time would be something like this. At two a.m. I would return home walking, because the last bus or tram had passed. Or I would spend the time on Presidency College lawn, or in the building or the hostel if it rained. I would have to go back to work by 6.15, 6.30. Classes began then. At 10 I would be back at Presidency College. We would start discussions with the students of the college and with students who had come from colleges all over Calcutta and West Bengal to learn of the movement.
‘The police were keeping an eye on us. They sent spies to the college. We caught one and gave him a beating up. There were frequent street fights with the police.’
‘What was that like?’
‘Whenever you go into a fight, whether it’s a private fight or a fight with the police, you are nervous to start with. Then the tension slowly drains out, and excitement takes its place, and finally you are quite ready even to risk your own life. Traditionally in Calcutta you fight the police with brickbats. That is the ordinary kind of fight. A serious fight would involve home-made bombs and country-made guns. But such fights are rare, and only occur at the height of important political movements.’
I found this strange: his ability to talk of disturbances and fights in this academic, Aristotelian manner.
I said, ‘You talk of these fights with the police as though you were protected in some way.’
Dipanjan said, ‘The communists were then sharing power. We understood their dilemma. We knew that the police wouldn’t be able to cross certain limits. This was the first time the communists were sharing power in West Bengal, and they couldn’t throw themselves against the students and the workers. The very fact that the police had fired on the peasants at Naxalbari caused a division within the party, and brought over some senior communists on to the side of the Naxalite movement.
‘In the evenings, after being with the students, we would go to the factories and the slums, or take political classes and conduct group discussions. We were slowly learning the classical Marxist political ideas – Marx, Lenin, Mao, all of them.
‘And then, in 1969, we went to the villages. The communist party in West Bengal is pretty old, even in many of the rural areas, and grassroots leaders who wanted the struggle started helping the students who had come to their areas.
‘We had a rule. You must have with you only a lungi, a cloth, a vest or singlet, and
a towel. You went to the villages, identified the huts of the agricultural labourers or poor peasants, and you told them directly why you were there. You started talking immediately about the political aims – seizure of power by the toiling people. We called this Red Guard Action.
‘The pioneers faced a lot of trouble getting their message across. But by the time I went to the villages, this fact was well known among the peasants. We kept just the fare back to the urban centre from which we had come, and no other money. And we kept a dhoti, a shirt, and pair of slippers for use in transit between the villages and towns.
‘The peasants fed us when they could. In some new places sometimes they wouldn’t, at the beginning. But on the whole everywhere they gave us a patient hearing. We slept in their huts. Usually, if they had only one room, and the hamlet was safe, composed only of poor people, we would sleep on the verandah. But this was a rare luxury. Usually we had to sleep concealed in a loft. As the state increased its repression, we would have to remain concealed the whole day. One or two of us had the experience of having to relieve themselves in pots.’
‘Repression’ – this, too, was strange: that after all he had gone through he should use this abstract word, and make it sound like something from a political textbook.
He went on: Two problems crept up. Amoebiasis, because drinking water is uniformly bad. And scabies. Because we had to bathe hurriedly, and on many days not at all. We lacked the know-how of keeping oneself clean in an Indian village. All the villagers know how to clean themselves with a little oil, a little alkaline ash, a little water – which we didn’t. But this didn’t really trouble us. This was the most exciting and the most interesting and fulfilling part of our political work: when we were moving among the villagers.
The major problem at the beginning was that I felt that there was an invisible partition between us and the villagers, that we were talking two different languages. It took a long time to get accustomed to the silences and obliquities of rural India.’
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 40
