India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘Make that a little more concrete.’

  ‘Suppose I’ve come to a village where they’re afraid to keep me. They won’t tell me that outright. When I went to one such village in the evening, the people suggested to me that I should go with the boys to a nearby jatra, a whole-night theatrical performance, a high spot in the annual life of a village. They were hinting to me that I couldn’t stay in any of their houses that night.’

  ‘You haven’t told me what it was like in the villages.’

  ‘The quality of life was better than in the urban slums. Apart from a lepers’ village, where – before harvest time – they had a little wheat, but so little they couldn’t make chapattis. They made paste of the flour and served that in very small quantities. Children couldn’t digest that paste. Hunger – getting one full meal a day – that was the major determining factor of the quality of village life for five months of the year at that time.’

  And I was struck again – as I had been when he was telling of the dying man he had picked up from the Calcutta street – by the way he spoke of the distress of India: as though it was a personal idea, a personal observation, as though his group observed it better than others and with more understanding, as though this distress was something they were entitled to refer to, to explain their actions.

  *

  It was now well past midday, well past the normal lunch hour. He was tired. He said he wanted to have a shower. Arati had prepared the lunch, and when Dipanjan went to the back space to have his shower, she brought out the food and set it on a little stool for me: simple food, two pieces of fried fish, peas, puris. The fish was bony, not easy to pick at, but Arati said that if I used my fingers I could feel the bones better and get rid of them.

  Standing in the little room while I ate, she talked again of the heat of the summer in Calcutta; and again she asked whether I was staying for that. She talked again of the trees that had been cut down. I asked her whether Indians hated trees, whether there was some idea that trees sheltered or encouraged bad spirits. She said no, Indians loved trees; but now there were simply too many people, and the trees had to be cut down.

  Dipanjan had left her during her first pregnancy, she said – when he went to live in the villages. She had gone to stay with his parents. That was the Indian way, the custom here: the wife stayed with her in-laws. In order to write about India, she said, you had to spend a lot of time in India. There were so many things of India that were different.

  She said she had been sympathetic to the cause in the beginning. But she didn’t like that idea of going to the villages, taking revolution to the people. She thought it was foolish. The poor here in India believed in their fate. That going out to the villages had set the revolution back by 40 years. And she didn’t like it when the murders began. She didn’t like that at all.

  Dipanjan and I hadn’t got to that yet: Dipanjan had promised that for another day, perhaps tomorrow.

  Perhaps, I said to Arati, the flaw had lain in that very idea of revolution, that idea of a particular moment when everything changes and the world is made good, and men are made anew.

  She didn’t take the point up.

  Turgenev had written a novel about that, I said. He had written a novel about middle-class people in Russia in the late 1860s taking revolution to the workers. Perhaps if people had read that book without prejudice they mightn’t have made the misjudgement that the people in the novel had made. But she hadn’t read Turgenev; she didn’t know Virgin Soil. Her Russian reading didn’t go back so far; her Russian reading appeared to have gone back only as far as the classical political texts.

  Standing sideways in the doorway, looking out at the verandah and the white early-afternoon light in the lane, the light that was still only the light of spring, she said reflectively that people in other countries seemed to be withdrawing from Marxism.

  She wasn’t a tall woman. But she was sturdy; and she was still shapely.

  She said she had spent some time in England, when Dipanjan had gone there to do higher studies in physics, after all that business was over. And what she had seen in England, and especially what she had noted about the position of women in England, had further shaken her up. Perhaps, she said, Marx was wrong. And I found it moving: such passion, in that tiny cluttered room, with the threat of the summer to come.

  At dinner that evening, in a large apartment in central Calcutta, I met someone who had known Dipanjan as a fellow student at Presidency College. Dipanjan had been a talented and even brilliant student, I heard. Then this Naxalite business had occurred, and there had been the dreadful time when it seemed that Dipanjan, married to someone from a very distinguished Calcutta family, might have been hanged. Since that Naxalite business they hadn’t met, Dipanjan and the man who was talking to me.

  The man said, ‘He was a better student than I was. Now he teaches physics. I do physics – that’s the difference between us. The college he teaches at is awful. He must know that. He is wasting his talent there. He should return to the mainstream.’

  But that wasn’t a subject he felt he would be able to raise with Dipanjan, if they were to meet. The matter was too embarrassing. All that Naxalite, communist involvement – in which, from his own account, Dipanjan for the first time in his sheltered life appeared to have found community, drama, and purpose – now lay like an embarrassment between Dipanjan and the other world he had known.

  Perhaps, the man said, Dipanjan was too ashamed to meet the people he had once known. So he lived where he did, and taught in that poor college. It was the same when he had gone to England: he had lived in the simplest kind of bedsitter.

  Someone else at the dinner said that this kind of disappearing, this hiding away, was a very Bengali thing to do.

  And I thought of Dipanjan coming out of the lane early that morning to meet me – in his cloth and shirt – coming after all those other people from the poor settlement with their respectable fronts, their briefcases and dispatch-boxes. From what he had said at our first meeting, I had got the impression that he taught at his college out of a fellow feeling with the students, ‘defeated soldiers’. And my first idea was that some similar feeling of social responsibility had made him live where he lived. But no; it wasn’t like that. He lived where he did because he couldn’t do better. In the villages he had suffered; in the town now he suffered almost as much, from the dust and the mosquitoes, and his wife suffered from the heat. He had chosen a hard way; and neither he nor his wife was used to harsh conditions.

  I went to see him the next morning at the college, and took in again the details of the two-storey building, with its Calcutta-style classical ornament, its pediment, and the columns in pairs inset in the walls on both storeys. The green shutters were coated with the grainy black grime of fumes and dust – you could write in that grime. The small trees in the small college yard were discoloured with dust; only the fresh shoots of the spring showed green and clear. Slowly burning mounds of old, flattened, garden rubbish sent pungent smoke into the air, not unpleasant, a gentler smell of autumn in the Calcutta spring. It was a Calcutta custom, this burning of garden waste even in the centre of the city, and it added to the brown haze. Many broken brown classroom tables and chairs had been placed that morning in a jumble on the small untended lawn of the college yard, where weeds grew out of litter mounds.

  Upstairs, broken window panes and door panes had been replaced by wire netting of various meshes. The tarnished label, Department of Physics, done with screw-down metal letters, looked incongruous. The wavering line of dust on the red floor – the dust Dipanjan and I had spoken about two days before – was still there. In the choked room or cell at the side, the rings made by the soda bottles and the saucers of two days before had not been wiped.

  Dipanjan made a half wave at the rings on the table, a half nod at the dust in the room with the lab tables, and said, ‘It will never be cleaned.’

  We sat in the cell, he in his old chair, I in the one I had sat in, facing each
other across the little table. The table was really quite multifariously stained. A narrow strip of white-tiled wall showed behind the olive or khaki-coloured metal cupboards and between the cupboards. Brown drips, from some unknown source, had coagulated on the tiles.

  I told him that there were certain things I hadn’t found in what he had told me. He had talked of going to the Guest Keen Williams workers in Calcutta. How had he done that? Who was the first worker he had talked to? I hadn’t got many pictures from his narrative. He had gone to the villages – how had he done that? Had he just taken a bus or a train to a particular village? Could he go beyond certain abstractions – ‘workers’, ‘villages’, ‘peasants’, ‘repression’?

  He accepted what I said. He offered to fill in details. He talked first of the time in 1967 when he had gone among the Guest Keen Williams workers in Calcutta.

  ‘One of my friends had been living in the Guest Keen Williams slum for some time, and he had met this second-rank communist leader. My friend asked me to come over to judge whether this man was a genuinely revolutionary man. I took a bus from Presidency College, crossing Howrah Bridge. I got off at Howrah station and caught another bus, and that went through the crowded streets of Howrah to the Guest Keen Williams gate.’

  (A week or so later I made the same journey myself, with someone from the Guest Keen Williams company. A year-long company lockout had just come to an end, and the inactivity of a year showed in the yard, in the tropical weeds and the post-monsoon rust. The company was one of those lumbering former British companies that had grown slack during the times of near-monopoly; it couldn’t adapt easily to new conditions. The company’s troubles of 1966–67 had been the beginning of its long decline. In 1966, when the Indian economy was in a bad way, Indian Railways, on which Guest Keen Williams was more or less traditionally dependent, cut their orders by more than half. For six or seven months in 1967 the points and crossings department, and the crossing-sleepers department, had no work. The bolt and nut department was also affected. Workers got their wages, but they got only the minimum. This was what I was told by the company: this was the background to Dipanjan’s story.)

  Dipanjan said, ‘My friend and I waited for a long time at the gate. We looked at the union shack. We talked to the people there. Workers were coming out of the gate. I saw the variety of the people – Muslims, Hindus, Biharis, Bengalis. I was exhilarated, but the man my friend wanted me to see unfortunately didn’t turn up.

  ‘The next visit I remember was this. The company was bringing in some new machines, and some workers were going to be laid off on half pay. The role envisaged for us by the organizer of the splinter communist union was that we should go to the slums inhabited by non-Bengali workers, whom the unions hadn’t succeeded in recruiting. These workers were anti-communist.

  ‘Late one afternoon many of us had entered the slums. I found myself in a room in one of the huts, and here is this Bihari sitting on a string bed in the space outside his hut.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Middle-aged. Reticent at first. But he smiles, and then I start talking about the machines that were going to come. I talked in Hindi, which I didn’t know well at that time. He was friendly but non-committal.

  ‘And here is another scene I remember – some time later. I began to go to this slum in the evenings. I had been asked to speak to the workers about Marxism. By that time the splinter union had a large following. This was a Muslim hut, and I was waiting with one of the workers. I had still not got used to the conditions of their life, and what I remember most after 20 years is that there was a public drain running through the room. That is the main thing I remember. Then I went to the class, to talk on Marxism. I don’t think I got my meaning across. They were tired, and I was speaking at too abstract a level, as I now understand.

  ‘I was in this euphoric world. I was very young, and some of the Muslim workers – I am talking now about workers in the docks, where I went later – were telling us to go back home to our parents, who were crying for us, and to go back to our studies. I remember I asked one of these workers, “Why should I go back? And why aren’t you coming forward and helping me with my work?” ’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘This chap was middle-aged. I still remember what he said in his Hindustani: “We have come here to make money.” It occurred to me that I was being too theoretical. But the party had said that workers in the town were “backward” compared to the peasants, and I had that rationalization to fall back on.’

  I said, ‘Arati didn’t like you going to the villages.’

  ‘In mid-68 I told her I would be going. When I actually had to go, she was pregnant. She cried. She didn’t think it was a great thing to do, but she didn’t think it was a foolish thing to do at that time. She felt I was betraying her. To some extent I felt that myself.’

  ‘How did you go to the villages?’

  ‘It was another anti-climax, at first. We had certain well-developed urban centres outside Calcutta. I took a train and went to one of them. It was a two-and-and-a-half-hour journey. I went to a factory-worker’s house. I knew the house. I had gone there before on certain errands. He was a refugee from East Bengal. He had built a small house of his own, in a ramshackle and dirty part of the town.

  ‘That same day I met one of the village comrades. He was expecting me. We leave the next day by bus. I have a canvas bag, but with nothing in it, only a dhoti. We get down in the late afternoon. My clothes don’t stick out, but my glasses do, and my Calcutta accent. We walk for half an hour and reach the village centre, where all the people support us. That night there is a meeting to decide upon a course of action. I don’t attend the meeting.

  ‘At night we go to eat in someone’s hut. The village people have arranged collectively for the food. The rice is wet. It’s not been strained at all, because that rice-water itself is food, and there is a lot of that wet rice. And I can’t eat it. It’s a strain for me, because I can’t throw it away either. My city stomach is just too small for it. And there is nothing else to eat, and nobody is going to eat a real meal again until the next night.’

  ‘What are you eating off? Plates? Leaves?’

  ‘Metal plates. It’s a thatched hut. We are eating outside, in an open space. No lights except for the sky, and quite a lot of mosquitoes. I am disconcerted.’

  ‘Why?’

  He switched tenses. ‘I was afraid of what I had to face the next day – communication-wise. We slept on a string bed outside the hut – two of us to a bed, and that was pretty uncomfortable, because a string bed sags in the middle. I had a sense of forlornness and apprehension. In the villages there are no lavatories. There are certain fields – with nearby pools of water – that are set aside for the purpose.

  ‘Next morning a better-off peasant (he had a radio) gave us tea – which is not common in the villages: the villagers at that time didn’t have hot drinks. In the afternoon we were given another meal – again of rice – because we were going off on another journey on foot. A journey of three to four hours.

  ‘I found it hard to keep up with the peasant guide. We reached our destination in the evening. I was charged up with my politics, but they were going slowly and calmly about their everyday tasks. I noticed that, and I felt like a fool. In the cities everyone was boiling, and here were these peasants, who were supposed to be the main force of the revolution, quite impassive. I felt let down, and I began to feel homesick for Calcutta.

  The next afternoon I began to walk back to the nearest party centre, which was in a very small town. I don’t remember any of the physical stress, and I don’t think it made any impact on me. All I remember is that I had to walk about six hours, because I had no money – we were not supposed to take any. While I walked, buses were plying.

  This was how I began my Red Guard Action. And then I felt I was doing my work at last.’

  I said, ‘You know I don’t want any names. But none of the people you are talking about have any faces. I can�
�t see them.’

  Dipanjan said, ‘There are faces. But when we began with the Guest Keen Williams workers we were following the communist tradition in which people are objects, not living subjects making their own lives – and history in that process. Our interaction at the human level was mainly within our own political set. Which is why when that Muslim dock-worker asked me why I didn’t go back to my family, it made such an impression on me. Even today I believe that conversation was on a different level.

  ‘I would like to make a further comment. The faces of my friends are with me. But most of them are still active politically, and I want to make no comment on them.’

  An event then occurred, on 1 May 1969, which called Dipanjan back from the villages to Calcutta. On that day, at a public meeting on the Calcutta Maidan, the great central park of Calcutta, the communist faction that had been organizing the Naxalite peasant movement announced its separate identity as the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

  Dipanjan said, ‘My parents rejected the new party. Arati was not pleased at all. At this stage she would have liked me to leave politics. Our daughter was to be born in October. I stayed on in Calcutta, working politically in the docks, until the end of 1969. And then I returned to the villages.

  The earlier comrades had been asking the peasants to form their own organizations, to seize political power and, in the process, to confiscate landlords’ lands and, later, guns – to harvest forcibly the produce of their lands, to take the produce of the landlords’ lands. And build centres of peasants’ power, as opposed to landlords’ power, in the villages.

  ‘And, in fact, there had been a big peasant uprising in the region in the harvest season. I was too late for that. It was during this uprising that the party line about individual killing arrived. The killings were to be carried out by conspiratorially constituted squads. And this time, when I began my Red Guard Action, I had to ask the peasants to form annihilation squads, as they were called.