‘This time, for me, the first trauma about the villages and non-communication was over. I had learned a little. I began this Red Guard Action with more conviction and less nervousness. This was an extensive journey, lasting many months, six months to a year. I moved from village to village, community to community, tribals and non-tribals, untouchables and farmer castes. I really learned about India.’
‘What did you feel about the new directive?’
‘Many of the comrades before had succeeded in forming squads and carrying out annihilations, mainly in the area covered by the old uprising of the harvest season, based on land and harvest – occupation of land, and forcible harvesting.’
‘Were you shocked by the directive?’
‘No, no. Indians are basically a very violent people. I was doing Red Guard Action in new areas, and in spite of my best efforts I could not persuade the peasants to carry out a single annihilation – which was a cause of great remorse to me, and led to a feeling of inadequacy.’
‘Do you remember how you did the asking?’
‘Oh, yes. I asked a peasant in whose hut I was staying. I remember that hut very well. They had a new-born baby, and she was being fed rice-water instead of milk – in a bottle – something which appeared quite shocking to me. These people were like others we talked to. They had very little land, enough for perhaps three months’ sustenance. The party had asked us all to concentrate on these people.
‘I asked this man, “Who is the most hated landlord of the area?” He named the landlord. I told him, “Why don’t you kill him off?” He brings another peasant that evening, and asks me to broach the subject with him. The two of them agree that that landlord should be killed off, but they refused to do it themselves.’
‘Did the idea shock them?’
‘The idea didn’t shock them. As I keep on telling you, we are a very violent people. I tried to convince them, coming and going, for about two months.
‘My life was a concealed life in that hut. If the landlord knew of my presence he would have killed me or handed me over to the police. I knew it was dangerous. I knew I had exceeded the law. But killing a man is nowhere considered contrary to any ethical code. You must understand that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata rule the everyday religious code of the Hindus, just as the Koran does for the Muslims, and these are books which extol killing for a greater purpose. I should think that, like any other other Indian, I had no sense of ethical outrage in advocating killing for a cause.’
‘Gandhi?’
‘Of the many ideals of Gandhi which the Indians didn’t accept, ahimsa, non-violence, stands out most.’
‘The Jains?’
‘They’re a strange sect. But it’s the wrong perspective of India you have, when you mention these religions – Buddhism, Jainism, and Gandhi. I point to what happened in Kampuchea, Ceylon, Burma, China – all countries ostensibly under the umbrella of Buddha and Confucius. All these peoples are very violent.’
‘Let’s go back to the villages.’
‘As I said, I began to feel inadequate. In late 1970 and early 1971 the movement as a whole faced a setback, and many of my friends started re-thinking.
‘In the last few months, before my arrest, I had become involved with tribal people. I got to like them very much. I felt at home with them. I understood their political aspirations. For the first time I had come across a section of peasants who thought and acted politically. I used to talk a lot to a schoolmaster among them. These months were very satisfying, the most satisfying of my life in the villages, more so because the doubts that my friends in the movement had developed about the line of individual killing – these doubts gave me the latitude to talk freely without the party trammels, which I was beginning to find impractical.’
‘How many people were annihilated in your area?’
‘More than 100 people were killed in the area because of this line. Most of them were landlords.’
But now the police were closing in.
‘Our friends had to break off from the party, and many of us had to keep on the move, in Bihar and Bengal. One night, at about eight or nine, we were at a food shop by a railway station in north Bihar. There were some policemen in plain clothes there, shirts and trousers. They were from the Bengal Police, and they were in search of some other Naxalites. They had come to the railway food shop to buy some cooked meat for themselves. One of my friends was recognized, and we were arrested.
‘At that time the police had started killing off Naxalites, and my first reaction was that they would kill us off. This reign of terror was by this time six months old, and I had accustomed myself to such a fate – just to keep myself going.
‘The policemen at the food stall were older than us. They were not abusive. They took us to the police station. There we immediately tried to influence the Bihari police officer in charge of us to prevent these policemen from Bengal from killing us.
‘The Bihari officer, an educated man, said, “I do respect you. You work for the country. But my duty as a police officer places me against you.” We laughed at him. “Why are you mocking us? These Bengali police officers will kill us in a few minutes’ time.”
‘They tied us with some ropes, and on the way the policemen gave us some blows, harping on the fact that we were Bengalis. The Bihari police officer was shocked, and immediately informed the whole police circuit of Bihar by radio of our arrest, so the Bengali policemen couldn’t kill us, if that had been their intention.
‘Most of us were never tried. Only a few were tried and convicted. The rest of us were kept under detention without trial until the amnesty of 1977 in West Bengal.
‘I was in prison until October 1972, in Calcutta. In prison I found two things which disheartened me. The first was the quality of the Naxalite prisoners from Calcutta. We had been hearing that they had been killing individual policemen, even traffic constables, and suspected spies. The prison was full with Naxalites, especially young boys, and they were not politically oriented at all. What had happened was that there had been an upheaval against the school system – boys and girls forced into the school system, who had then dropped out, and had been recruited by the party for urban violence.
The party had fragmented. My own ideas were not clear. I felt there had been maladies within the movement. I felt that my political search had reached a dead end, and I would have to begin anew. And for some time I could not think of myself as a political worker any longer.
‘After I came to the Calcutta prison I could meet my parents and Arati regularly. No case could be proved against me. I remained in preventive detention. Finally, I wrote the government that if they released me, I would go abroad for further studies in physics.’
The petition was granted. He was accepted by London University, and his father paid his fare to England. The police went with him right up to the plane. He completed his Ph.D. in London, and then came back to Calcutta. This was in September 1974.
I asked him, ‘What do you think now?’
He fingered his glasses, squinted, and looked out through the window. I was sitting across the narrow table from him, in a chair with arms, between the two tall metal cupboards. Behind him was an empty room, with patches of new, level plaster on the walls.
He said, ‘The major mistake, the basic misunderstanding of the Marxist position – I feel the people must liberate themselves. The intellectuals can only hand them the equipment for doing so.’
He now did civil rights work, and taught in the slums. ‘I see no discontinuity with my earlier political search. Between going to the urban slums, and this teaching in the slums.’ He leaned back against an olive-green metal cupboard, and considered the sky. ‘Society is so structured that the toiling people can never find their own voice, their own view of the world, their own identity.’
I asked about Arati, and her time in England.
‘It altered her world. Because she found for the first time that a woman was not merely or at all the appendage of a some
man. I was very happy to come back here. Arati cried for days, and her friends who were brought up never to show their emotions in public were unhappy for her. Given the choice, she would have continued to live in England – this feeling of freedom, and recognition of her as an individual.
‘I had this running fight with her from 67 to 72 – I could not convince her that if we stayed with my parents we would always be dominated by them. She did not recognize the domination as such. And only when we went to England she realized what I was saying. Until then she regarded that as part of my eccentricity – which, for example, had led me into the Naxalite movement. I used to say, “Let’s take an apartment.” Or: “Why don’t you stand up to my mother? Why do you carry out everything my father says, even when it is hurting you?” She never knew there could be a different way of life. Nowadays things have changed, and are changing, but in the 1960s she was in no way an exception in her view of life.’
This gave an added point to what Arati had said at her house the previous day, when Dipanjan was having his shower. When Dipanjan had gone to live in the villages, Arati said, she had gone to live with Dipanjan’s parents. In India a wife stayed with her in-laws; you moved from your parents’ house to your husband’s parents’ house. India was different from other places; you had to know many things in order to write about India.
But now they lived by themselves.
I asked Dipanjan, ‘Are you happy in the little house?’
‘Yes. As far as Arati and I are concerned, the material side of life has never been important. Both of us are capable of hard physical toil.’
‘What about the disorder of your bookcase there – things just thrown together? And the dust – can I mention the dust? You were saying that the college is a corporate place, and that is why it will never be cleaned.’
He said, ‘I am ashamed of that, in my house. Both of us are overworked and can’t find the time. Arati works as a teacher of physics in a morning college. She works there from 6.30 to 10 – and you have to add an hour to go there, and two hours to come back. But I am ashamed of that disorder in my house. And say “dust”, if you like. My grandfather would have taken me to task. But no one is ashamed of this place. That’s the difference.’
‘Do you feel that the most active part of your life is over?’
‘Not at all. My life so far has been the first part of the search.’
‘May I ask this? You have spent so much time thinking of others. Isn’t that arrogant? Shouldn’t you have also thought of developing your own talent? You don’t have to answer. If you don’t want to answer, I’ll withdraw the question and not refer to it.’
‘I’ll answer. The most brilliant boy of the year before me at Presidency College is now a renowned professor in the U.S.A. He asked me the same question. Not the arrogance part. In physics the questions which interested me I found were beyond my ability to answer. I worked on them; I thought about them. I still work on them – or, I should say, I still read about them. But less difficult questions cannot hold my interest. In poetry I am never satisfied with what I write, and especially because the type of poetry I write can only appeal to a few people like myself. But I find helping others is something I can tackle, although I make mistakes. I keep on learning from them.’
Ashok’s first story had been about his attempt to get into marketing, and his entanglement with Imba, the Institute of Management and Business Administration, run by Dr Malhotra of Delhi. His second story was about his marriage, his break with the past.
He said, ‘I eventually went into an advertising agency, and was immediately happy. My career righted itself from here. I grew in my job; I learned a lot about the real world of marketing; it was the most productive five years of my career.
‘But this went with an upheaval in another aspect of my life. I came from a traditional South Indian brahmin household. My father had travelled on various postings all over the world and had settled in Calcutta. And I had a public-school upbringing in India. Yet so ingrained was the traditional outlook of the family that I had never thought of dating girls, although I was popular, and sang pop songs and Indian classical songs. In this Indian classical side I had been trained at home by a private tutor; it was part of one’s traditional upbringing.
‘A number of my friends were leading an active social life, but I myself didn’t see this as either necessary or indeed desirable. Other people did it, had girl friends, but I felt that wasn’t for me. I suppose it was deeply in my subconscious that I would get married in the traditional arranged way – until I actually went to participate in a ceremony of “viewing” a girl with the object of marriage.
‘My family had arranged it in the standard way, through the exchange of horoscopes. The girl lived in Bangalore, and I went all the way down there to see her. There were hordes of my relatives there, and her relatives. We were told to arrive at the appointed place, which was of the girl’s parents’ choosing, at a certain time.
‘It was in the evening. The occasion itself involved everybody sitting round in a circle. I was introduced only to the girl’s father, and we sat round in a circle in the hall. Savouries and sweets were passed around. And everyone was dressed for the occasion. So peculiar were the arrangements, I wasn’t sure who the girl was. There were other girls from her side, and I hadn’t been introduced to the girl herself, and the girl’s father kept up a constant chatter, asking me a whole host of questions about what I did, and what I liked, and what I disliked, and so on.
‘Alarmingly, he also started talking about possible marriage venues. So I found responding in a normal way difficult. He would say, “I would rather hold the wedding in Sholapur than in Bangalore, because I have better facilities in Sholapur. What do you think?”
‘And you couldn’t say no and you couldn’t say yes. If you said no, it would have been rude. If you said yes, it would have been nonsense. So one indulged in a series of diplomatic half-volleys. One smiled vaguely. I was relieved when the hour was over. When people asked me what I thought, I kept saying I didn’t know.
‘One was supposed to make up one’s mind about a girl whom one did not actually get to meeting, with whom one did not exchange a word, and who was just about surreptitiously pointed out by one of my relatives. One was supposed to make up one’s mind at the end of the occasion.
‘It also disturbed me that the girl apparently had no say in the matter. Certainly everybody – all the 20, 30 people there – was anxiously waiting to know whether I had given the green signal. On these occasions it’s all weighted in favour of the boy, and the girl’s family occupies the inferior position.
‘Many years later a feeling of shame crystallizes around the memory. But at that point the feeling was one of embarrassment, though even today boys and girls get married in the way I chose not to then. In fairness to them, I should say they have no choice. It’s not fair for me to tell anyone to follow my example. Perhaps if it had been handled differently, I might have been less embarrassed.
‘At the end, while we were trooping out, saying goodbye, it occurred to me – in a trice – that I wouldn’t like to go through this again.
‘We went back to our family house. I was confused. In the car were my brother, his wife, my father, and I. I was quite silent, and remained silent. They knew I was unhappy. I pushed off to a friend’s house and stayed there till late. I was scheduled to leave Bangalore the next day. What was worrying me was that my family had given the girl’s parents the promise that they would revert to them the next day.
‘When I went back home later that night, my father and my brother asked me what I had decided to do – did I want to marry the girl? I said no. My father said, “No problem. We’ll find another girl.”
‘I told my father I wasn’t saying no because I didn’t like the girl’s face – that would have been unfair: I hadn’t had a chance to talk to the girl. I was saying no to the process, not to the girl. And I didn’t want to talk about it any more.
‘My elders though
t that time would heal things, that this was my first time, and that the next time round would be different.
‘I became less and less communicative. It’s in the situation that parents and children don’t talk openly about these things. Nobody ever asks you what your views on marriage are. It just happens that one fine day somebody presents you with a proposal.
‘And it was at this time that, spurred on by the thought that I would have to go through with that viewing process once more or many times more, my mind gradually turned towards the principle of making up my own mind who I wanted to marry.
‘There was someone I had known, a marketing executive. Marketing – it’s always been marketing for me. But this girl I knew came from another community. I declared myself to her. We agreed that it could be a workable proposition. We knew each other socially. We spoke the same language. But she was of a different community. And when I finally broached the subject to my parents, they were as opposed as I thought they would be. They went into a shell, withdrew – as I had withdrawn after the viewing ceremony at Bangalore. It was difficult to communicate with them, because in a situation like this they had a certain crude logic on their side: in a matter like this there could be no half-way compromise. For them I was about to break the family link with history, tradition, and they could have no vision of the future. For them everything appeared to become black.
‘I was on test, too, because the person I wanted to marry wanted to see how I would react to pressure. So it was important to me to stand up. I told my parents I wasn’t going to change my mind, but I wasn’t in a hurry. They could take their time. It was very hard for them, but slowly they came round. They were counselled by some people in the family and by friends. Our wedding was held in the traditional grand manner.
Today we are physically apart, in different cities, my wife and I in Calcutta, my parents elsewhere. This distance has helped us to adjust to each other. We meet once in a while, a couple of times a year, and we have a cordial relationship. My brothers and sisters have married in the traditional way, and they live with my parents in the same city. But there is no great bonhomie among them. It is my view that the South Indian brahmin cannot let himself go; everything is restrained.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 42
