India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘Among the younger generation of the family, I became a hero. Quite a few members of the family have done what I have done. And it’s not now quite the shock that it had been. But one also has to accept – what my parents felt but couldn’t express, what made them go into their shell – that something indefinable has snapped. We’ve been brahmins for untold generations.’

  Fifteen years or so had passed since the end of the Naxalite rebellion, but Debu – who was now a high executive in a big company – still looked forward to a new, true revolution. Debu had taken part in the rebellion in its early stages. He had then fallen out ideologically with some elements of the leadership, and had had to hide from both police and former associates. He could chart, precisely and convincingly, how the revolution of love and compassion had turned into simple nihilism, with people talking of revolution and peasant power, but never actually taking on the state, or the powerful or the protected, concentrating instead on the weak and the exposed. But there was still in Debu some idea that a fresh and better start might be made.

  He said, ‘The only change – a big change – between then and now is that at that time, in the late 60s, I thought I would be a part of the revolution, and now I know that I shall be a witness to it. A supportive witness. I don’t think the need for revolution has changed.’ And going on from there to talk of his involvement, he dropped a half-thought: ‘Once you’ve tasted blood – ’

  Tasting blood – strange metaphor.

  Debu said, ‘Organizing large masses of people.’ And he meant something else as well: experiencing the love the people offered to those who were trying to do something for them. ‘Love is a trite word. You cannot describe the thing I mean – it was something welling up and touching you. At that time I thought this was to do with loyalty to the party. Now I feel that the party always is the person. That is what I mean by the taste of blood: the people give you a million times more than what you might ultimately give them.’

  He was born in the late 1930s, into the Calcutta middle class. But when Debu was young, his father, a professional man, had a serious illness that lasted for some years; and the family became poor. They were helped by friends, but isolated by their own relatives.

  Some of those relatives, when they came to visit, said things like: ‘When you want to sell those chairs, you must let us know. We might want to buy them.’ The chairs were real, not just a figure of speech. When I met Debu again, and he took me to his large apartment, after a little tour of middle-class central Calcutta, and the once British clubs, I saw the chairs in his drawing-room: low, old-fashioned, ebony or black-lacquer Bengali chairs, a complete set. They would have reminded him every day of those hard years of his father’s illness; they would have confirmed him every day in the distrust of the class from which he had come.

  He had thought for so long about those years that the story came out easily, like a simple fable, together with the political moral he drew from it. There were four components of the Bengali middle class, he said: caste, education, family history, and money. The first three stayed with his family when they fell, but lack of money took them to the outer limit of the class.

  He couldn’t forget that. Even when his family cirumstances improved, he remained an ‘achiever’, passionate to do well at school and college. Even when he was playing cricket – at which he was good – that passion to achieve, to do well at his school, was with him. He punished himself. He said that for six years he worked 16 hours a day. Finally, when he was twenty-two, he had his reward. He became an executive in one of the boxwallah companies, at a time when the Calcutta boxwallah world still had 10 years or so to go.

  It was only then that he could look around. He read a book about President Kennedy, and decided, with some young accountants, to do social work in the slums. The group had vague political ideas; they were not connected with any political party. Their primary idea was the old Bengali idea of the Motherland, the idea that Bengal had given to the rest of India, Debu said: the idea that India had to be a country one could be proud of. The idea had decayed in Bengal since independence, Debu said. ‘In my class the idea is still there, but it is a remnant of the past – considered an anachronism – and in the class above, the industrialists and businessmen, the idea exists more or less as a negative quantity.’

  The slum work became serious. Debu was giving it three evenings a week and two mornings a week. He already had a distrust of his middle class. Now he saw, close to, the injustices of society lower down. He saw how the middle classes were responsible; and he saw also the chain of injustice.

  ‘You had Sir So-and-so, the landlord of a slum. He would do whatever he was doing to the widowed housewives of that particular slum through his lower-middle-class agent. The agent would have his own agents among the lower class in the lumpen proletariat. This was the chain. If you disposed of the landlord, he would be replaced by someone else. The chain itself would go on.’

  After three or four years with his firm, Debu went to the United States on a one-year business fellowship. As part of the deal, he gave lectures on India. He found the experience unexpectedly humiliating. At the end of every lecture there would always be some questioner asking, ‘How come you’re starving and begging for food, if you’re so great?’ And there would always be someone making a shaming comparison between India and China.

  He started to study Marxism and Indian history, and he decided that when he went back to Calcutta at the end of the year he would join the more radical of the communist parties. This was the time of the Food Movement, when India was going through its worst food crisis. Sixty people had been shot by the police in West Bengal, and people were eating ‘milo’.

  ‘This was a derivative of maize which the Americans fed their pigs, and which they had sent over as charity, and the Government of India were dishing out in their ration shops to feed the village poor. I was very ashamed and angry. To me it wasn’t the poor who were eating it. It was Indians and Bengalis.’

  He joined the Communist Party (Marxist) and began to work in the villages. He lived with the peasants. In the main he did propaganda. He also tried to stop black-marketing in rice. He and his fellow workers did this by stopping the movement of rice out of the villages. They also worked to prevent the eviction of sharecroppers.

  Debu began to rise in the party. The Bengali bhadra-lok, the middle class, loved what was foreign, and Debu found that being a foreign-returned person and an English speaker was helping him up even in the Communist Party (Marxist). This was unsettling, but it was also the time when Debu began to have the almost mystical experience of receiving the love of the people. He placed no limit on the time he wanted to give to the cause, no limit on the risk he was prepared to take; and the people in return gave him love.

  ‘People I didn’t know at all – peasants, labourers – no one among them ever said, “You can’t stay here. We can’t give shelter to this friend of yours.” ’

  He formed a committee to fight revisionism in the party, but then he himself became disenchanted with the party. He found that at the lower levels of the party leadership there was a lot of minor corruption: people were stealing fish or rice that had been collected for the party. When he complained to a higher-level committee, he was accused by them of being a CIA agent. He began to feel that some people were trying to push him out of the party.

  But he had also begun to write articles about the peasant movement, and these articles had got the attention of the people who were later to form the Naxalite faction of the party. Some of these articles were read out on Peking Radio; to the Naxalites, as bhadra-lok as any in their love of the foreign, this was the highest recognition. Debu became important in the councils of the faction. The leader of the faction, when he came to Calcutta, began to stay in Debu’s house.

  ‘I had come into this movement through indignation felt abroad at the position of India. And since most of the people of India were poor and lived in villages, this indignation focussed on the poor. I was convince
d you needed an overturning brought about by the poor, since my class and the class above stank, and no redemption could even begin to come from them. And this is where the abstract part comes: the entire concept of overturning came from Marxism as interpreted by Lenin and particularly by Mao. At this time there were two classes of books about Russia and China. On one side were the cold warriors. And on the other were the starry-eyed – Han Suyin, Felix Greene, Edgar Snow. One rejected the cold wariors. I say this with hindsight.

  ‘When the Naxalite movement started – with its attempts to inform and involve the mass of the people – it was quite different from what the other communist parties had been doing. And I want to tell you that I started believing it could be done, it could happen here now. It was the transformation of desire into belief.

  ‘The Naxalites were not using quotations only from Marx, but from Rabindranath and Vivekananda and Romain Rolland. In their wall posters they gave facts about poverty, the amount of food available, the wage scales. And one could see people reading them, and even the illiterates understood them when somebody read them out to them. And above all there was the business of not wanting office, staying away from the electoral process – which had become quite filthy, a matter of money and compromise.

  ‘And now comes the agony, for someone like me. If you have to do something big, you have to be organized in a big way. To be organized in a big way, you needed a command structure. And with a command structure you had battles between individuals for positions in that command structure.

  ‘In communist parties you fight your inner party battles with a thesis and a programme for revolution, and then there are debates, accompanied by expulsions and counter-expulsions, until in the end you have a small group of people or an individual left in supreme command. The style in which this takes place varies from country to country – that grows up from the soil, the culture, the traditions.

  ‘In Bengal we were heavily struck by several things. There was the bhadra-lok tradition I’ve told you about – not in the sense that it led to any gentlemanliness in the struggle, but in the sense that the bhadra-lok is upper caste and Hindu, and has a fixation with the foreign. The upper-caste Bengali is governed by certain laws of inheritance which make internecine war a way of life. That informed our actions very much. We forgot the other political groups, even the extreme communalists. The fight among ourselves was bitter. In this fight you might say that the people became secondary. The level of our intensity was very great; our quarrels were correspondingly bitter. It wasn’t at all an abstract ideological war. It was like a family conflict which had strong overtones of violence.

  ‘A second, later development was parallel: the sanction of individual killing.’ This went with other things, which Debu now outlined. The seizure of college and school buildings, the destruction of laboratories and libraries – since it was considered that this educational system created enemies of the people. The rewriting of our history. The destruction of the statues of people like Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Vivekananda.’ Ram Mohun Roy, out of whose teachings the Brahmo Samaj and the Bengali Renaissance had arisen, which had given so much to India and the nationalist cause, and which still remained dear to people like Chidananda Das Gupta. Vivekananda, the religious teacher – qotations from whose writings had appeared on the first Naxalite wall posters. They were considered people who had compromised with imperialism, and served the interests of the landlords and the then ruling classes. Along with this came the slogan: “China’s chairman is our chairman.” ’

  Stage by abstract stage, from a raw, humiliated concern with the poor and India, to cultural and economic suicide, new compulsions and violations, and a cause far removed from the peasant’s hunger.

  The leader of the Naxalite faction was called Charu Mazumdar. Debu knew him well.

  Debu said, ‘I was present at the small meeting in Calcutta when Charu Mazumdar first unveiled that policy, of individual killing. He had already spoken of this in the villages, and had sent out letters to individual units. This was the first time he was talking about it in Calcutta, and I actually went with him to the meeting.

  ‘It was in North Calcutta, in a lower-middle-class home. I remember a short corridor and a small room. The corridor was full of slippers left by those sitting on the floor in the small room. It was a late-evening meeting, a local meeting.

  ‘I had tremendous admiration for Charu Mazumdar then, and I have admiration now. He was the most intense person I had ever met. And he truly believed in what he spoke about. He put tremendous faith in the young and the new. He truly loved the peasant – much, much more than the love I felt for them. My love was different. He believed in the Indian peasant. He admired them.

  ‘His sense of Indian history was really startling – the essence and dynamics of Indian history. He had no greed, none at all. No sense of personal comfort. There were many thousands of people, at that point, who were prepared to give their lives and follow his command. And he had developed that power without coercion. The only other organization I have known with the kind of power he possessed is the army, and in the army there is a great deal of coercion.

  ‘He was a thin, short man with glasses. His glasses had very powerful lenses. He generally dressed in shirt and dhoti, or bush shirt and trousers. The clarity of his speech and expression was very great. And this was duplicated in his movements.’ Debu meant that Charu Mazumdar’s movements were economical and precise, without too many gestures. ‘He had enormous energy, his movements were swift. And, by God, he could inspire.

  ‘He never ever raised his voice, but he could speak with great emphasis. And in that small room in North Calcutta he started speaking. There were two windows at the back of the room, and they were both open. I noticed those windows, because I was worried that people outside would be listening. There was very little in that room. I remember an unpainted wooden table with lots of books on it, and a radio. The radio was important. Do you know why? That was the link to Peking Radio. All Naxalites gave enormous importance to the radio – “where-yesterday-we-were-mentioned-on-Peking-Radio” sort of thing. There was something wrong with me. In my whole life I have never listened to Peking Radio more than twice.

  ‘There was also a small bare bench at the back. I noticed that no one was willing to sit on it, in spite of the crowd in the room. But ultimately the room became so packed that people had to sit on the bench. Charu Mazumdar was sitting on the floor – that was why people were reluctant to sit on the bench: they didn’t want to be higher than he was.

  ‘People were smoking. That was why the windows were open. I was smoking myself. The atmosphere was still free and easy. I think some tea was brought in, but not for everybody – it couldn’t get to everybody in the room.

  ‘Charu Mazumdar started by mentioning certain successes the group had had in Bengal and in certain other parts of the country. “You are doing very good work here, I know. And they are frightened of us. You can expect them to attack. Our experience has proved that killing individual oppressors helps to mobilize the people, because the people then perceive that the oppressor can be destroyed. Therefore I have just issued this letter.” He read out the letter from a handwritten script. It was the letter calling for individual killing. Then he called for questions.

  ‘I was shocked. But I think my own roots came into play then – as it always does. I was shocked, but simultaneously thrilled. The thrill was: “Have we at last found the way?” It didn’t enter my mind to question what had been given as fact: that killing had generated large-scale enthusiasm among the poor.

  ‘My shock was on two counts. One, it was so close to murder. But this I rationalized: it’s not murder, it’s execution. People weren’t going to be killed just like that. The individual killings were going to be discussed and agreed upon by the group. The second shock was that virtually all the gurus of Marxism had warned against terrorism. And this sounded like terrorism.

  ‘The questions that came were essentially like this: “What
do we do in the cities?” “What happens if the landlord is supplanted by another oppressor?” There were many tactical questions. I was one of the last to ask a question, and I asked it in a very humble way, I must tell you, because, compared to the fellows there, I was from the wrong class, and the fellows sitting there were more active in the field than I was. The question I asked was about Mao and Lenin having warned against terrorism. So how, theoretically, could we support this?

  ‘Charu Mazumdar answered us all. Very quietly, convincingly. We were all convinced.’

  I said to Debu, ‘Tell me a little more about him.’

  ‘He was about fifty-eight. Wizened, fair. He was from a landlord’s family in North Bengal, and his father was a famous doctor, well-to-do. He was very bright in his studies and did well. He was pulled into the swadeshi movement’ – the nationalist movement – ‘and from there he transferred to the peasant movement, and made a name for himself. He became a member of the Communist Party. What he did was to transform a militant reform movement – protecting the sharecropper – into the beginning of a revolutionary movement. He did that by deciding that the battle would be carried on against the state.’

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you that it was madness?’

  ‘At the time I didn’t think it was madness. I don’t think it is madness now. If there is to be revolution, it has to take on the state.

  ‘That meeting in North Calcutta lasted for three hours. Charu Mazumdar’s initial statement was for about an hour and 15 minutes. The discussion was about another hour. Afterwards, little groups would talk to him about their local problems, and leave.

  ‘Up to that time the Naxalites had been occupying schools, defacing statues, etc. Isolated incidents. These things I objected to rather seriously. Up to about April 1970 Charu Mazumdar and others assured me that they were the result of over-enthusiasm. I remember now with hindsight that it was the lower-middle-class and rural schools that were made targets. There was no attempt at touching the elite schools.