India (21 page)

He didn’t go out to work. He went to school. In the school in the village he had been a failure in the fourth standard; in Bombay, in the same standard, he stood first. It was then, too, that he began writing poetry.

All his poems came straight out, ‘in a flow’. He had read about Bob Dylan and Eldridge Cleaver. And he had read some Negro poets; and Leroi Jones. He had read them in English. He understood English, though he couldn’t speak it. There was no direct influence, but he was aware of those poets. He also knew Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Rilke, Baudelaire, Lorca, the last four in English translations. He’d read all the major mid-20th-century poets.

And though, from a distance, his career seemed to be like the careers of a number of Black Power people in the United States – he had become someone the newspapers and magazines wrote about, and in the end he had become more famous than his cause – yet, talking to him in this little room of the Bombay house, I felt that he was the prisoner of an Indian past no one outside could truly understand. It had been harder for him to break out, to reject the past, than it had been for black people in the United States. And now Namdeo was again, if in a different way, a prisoner of India, with its multiplicity of movements and desperate needs; he could easily sink again. It wasn’t really possible for him, as it might have been possible for a black activist in the United States, to withdraw, to settle for ease.

I asked whether he was now more a poet than a politician.

‘The roles are not separate. I am against this caste system. I express it in my politics and in my poems. Poetry is a political act. Politics is part of my poetry.’

Only now I thought I could refer to the adventure of the previous night.

‘You will keep on working with the prostitutes?’

‘I will keep on working on various problems. Prostitutes are a major problem.’

‘Are there Dalits who are jealous of you?’

‘There is a jealousy of me. There are allegations that I am a communist.’

When he had first come out to greet us, before going in again to
continue eating, he had seemed casually dressed, a man at home, with a brownish shirt and a many-coloured dhoti. In fact, he had dressed carefully. The shirt was elegant, fawn-coloured, thick and textured; and his dhoti had a plaid pattern. He fitted into the room, with its walls in an eggshell finish, and the plastic flowers in a vase on the window-sill in front of the vertical iron bars: a lot of Mallika’s taste here.

I said, ‘Mallika says your poetry is a milestone.’

‘I feel surprised when people say things like that. Marathi literature is so poor. There were nice poems like Tukaram’s, and then there was nothing for hundreds of years.’

His life was very public now. Was it possible for him to write poetry while living such a public life?

He misunderstood the question. ‘I’m not really troubled. I don’t expect to be praised.’

‘Mallika said you defended her right to publish her book.’

He didn’t make a direct comment. ‘It’s a conflict between two cultures, two backgrounds. Mallika’s mother was a traditional Hindu. Though her father was Muslim, her culture was traditional Hindu middle-class culture.’

‘You defended her book.’

‘Her book was damaging to me, it is true. My image outside was that of a progressive, and Mallika’s picture was damaging. But Mallika was right. I’ve always been an Ambedkarite. That’s been part of my being, and I feel that Mallika has a right to say what she feels about her husband.’

Then, explaining himself, not waiting for me to ask questions, he began to speak of some of the things I might have heard about him or wanted to know about him.

‘My political rise started in 1971–1972. Before that I was living in that Kanthipura area in the underworld. Money was easy to come by. It was a red-light area, full of ignorance and the mafia and cruelty. It’s a cruel area, and that had an effect on me. It had a tremendous impact on my character. When you are young, you are tough and militant. Your energy can take you on to a good path or a wrong path. If I didn’t have my special past, and if I wasn’t aware of Ambedkar’s movement, I might have been one of the big men of the underworld, and I mightn’t have gone into politics. Because of the way I had been brought up, I was full of anger and ready to fight at the slightest provocation. Some of the fights I got
into came close to murder. Everybody in the Bombay underworld knew me.’

The afternoon had gone; dusk was almost upon us. Our talk had taken a long time, because Namdeo had always spoken at length, and I had had to wait for Charu’s translation or summaries. I was tired. Charu was tired, and he had missed the visiting Russian circus to which he had been hoping to take his wife that evening. I got up, ready to leave. But Namdeo didn’t want it.

He said, ‘You haven’t asked me about my personal life.’

And then, like a man doing what was expected of him, giving full value, he spoke the things people said about him and sometimes used against him.

‘I used to be a taxi-driver. From 1967 to 1971. I used to go with prostitutes. I have tried all kinds of vices.
Now I’m too much normal and gentleman.
’ The last sentence was in English. ‘Even after I got married, I used sometimes to go to prostitutes. When the Dalit Panthers split, I used to drink very heavily. I started the Panthers, and then they put me in a minority. It was a great blow. It saddens me still.’

‘Why do you think you lost your power?’

‘I was ahead of my time. I tried to expand the definition of Dalits – to take in all the oppressed, not just the scheduled castes. If you really want to break untouchability, you have to get into the mainstream. I wanted to be in the mainstream. That was why I wanted to expand the definition of Dalits. But the reactionaries among the Dalits didn’t want to be in the mainstream. Their feeling was that, to break communal feelings, you have to be communal yourself. And those were the people who put me in the minority.’

Then there was his illness. That came in 1981; that was also the year he had published his last book. He had spoken in a cool, open way of his life and failings, while the friend of the house with the thick moustache and the orange or saffron tunic (looking more and more like a religious garment of some kind) had listened and looked down at a point half-way to the floor and shaken his head affirmatively from time to time. And Namdeo spoke now of his illness in the same way. It was as though he was detached from his life, and observing it from a distance. He was no longer looking for praise or approval: he spoke of Mallika’s right to publish her
critical book as though the other possibility, of anger and suppression, had never entered his head.

He had spoken of his own past violence. But he was calm now: it might, after all, have been something he had inherited from the Hindu culture around him.

‘What does Ambedkar mean to the Dalits?’

‘There was a time when we were treated like animals. Now we live like human beings. It’s all because of Ambedkar.’

So, just as greater meaning could be read into the house with the eggshell lilac walls and the white-painted rattan chairs, so a greater understanding became possible of the long, patient line of dark men and women on one side of the road on the morning I had arrived: not just the poor of India, but an expression of the old internal cruelty of that poverty: people at the bottom, full of emotion, with no politics at that moment, just rejecting rejection.

Nikhil said one day, ‘I know a man here called Rajan. He is the private secretary of an influential politician and businessman. He says he met you in Calcutta in 1962.’

I couldn’t remember, and I still didn’t remember even when Nikhil took me one afternoon to Rajan’s office. Rajan was a small, sturdy man of the South with a square, dark face. His office – or the suite of which it formed part – was one of the most spacious and stylish offices I had seen in Bombay. It was in the international style, in cool, neutral colours, and it was beautifully air-conditioned. Rajan was clearly a man of authority in that office. He wore a fawn-coloured, short-sleeved Mao outfit, which might also have passed as a version of Indian formal clothes, or might simply have been a ‘safari’ suit.

He said, ‘You came to Calcutta in 1962, during or just after the China war. You were with some film people. In those days I myself took a great interest in films and the arts – it was the most hopeful period of my life. Someone from the Film Society at the end of one evening introduced me to you. My duty was to take you back to the drug-company guest house where you were staying.’

The painful war in the background, the mingled smoke and autumnal mist of Calcutta, the small, ceiling-lit rooms of the Film Society, full of old office furniture: one or two moments of the vanished evening began to come back, but they were the merest pictures, hard to hold on to. And nothing remained of the end of the evening.

‘I was twenty-two,’ Rajan said. ‘I was working in an advertising agency. I was a kind of clerk. My salary was 315 rupees a month. I was tipped to be an assistant account executive, but that wasn’t to be.’ Three hundred and fifteen rupees, £24, a month.

‘When did you leave Calcutta?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Rajan said.

And later that afternoon – while we sat outside the club house in Brabourne Stadium, the old international cricket ground of Bombay, and had tea, and watched the young cricketers practising at the nets (at the other end of the ground: the high, scaffolded back of the big stage built for the Russian ice show, part of the visiting Festival of Russia) – and on another day, in a hotel room not far from his office, beginning after his office work, and talking on until late in the evening, Rajan told me his story.

‘I was born in Calcutta in 1940. Our family came from the South, from what in British times was known as the province of Madras and today is the state of Tamil Nadu. My grandfather used to be some kind of petty official in one of the law courts near the town of Tanjore. He was respected by people for his honesty and courage. Courage in the sense that if something wrong happened, or if someone asked him to do something his heart wouldn’t let him do, he would turn violent or resist it in any form he thought fit.

‘A Britisher was above him. He wanted my grandfather to be a witness in a lawsuit and say what was not true. I know only that it ended up in a kind of fracas, and my grandfather took off his footwear and hit the Britisher. He realized that after that life would be difficult for him in Tanjore. He decided to migrate to the North with his only son, who was a student at that time. This would have been early in the century, between 1900 and 1905. He chose to move to Calcutta, which was the British headquarters. He could make a living there and have some kind of life.

‘In Calcutta he stayed with some friend or distant relation till he found his feet. He got his son to learn stenography. South Indians, brahmins especially, had a better grasp of English because they were more exposed to it, and they would get jobs as secretary, stenographer, or even typist. These were probably the most widely followed professions for the South Indian or Tamil brahmins in British times – and this is something that has changed only in very recent years. Otherwise, as a class, South Indian brahmins worked as teachers or as priests or as petty clerks. Or, if they were lucky enough, they would take up a job in one of the government departments. These were the days when a 10-rupee-a-month government job was a most prized thing – it was the ultimate
aspiration of the bulk of the Tamil brahmins who had done some schooling. And quite a few of them migrated to the North, to the big cities, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi.

‘After he settled, my grandfather lived in Howrah, on the other side of the river from Calcutta city. It was one of those typical Calcutta residential houses – a
pucca
house, a proper house, not
kaccha
, something unfinished or improvised, and it was in a respectable middle-class locality. These places could be rented. It was a locality where there were other people from the South who had similarly migrated, and it gave them some security to live among their own kind. There was no ill-feeling at that time towards South Indians in Calcutta – those times were different. In fact, South Indians were widely respected by the Bengalis. It’s quite different today. Since the 1960s South Indians in Calcutta feel they don’t belong, in spite of their having been there for many decades. Which is perhaps one reason why I left Calcutta and moved to Bombay – but that was many years later.

‘My father became a stenographer when he was seventeen or eighteen. This would have been about 1909, and he would probably have worked in one of the British companies. He was a capable stenographer, and he told me he had twice won the 50-rupee government prize for speed in English shorthand and typing. He continued to live in Howrah, in my grandfather’s dwelling, which was a portion of a residential house. In Calcutta there were no such things as flats or apartments or tenements. There were just parts of houses – with the landlord occupying a part of the house, and renting out the rest with little adjustments here and there.

‘In a few years both my grandfather and grandmother passed away, not leaving much by way of money or property. But my father moved to better jobs over the years. A stage came, in the decade between 1915 and 1925, when he was quite well paid. He had enough money not only to look after his family more than comfortably, but also to acquire some status symbols, like horses and phaetons. He had a few Arab horses driven by Muslim coachmen. Why Muslim? In those days they were the most widely available for those jobs. In those days, for certain trusted jobs, Hindus wouldn’t mind having Muslims around them.

‘I myself don’t have any memory of this period of my father’s life. These are all versions narrated to me by my eldest sister, without me asking for it. And narrated also by people who used to
know my father very closely. Some of them would come out with remarks like: “Rarely have South Indians lived in Calcutta in such status or style as your father did.” When I was a kid, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when I was at school, I heard this when I ran into them at some social gathering. There would be talk then of someone doing well in life, or of someone having failed, and there would be talk of my father’s past glory. When I heard these stories I felt a mixture of both pride and sadness.