India (52 page)

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.’

‘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.