India (53 page)

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Upstairs, broken window panes and door panes had been replaced by wire netting of various meshes.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.

‘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.