The Epic City

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by Kushanava Choudhury


  At various points, the governments of Pakistan and then Bangladesh had offered compensation to Hindu refugees who had lost land. Compensation in cash, or in land swaps. But few in Bengal got any land or money. In the 1980s someone swindled Dida out of a hundred rupees by claiming to be close to Ershad, the erstwhile dictator of Bangladesh. There were rumours that my grandmother was going to receive compensation – fantastical figures depending on whom you asked – but that various members of our extended family had prevented her from going to collect it, for fear of what would happen when she went back. Those stories were the self-deceptions of little lives trying to make sense of that which was not publicly remembered.

  In the early years after Partition, Dadu and Dida both went back to their village in East Pakistan several times, once when my great-grandmother was ill, once taking my father and his brothers to show the boys their country, their desh. My father remembered riding a palanquin on that trip.

  The migration to Calcutta was a temporary arrangement. There were plans for a full return. Like my grandparents, few believed in the finality of the exchange of populations, the permanence of Partition. There had been riots before, temporary bouts of madness, and like those flare-ups, this, too, would subside. In the thousand years since the coming of Islam to Bengal, in over seven centuries of Muslim rulers and 200 years of the British Raj, never had millions of Bengalis been forced to flee their ancestral lands because of their faith. No ruler had done what the British had accomplished, drawing lines on a map to assign each group its place, Hindus here, Muslims there, tearing a land in two and making millions homeless. Their folly was so unprecedented, their solution of a permanent partition so flawed, that Dadu and millions like him could be forgiven for failing to realise the finality of the schism.

  There would be no going back. In time Pakistan itself split, and what had been East Bengal and then East Pakistan became Bangladesh after the 1971 war. Dadu’s brothers moved too, until by the 1980s there was no one in our family left on the land. That chapter was closed. What was done was done. It wasn’t talked about at family gatherings. My uncles and aunts fought to forget and forged new lives in and around Calcutta.

  ***

  Soon after Independence, Dadu had a breakdown. The life of a teacher and hostel warden, which he had led till Partition, now changed dramatically. The warden’s quarter had two rooms. What had been a cosy flat when Dida came for visits was now crammed with eight children. There were ten mouths to feed, and only his income with which to feed them. Dadu went to the homes of wealthy children and gave tuition in the mornings before school. He taught maths in the morning school, then in the afternoon school, then gave tuition again in the evening. His days were fuelled by cigarettes and endless cups of tea. On top of that he had to deal with the daily fracas of several hundred boys in the hostel. He fell ill. He gave up the warden’s job and flat. The family moved to a rented house in Jadavpur, beyond the southern boundary of the city.

  Adjoining my grandparents’ new lodgings was a bamboo grove. One night, refugees who had been squatting in nearby areas came and cut down the bamboo. They planted the bamboo poles on a stretch of fallow land nearby, apportioned plots and built huts. The land belonged to a local landlord. The landlord brought armed guards to drive the refugees out. The guards destroyed the huts and flattened the settlement. The people ran into the night. In Faridpur, my grandparents had had their own guards to protect their property, men just like these who had stood sentry outside their ancestral house. Now people like my grandparents were the usurpers, the robbers, the ones being beaten back.

  The guards were no match for the refugees, who had nothing more to lose and nowhere else to go. Soon they returned and rebuilt their grass and bamboo huts and began to live there. A ‘refugee colony’ was born.

  In the first five years after Partition, the population of Calcutta grew as much as it had in half a century. The millions of refugees who arrived at Sealdah station could not be accommodated in rented houses. Thousands of families lived in the station itself, because they had nowhere to go. The only destination that the newly formed Congress government had provided for these people was the refugee camps, to eat the dole, shit in troughs, and catch diseases. Rumours of sexual violence were rampant in the camps; damaged people living in damaged surroundings. Right up to the 1950s, the government kept believing that the refugees in West Bengal had come as visitors and would soon go back. No permanent arrangements were made to accommodate them in the city.

  When it became clear that neither the post-colonial government nor the political parties could do anything for the refugees, they began organising among themselves. Among them were Congress and Communist leaders, socialists and Radical Humanists, terrorists and Gandhians. What bound them was circumstance. In the struggle against colonial rule, disobedience had been the backbone of their politics. Many had gone to jail for breaking what were unjust colonial laws. The end of British rule had placed them on the wrong side of the law again. They had to break the law in order to survive.

  Groups of refugees formed committees across ideology and party affiliation, to identify fallow lands where they could squat and build settlements. Within five years they established over a hundred and forty squatter settlements, or ‘colonies’, in the outskirts of Calcutta, in Jadavpur, Belghoria, Baranagar. The tragedy of Independence became most starkly clear in the refugee colonies. The iconic parts of the metropolis, like Esplanade, Park Street and Dalhousie, where brown men now replaced white men, were marginal to their experience. They lived in rooms lit only by lamplight, whose walls were as fragile as their lives had become. This was Ritwikland. In his films, Ritwik Ghatak made the world of refugee colonies visible, the lorries full of people being dumped into nowhere, the blank spaces upon which colonies arose. It was a landscape of mud paths leading to shacks that looked like they could be torn apart in one good jhor. Those shacks became shelter for people rendered suddenly powerless, like the refugee family in his film Meghe Dhaka Tara. The father is a schoolteacher, physically and psychically hobbled by history, who is no longer able to provide for his family, scarcely able to care for himself. His children splinter in different directions, unable to hold together the family that fate has uprooted from its true home. In those fragile spaces, families lost one another, literally and psychologically. This was the bamboo frontier where human decency was tested by the heartlessness of the city. For Ritwik, the refugee predicament exemplified the universal human condition, of homelessness and alienation in the modern metropolis.

  ***

  In the early 1970s, when the alleys of the city were again full of bullet holes, the director Satyajit Ray made three films that captured the mood of the time. Satyajit was a filmmaker of drawing rooms, Ritwik of the streets, my father used to say. And indeed, within the Calcutta trilogy, the film that crystallises that era best is set almost exclusively in a drawing room.

  ‘In Bengal,’ begins the film Seemabaddha, ‘the number of educated unemployed is over one million. How many uneducated unemployed there are I don’t know. Many believe all of Bengal’s problems stem from this fact. I myself am not one among them. For the last ten years, I have been working in the offices of a foreign corporation . . .’

  The voice is not of an angry young man, but a bhodrolok of fine features and gracious manners, a man who has made it. Seemabaddha, or Company Limited, is about a Bengali executive in a British-owned company in Calcutta that produces ceiling fans. Played by the debonair Barun Chanda, it shows a brown man who has risen fast to inherit a post once held only by white men. He has a car, a high-rise apartment, and membership in a club formerly closed to Indians. Now, to keep rising, he has to instigate a labour conflict in the fan factory – a factory much like the one where Manoj worked – to provoke a union walkout. For full effect, a bomb is thrown into the grounds and a nightwatchman is seriously injured. But the executive with his high-rise flat gets his promotion. Seemabaddha may be one of the few films which is far better than the book
that inspired it, because of its ending. In Shankar’s novel, the ending is maudlin – the nightwatchman dies and the executive is found alone, weeping. No one dies and no one cries in Satyajit’s film. In the penultimate scene, the elevator in the executive’s high-rise is not working, so Satyajit films Barun Chanda climbing up eight flights of stairs in suit and tie, climbing literally and metaphorically to his drawing room in the sky. By the time he reaches the top, he is drenched in sweat. He looks spent.

  There are no revolutionaries in the film, no Communists, no slogans, no killings. But they are present like a spectral force. In those rarefied drawing rooms there are whispers of bombs going off, of youth calling for an overthrow of the entire corrupt system. The revolution is like a steady hum from high-tension wires that is heard in the background. But those rooms are so high above the streets that the sounds of gunfire echoing from the alleys can only be heard in the deep, deep lonesome dead of night.

  By the 1960s, the young men who had been brought up to salute Netaji’s portrait on Republic Day were going to college to find a system that looked largely unchanged from the British time. Poverty and injustice were all around them. Two decades after the departure of the British, the ruling Congress was still cashing in on being the party that had led the movement against colonial rule. But the Congressmen were the status quo, nothing more. All across India, the party of Nehru was being dethroned in state assemblies by local ethnic, caste and language movements. In Bengal, those energies flowed to the Communists. The CPI, undivided Communist Party of India, had been organising schoolteachers and sharecroppers, students and refugees. Their vote share was growing with each election. But by the mid-1960s, for the youth who were both educated and excluded by the system, their patience with the mainstream Communists had run out. The party had split into the CPI and the CPM but both remained committed to a revolution through the ballot box rather than taking up arms.

  News of the Cultural Revolution was reaching Calcutta from Beijing. Mao had proclaimed that the first revolution had not been enough. A second revolution was needed to finish the job. In north Bengal, in a village called Naxalbari, peasants had revolted and been violently suppressed by police. Radicals within the Communists declared solidarity with the uprising to form a breakaway faction, dedicated to organising an armed peasant revolution across India. They called themselves the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), a.k.a the Naxalites.

  ‘Political power flows from the barrel of the gun.’ Those words of Chairman Mao began to appear on whitewashed walls around Calcutta, as did the addendum by the Naxalite guru Charu Majumdar: ‘No one is a Communist who has not first soaked his hands in the blood of his class enemies.’

  In 1971 there were ten to twenty thousand Naxalites across Bengal. Most were young men from Calcutta and its suburbs. The city’s colleges were full of recruits. The guerrilla movement, which was supposed to ignite a peasant revolution, had turned into a rebellion of urban youth. They were fighting the bourgeois state, the Congress, the CPI, the CPM, the principals of the schools and colleges where they were being stuffed with fodder to make them sheep. In the tea shops and the canteens, elder boys were blooding younger boys, teenagers battling for respect and fighting for turf.

  In 1964, when my father entered Surendranath College to study chemistry, the Naxalbari revolution was yet to come. The CPM had just formed out of the CPI and the college was dominated by the radicals of the CPM. Among his group of friends in chemistry was a CPM ‘theoretician’ named Surjo, a boy well schooled in Marx, Lenin and Stalin. In 1967, Naxalbari was erupting when they went their separate ways, Surjo to study applied chemistry at Rajabazar Science College, Baba to study biochemistry at Ballygunge Science College. Each became caught up in his own world of new friends and new horizons. They saw each other less and less. By 1970, the guerrilla movement that Charu Majumdar had started in order to spread a peasant revolution across the country had turned into an urban war. The movement was turning murderous. Beneath the slogans and wall graffiti the contours of the conflict were no different from gang wars anywhere in the world and, like all gang wars, it eventually became a battle with the police. Across the city, there were countless stories of young men plucked from alleys by police, beaten up in custody, then released and shot in the back. In the police reports, it was written that they were killed while trying to flee.

  Baba had started a PhD in Sir’s lab at the cancer institute. Every night he came back from lab prepared not to make it home, prepared for a police cordon and being herded off along with the para’s young men in a raid. The police were scared too. The Naxalites thought that if you killed policemen, then you could create dissension in the ranks of the police. One of Baba’s friends in Bagmari had a brother who was a police officer. The brother was also a bodybuilder. After the Naxalites started killing police, the officer began riding pillion with another bodybuilder.

  One night, news spread through the city of a murder on the Rajabazar Science College campus. A Congress activist had been shot and killed. Baba’s friend Surjo was arrested for the murder. He went to prison.

  By the time he came out, the Left Front was already in power. By then my father was a scientist at a cancer research institute. Surjo was running a neighbourhood chemist shop. He came to see Baba at the lab once. He still maintained that he was innocent, as my father still believes, that he had been framed to get him out of the way. Perhaps, like many CPM ideologues at the time, he was threatening to defect to the Naxalites and was sacrificed, a victim of the Communist fratricide that was taking place in the paras. There would be no way of knowing the truth.

  If this were a novel, this would be the moment to reveal that my father, or better yet my mother, had been a Naxalite revolutionary. A dramatic family secret would be let out. But life does not work that way. In those years of torture, imprisonment, death and exile, my parents met, fell in love, got married, moved to America, moved back. Life went on. Everything had changed because of the Naxalite period, but no one spoke of it any more.

  ***

  In New Jersey, my father privately remembered the events of his youth, of Surjo and destruction, playing the tape of memory backward and forward to understand how fate had torn his generation apart. And yet Baba, who was so familiar with the traumas of the city in ’71, knew nothing about the people who had been murdered in August ’46 on Musulman Para Lane and Hayat Khan Lane where he grew up playing cricket. He had no idea how those events had changed the course of his life. Those carcases in the courtyards and lanes were the reason Baba was born to poverty in Sealdah and not to relative comfort in East Bengal. How could he have known? Of the history that had happened on his own street, there was no mention in his history books. His life was structured by the trauma he knew nothing about. Unlike the street-corner busts or the Faces You Can’t Piss On, there are no memorials to the three million who died in the Bengal Famine of 1943, nor to the thousands who died in the Killings of 1946, nor to the millions uprooted there and displaced here who lost their homes and who arrived as refugees in the city. No monument remembers those pasts, which have been wilfully forgotten.

  It is not so easy to remember that time, nor to build its memorials. To do that would be to make the footpaths of the entire city into a memorial. Satyajit Ray had witnessed those calamities with his own eyes and his ‘famine movie’, A Distant Thunder, is one of his most terrible films. It exposed the limits of Ray’s visual language. Neorealism made famine look picturesque. The best effort is a film about the impossibility of such filming, by Mrinal Sen, called In Search of Famine, which is about a film crew trying to make a movie about the ’43 famine. When they go to a village to shoot a period piece about the ’43 famine, the villagers ask, ‘Famine? Which one?’

  In Bengal, there were famines to mark the beginning and end of British rule, and famines in between. The lasting legacy of the British in Bengal was famine. Soon after the East India Company first took over Bengal in 1757, a fixed cash payment was imposed that caused
widespread famine and the Company refused to provide any relief. According to colonial records, a third of the population died of starvation. Whole districts turned into jungle. Imagine that: one in three people just vanished. It marked the real beginning of colonial rule.

  An account of the past should help a people to understand its present in order to imagine a shared future. The history we are taught about ourselves is no longer being written by our rulers. Yet we fill our heads with fantasies about the past, of nationalist history or Marxist history, each time like diligent fly-swatting clerks matching up some European narrative and copying it out in local colours, matching their Renaissance to our Renaissance, their nationalism to our nationalism, their revolutions to our own. The goal of this also-ran history is to pass the biggest exam of all – the test that certifies that we, too, are moderns, that is, that we, too, are human beings just like Europeans.

  It is no surprise that this ‘history’ makes our present look like an Abol Tabol nonsense poem. It tells us nothing about the real traumas of our past. It does not help us make sense of those breaks, does not help us reconstruct ourselves. To remember what really happened, to understand how we came to be, we have to rely only on our own wits, only on private memory, a limited, blinkered version of the past. My memory leads back to Bagmari, my father’s to Sealdah, as my grandmother once remembered her village across the international border in Bangladesh. My father relives the city of the Naxalite years, just as my grandmother’s world was forever in the lost village in Faridpur, just as my world somehow remained fixed in the Calcutta that was being destroyed without flood, famine or riot, a city that my generation was abandoning as if it were a sinking ship, the city to which I returned, from which I fled. Inside each private memory is another private memory, like a set of Russian dolls, in an infinite regression of experiences of longing and loss, each separate and unconnected by any narrative thread that other peoples call a history.

 

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