Their job was actually accomplished in a more organised and far-reaching way by, paradoxically, the Left Front government. In 1983, under the CPI(M), English ceased to be taught at the primary level in Bengali-medium schools, for being an impediment to the progress of the less privileged who lived in a milieu that had little English. This ideological move, thirty years later, was seen to have been misled and not have benefited the disadvantaged classes and areas it was supposed to. It was reversed only in 2009. By then, the city had changed. It had entirely lost its aura of leadership (“What Bengal does today, India does tomorrow”: thus the famous but obsolete formula from the nationalist Gokhale, once frequently quoted by Bengalis, and today only invoked with bitterness). The ingenuous Rajiv Gandhi, visiting Calcutta in 1985 as prime minister, had inadvertently informed its inhabitants that it was a “dying city.” Out of the remnants of that city, and through a simple act of renaming, eventually arose a new one—without pedigree or history; large but provincial; inhabited but largely unknown—called “Kolkata.”
* * *
The Bengali language was at the centre of a moment of sudden self-consciousness in Calcutta in the nineteenth century, the stirring and arms-stretching of individualism, the “I” waking up from dormancy and sleep and speaking its name. What dreams this “I” had had in the meanwhile we can only guess at. The “I” also became the “eye,” open and looking at the world: and so, in Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali, we’re first introduced to Apu, the boy, as an open eye. He’s pretending to sleep; his sister Durga shakes him; the eye opens; light floods in. That light is consciousness. It illumined, in nineteenth-century Calcutta, literature; the academic disciplines; the professions; science. And the great names of that era contained radiance and illumination: Rabindranath—“lord of the sun”; his older brother, the idiosyncratic, gifted, elegant Jyotirindranath—“lord of light.” My own name, Amit, which means “endless,” has appended to it (by my father) a middle name I never use: “Prakash”—“light.” “Endless light.” Last month, as I write this, I met another Amit, much older than me, who too has a middle name, “Jyoti,” meaning exactly the same thing. “Amitava” is another name recruited for this purpose, a conjunction of two words, “amit” and “abha,” or radiance. The names of ordinary-looking middle-class men in Bengal were, for four or five generations, replete with illumination.
When I’d visit Calcutta from England in the late eighties and early nineties, soon after my parents moved there, I’d sense there was something amiss. Even from above, from the aeroplane window, it looked poorly lit at night, with large patches of dark, compared to the bright, intricate city I used to view from the sky as a child. If the plane was landing in the daytime, you noticed that the verdant fabric that surrounds the city, with epic watery inlets—West Bengal is very fertile—was now bereft of the poetry that used to excite me as a boy when I gazed downward. Even the low houses that came closer as the plane descended—entirely unremarkable, entirely mysterious—which once seemed to me as if there was everything going on inside them, now looked part of a location in which nothing happens.
What had changed? I think it’s to do with the decline and marginalisation of the Bengali language—through the disappearance of the bhadralok class; through the processes of globalisation—a language which, in its books, its poems, songs, stories, cinema, brought the city into being in the imagination. Calcutta is an imaginary city; it’s in that realm that it’s most visible and detailed and compelling. I remember the covers of my cousins’ Puja annuals and of their collections of mystery stories, and the envy and inarticulate loss I’d feel upon studying them. But today? I turn to a snatch of conversation from the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark. “Glasgow is a magnificent city. Why do we hardly notice that?” asks a colleague at art school of the protagonist Duncan; who replies: “Because nobody imagines living here … if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”
And this is largely true of this new, hazy, provincial metropolis, Kolkata, which came into being in 2001—and explains why we know so little about it.
* * *
This city—Kolkata—is neither a shadow of Calcutta, nor a reinvention of it, nor even the same city. Nor does it bear anything more than an outward resemblance to its namesake, Kolkata: the city as it’s always been referred to in Bengali. I myself can’t stand calling it any other name but “Calcutta” when speaking in English; just as I’ll always call it “Kolkata” in Bengali conversation. Is this because we—cities and human beings—have contradictory lives that flow in and out of each other? To take away one or the other name is to deprive the city of a dimension that’s coterminous with it, that grew and rose and fell with it, whose meaning, deep in your heart, you know exactly.
In 1999, for a number of reasons, I moved to this city that would soon be without its name: though the official name-change hadn’t taken place. It was, to all purposes, already no longer Calcutta.
For one, I’d had enough of England—not just its weather, rain, and loneliness, but the things about it I’d grown to like: its television, newspapers, and bookshops. I’ve been discussing names; and I can say that, in the new Britain of the nineties, many continued to carry old resonances, while they were actually being hollowed of meaning, emptied of what it was that made one thing—or name—distinct from the other. The most famous and striking example of this were the names of the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, or New Labour. They sounded like parties historically in opposition to each other; in reality, of course, they weren’t. The last great political war in Britain after the miners’ strike (which I’d watched agog for hours on television, as one of the first serially televised political upheavals) was the one between old Labour and New. The confrontations in the latter were less bloody; but its outcome was decisive. New Britain was a country of consensus. Names in the public domain that had meant different things now denoted shades of one thing. For instance, I recall a time when BBC 2 and Channel 4 had particular textures and shapes. A time came—I don’t know when, but it was in the late nineties—when I realised that, though those channels had the old, prickly names, the 2 and 4 always sticking out like a rebarbative angularity, they’d become no different from BBC 1 and ITV—which themselves had grown indistinguishable from each other, like heavyweight premier league football teams that always seem to be at war.
This happened also to English cities, towns, and villages—even to the distinctive connotations those generic appellations had. Once, on a coach from Oxford to Cambridge, half-nauseous because of the convoluted route, I noticed that every place we passed through (the coach doesn’t take the motorway as it winds through the midlands) had a Tesco’s in it and a Texaco outside it. This may seem too obvious today to mention, but then, in the mid-nineties, it was still a gradually unfolding realisation: that the idea of town, village, and city had become anachronistic. I felt, during that trip towards Cambridge, I had nothing left to discover in England; not that discoveries were no longer possible there, but that I had little access to them. Around the mid-nineties, I went to a dinner at a ground-floor flat in Southern Avenue in Calcutta in the winter, and was struck by the paintings on the walls. The flat was Ruby Pal Chowdhury’s, of the Crafts Council, and her husband’s; among the things I noticed in its informal atmosphere was a beautiful clay bust of Mrs. Pal Chowdhury’s mother-in-law: very lifelike and singular, painted white. The elder, late Mrs. Pal Chowdhury seemed to have been, from the expression of the face, a remarkable person. “But it was made by an ordinary artisan from Krishnanagar—no one famous,” protested Ruby Pal Chowdhury. “And it’s clay … very vulnerable. A fall could break it, and a leak in the roof could destroy it.” She seemed suddenly protective, in the midst of that dinner, of the mother-in-law. She showed us a portrait done in oil by an English painter called Harris, who lived in this city for some years in the 1920s: it was unmistakably the mother-in-law again, a young woman, wearing a red s
ari, gazing into a book. In its stillness, it was less like a picture of a figure than of a vivid cosmological shape: of a new universe that had come into being—which, when you looked closer at it, became a young woman in a sari, reading. I remember thinking that, though Calcutta was now to all purposes dead, it possessed some secrets, and that there were discoveries for me to chance upon here amidst the deceptive nullity—which, for whatever reason, I could no longer in England.
Names … Add to this the publishing houses, whose names I’d been quietly savouring like sensations in the late eighties as I wrote my first novel. Much glamour accrued to them. Heinemann, which first published me, had those alpine, canonical figures, D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann—and two emblems of an India that was fading: Anita Desai and R. K. Narayan. It had that symbol of writerly productivity, whom everyone read and, suddenly, almost no one did, Graham Greene. To be part of this list was to insinuate oneself into a history and what felt like a pre-history. Thomas Mann—almost the beginning of the modern novel itself! Just around the corner was Secker and Warburg, where I secretly desired to be, publishing the more recalcitrant, poetic writers: like James Kelman.
Then, irrevocably, these names became interchangeable. As we know, most of them, by 1998 (just a year before I left), were bought over by two German conglomerates. People continued to use the names as if they meant something specific, like a detail in a story. Then they stopped speaking of them in that slightly childish, enchanted way. The world of publishing, and publishers’ names, lost its potency or magic. Had I glimpsed them on the cusp of change, glimmering? Or had I just invented that world? Mann, a deceptive experimenter within the near-extinct forms of realist fiction, may have said “yes” to the second question. Perhaps the meanings of all epochs are unstable, and you need to go on pretending, on some level (as Mann did), that they aren’t. But to be within that world of publishing, as an interloper who’d gained entry into it eight years before, and to feel that it was now no longer itself, that it was essentially foreign, was hard.
I’d had enough of Britain under Blair. I returned to India.
FOUR
The New Old Guard
I first met Nirupam Sen at a party. The list of invitees was small; our host was Manoj, a Marwari businessman with a middle-class air. By this I mean he neither looks like a trader nor an industrialist, but a man who has a university background and is in a job. Nevertheless, he was a businessman and was proud of it. The pride came from being something of a one-off, of having made of himself a small-scale success (which, in a booming global economy, and even in a resistant outpost like Calcutta, means considerable wealth), and having done it without the immemorial infrastructure of the Marwari business family. He confirmed his maverick status by casually and tastelessly referring to other Marwaris as Meros. Manoj’s taste in acquaintances and contacts was eclectic: one could run into business types you’d never see anywhere else at his parties; local industrialists of stature, like Harsh Neotia of the construction business; whoever might be the British deputy high commissioner at the time (Manoj has a business venture in England); and the occasional politician, either from the centre right, like the effusive but slightly furtive-looking Dinesh Trivedi, or the unprepossessing Nirupam Sen from the left. Manoj himself was equanimous about his political affiliations. He spoke of his guests as individuals, enthusiastically, rather than in support of their particular political ideology.
This party probably took place in the summer of 2008. I say this because it happened in Manoj’s flat and not on the lovely terraced garden he uses in the winter. I have other means of dating the event. I remember viewing Nirupam Sen as he stood in the distance—the minister for commerce and industry—not as someone on his way out, but one whose task had barely begun. For more than a decade now, the Left Front had been making noises about luring investment to Bengal, of encouraging rapid industrialisation. In the 2006 assembly elections the Front, under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, successor to the imperious Jyoti Basu, had surprised everyone by returning to power in the state, mainly because the Opposition’s Trinamool alliance, led by Mamata Banerjee, had imploded temperamentally. It had seemed that voters had desperately wanted a change of face, but had been obstinately denied it by the Opposition. Nirupam Sen knew this, and it made of him an attractively realistic and uncomplacent figure. Times had changed; the perpetuity of the Left could no longer be taken for granted; but he was still restrainedly upbeat about the job at hand, a job he’d been more or less entrusted: the industrialisation and economic revival of Bengal. It must have been summer, because had the global crash already occurred (once it did, it exposed capitalism’s fragility, and gave a fleeting fillip to the Left’s vision of the world), we’d have had a different conversation. Also, the great reversals in West Bengal had still not taken place, the developments that would put the Left government in a strange Hamlet-like mood, seeing itself as a caretaker government in 2010, a government that was, after thirty-three undisputed years, in transit, and, by its own admission, only symbolically in power. By “reversals,” I mean, of course, the series of events through which Tata’s Nano project, meant to produce the world’s cheapest small car, had to make an ignominious egress from the state; and the general elections in 2009, which saw an alarming, and record, number of Left Front MPs lose their seats to the Trinamool Congress. At that dinner, all this was to come, and Nirupam Sen was characteristically low-key, but, I believe, optimistic.
When Manoj introduced me to Sen, I was already pretty well-disposed towards him. He had a reputation for being unostentatious, serious, and, despite being a hardcore Marxist, an advocate of change. There was an allegation against him—a “canard,” according to Manoj—of being involved directly in the Sainbari murders in Burdwan in 1970: gruesome killings of a family that had strong allegiances to the Congress Party. In 2008, the case was as remote from the consciousness as the dead themselves; I myself hadn’t heard of it. Anyway, industry in Calcutta had decided it had in Sen a person it could work with. Whatever he might be like with his comrades or to his enemies, whatever he was really like, in his conversation with me he was humane and non-ideological. In the end, it’s hard to decide about the value of one’s own impressions. Still, I realised I could open up with him in a way I couldn’t with Bengali Marxist sympathisers—some of whom belong to my extended family. The latter used to be swift to take offence if you breathed any kind of criticism about the party or the state (the two had become conflated in their minds). Sen was easier to talk to; you didn’t have to constantly worry about outraging him, as you might have if, for instance, you were speaking with the grand old man of Bengali Marxists, the last chief minister, Jyoti Basu. But this was the new face of the party under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya: less prickly, more approachable; more self-questioning, less defensive; less of a stickler, at least to the naive observer, for the Communist rulebook. So I wasn’t wholly surprised when Sen told me how close the party had been to losing power to Mamata Banerjee. We already knew this; nevertheless, the candid admission cleared the air. We discussed societies in transition; I reflected on how resistant and unionised Britain had become in the late seventies (around when the Left came to power in Bengal), how it took Thatcher to heartlessly, ruthlessly, break the unions, and the Labour Party to respond by mutating into New Labour. The situation in Bengal today was, in some ways, comparable. Sen nodded throughout. This is not to say that I, and presumably he, wanted the Bengali equivalent of Margaret Thatcher to emerge in Calcutta. But it was good to have the freedom to pursue these analogies till they fell apart, without, in Sen’s company, having the ghost of self-censorship hover over the conversation. Such was the equable air of the minister for industrial reconstruction.
Almost three years later, in March 2011, I decided it was time to see Sen again. A lot had happened since that dinner; and the state assembly elections—the most important elections in sixty-four-year-old West Bengal since 1977—would take place in April. After 2009, after the humiliating loss of Tata’s Nan
o factory to Gujarat, and the setback in the general elections, the Left had retreated into a shell. It seemed to be biding its time, going through the motions of governance before its inevitable departure from office. Meanwhile, everywhere there had been talk, for more than two years now, of “change” or “paribartan.” It originated in a seemingly spontaneous movement that came into being (with a great deal of middle-class support) in relation to the farmers and peasants of two obscure locations outside Calcutta, Singur, a small town, and a village, Nandigram. After the emergence of this movement, whose rhetoric of resistance and redressal at some point merged into the Trinamool Congress’s rhetoric of removal—the removal of the Left Front government—the notion of “change” in Bengal became a different one from the idea introduced not long ago by the communists: of change within the party and the state; of a calculated embrace of industrialisation, investment, and development. Now, “change” came to imply the urgency of a change of government; and the Left Front came to be synonymous with repression and fixity. These thoughts had been in the air for a while, but suddenly they rose to the foreground of the consciousness. The mood was like a contagion in middle-class Calcutta and beyond; everyone, even those who didn’t want to catch the infection, caught it, and showed all the symptoms. The Left must go.
Calcutta Page 10