Calcutta (13 page)

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 Nano 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.

At certain points in modern Indian history, obscure villages and locations, whose names invoke millennia of stasis, become incandescent with some debate that’s central to the nation’s consciousness. This happens without the nation necessarily having been aware of that issue’s centrality—until the flashpoint, when the unknown place becomes a battleground. After that moment, the location may well enter the history books, while remaining, in every other sense, unimportant.

Sometimes the battle is a real one. For instance, who’d heard of Palashi, or Plassey, in Bengal, before Siraj-ud-daula capitulated to Clive’s troops in 1757, opening the door to Empire? For that matter, who’s heard of it since?

During the freedom struggle, an outpost called Chauri Chaura became briefly famous when a group of protesters set fire to a police station, causing Gandhi to suspend his satyagraha movement until it returned to non-violent ways.

The peasant uprising in a region called Telengana in the late forties was the first anti-landlord movement in independent India. Its successor, which emerged from the equally little-known Naxalbari in North Bengal, led to the first formal, and violent, articulation of Maoism.

In 1998, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government exploded five nuclear devices at a test range in Rajasthan called Pokaran. The following year, the Pakistani army, directed in the
background by General Musharraf, initiated an invasion into the Kashmiri border, in a mountainous and unheard-of district called Kargil, specifically shelling Dras, a town no one had heard of.

What do these names, otherwise seldom uttered, tell us? Firstly, they resist the banality of the contemporary. We can’t imagine mentioning them in the same breath as shopping malls and the new Apple product. We also can’t imagine, or foresee, how a place like Dras might one day converge with the known world of malls and Apple products; though it well might. These locations and towns and villages represent a remoteness and inert changelessness; then, briefly, we realise that—beyond the bounded environment of the metropolis—this is precisely the India that is, and historically has been, in a state of siege.

To this roster of obscure names, whose effect on the consciousness is both undeniable and difficult to pin down, must be added Singur and Nandigram.

Nandigram is a village in Purba Medinipur district, its inhabitants mainly farmers and mainly Muslim. Like most other villages in the Bengal of the last four decades, it was, traditionally, a communist outpost. The land reforms brought about by the Left Front government—redistributing land controlled by landlords among peasants, ending centuries of oppression—is its single greatest achievement, and one that’s not to be belittled.

That trouble began in Nandigram, one of the many villages that had benefited from land reform, was ironical; it also pointed to the compulsions of the Left Front under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. The state was probably near bankrupt; agriculture was no longer productive; the world had globalised, the Berlin Wall long fallen, a new sort of economic game was being played worldwide, and you needed to participate to be able to generate money. The advent of Indonesia’s Salim Group was announced
celebratorily in Bengal. Special economic zones were being created throughout India since the early 2000s; land purchased, or even wrested, from peasants to make space for focussed development and industry. Nandigram was the first village to resist being transformed into a special economic zone, in the process becoming not only a distinct entity within the state, fortressed, oppositional, neither of Bengal nor not of it, but scuppering both Bhattacharya’s and the Salim Group’s plans. It was a classic David and Goliath story—with a twist to the confrontation since, here, Goliath, formerly the progenitor and nurturer of David, had sneakily turned upon him.

Nandigram mobilised sections of the Bengali middle class and its media, and it introduced a new, inebriating celebrity activism into Bengal. Among the famous personalities who condemned the government for its approach to this whole matter of special economic zones was the highly regarded poet Joy Goswami; the filmmaker and actress Aparna Sen; and a number of artists, playwrights, theatre people, some of whom were household names in the neighbourhoods of Calcutta because they worked in television serials and soap operas. This was probably the first time in a very long while that public figures had gone public in their criticism of the government. Adding her weight—negligible in literal terms, considerable in symbolic ones—to this outcry was the frail but predominant Mahasweta Devi, seen by many to be Bengal’s foremost living writer, a novelist and short-story writer who’d spent her life working with the tribals, and also making their lives and world her subject matter. From a strange but opportune marriage of genuine passion and outrage, sentimentality and self-promotion, individual conscience and an amoral but hyperactive media, was born a constellation of what the latter named
“buddhijibi
,” or “intellectuals,” though not everyone in that group was an intellectual, and not by any stretch was every intellectual
or writer or artist of stature in that group. Nevertheless, the buddhijibi were here, a posse of recognisable faces, and Mamata Banerjee probably sensed that their emergence had a bearing on her political future. No doubt some of the buddhijibi—that is, those who had embryonic political ambitions—realised that Mamata’s re-emergence would be significant to
their
plans. Who made the first overture to whom is difficult to tell—but, suddenly, the buddhijibi and the Trinamool Congress were speaking from one platform.