Calcutta Notebook
D R C

Iredeem my promise to read ers of this notebook to talk of Asim Chattopadhyay's book Haate Khari (Dec 2011, Kolkata) about his boyhood. In this book, he tries to remember the people and events contributing the most to the formation of his character and the development of his mind. Fluent and concise, it is an example of Bangla prose writing at its unobtrusive best.

The places in his life are described through visual images, stories of people acting in their commonalty as the jigsaw pieces making up the community and in their diversity as individuals, and social and economic dynamics as seen through the eyes of a growing child. Life in Mogma, where he stayed up to class 2, was centred around a firebrick factory. His father worked in the factory, possibly as a supervisor, till he had to leave for supporting the union against the management in a dispute. The child's most living memory was of a small stream which appeared to him at the time as a wide river, powerful and mysterious, and of Punit Sha, the domestic help, intoning endless stories about the river.

The family shifted to the ancestral village of Panchra, dominated by pedigreed kulin Brahmins, many of whom were relatives on his father's side. At the margins were clusters of Bauri, Bagdi, and Muchi cottages. Among the last was one Muslim house. Close-by was a little hamlet of peasants, curled into the bend of the Hinglow river, called Simjuri, where the boy learnt how lived and thought the Indian peasant.

The society in and around Panchra was conservative, marriage was caste-based, mixing among boys and girls non-existent or heavily concealed. Women were accorded respect, but powerwise were marginalized economically, socially and politically. Infant mortality was high.

The area was dominated economically and socially by the landowning clans and politically by the Congress, Asim's father, Biswanath Chattopadhyay being a stalwart of the party. The British had left in 1947 and the fifties held an expectation that independence would start bearing fruit by and by. In Panchra, Congress supporters took interest in reformist programmes for rural development.

The boy was liked by his grandfather, who narrated stories from the epics to him. But, his father having no earning, the family shifted from the ancestral house, and times were hard, indeed. His mother fell like a ton of bricks on his father's political excursions, and his friends finally woke up to the economic state of the family. So, his father was sent off to Suri, the district headquarters of Birbhum, as manager of "Birbhum Boarding", a hotel set up by landowners from Panchra. He returned at week-ends. Somewhat introverted at this juncture, Asim had developed into an avid reader and a smart pupil, and topped the scholarship examinations of the district at the end of class 4, which took him to the prestigious District school at Suri. Panchra might have been a backwater taken in its entirety, but there were interesting individuals. Muktipada Mukherjee had a poetic temperament and leftist leanings. Jiu Mukherjee was a funster, playing practical jokes on gullible believers in ghosts and outwitting Kabuli moneylenders. Jurukaka, a schoolteacher, was seeped in patriotism, some of which rubbed off onto young Asim, together with a feeling for the left, a contribution of Muktikaka.

From 1953 began the Suri interlude. Childhood was over. The hum (in fact, the noise) of the boarding house, the travails of its manager with his large family, and, especially the doings of the boarders brought the outside world into the boy's life. The independence in personal life demanded by widening interests led to conflict with the father. The immediate cause was the usual (shall I say universal ?) question of when the budding man is to return home, nine in the evening or six thirty? The apprentice had entered two universities, the Jubilee library, a world of books and magazines, and the kaleidoscope of the lives and traits of friends and boarders . The boarders were a motley lot, and observing and comprehending their behaviour taught the future organizer to distinguish between words and actuality. He learnt to gather the living idea of what the person was doing and why, instead of accepting at face value an individual's superficial account of his or her own actions.

Friends were structured multi-dimensionally. There were the friends who shared concerns about studies, friends from the sports grounds, a circle of budding writers, companions in relief work and other social issues, and, finally, there was the Rajbari club, the hub of an adda of addictive activities, playing cards for the magic twenty-nine points, listening to anurodher asar, a disc-jockey presentation of popular romantic songs, bunking school to take in films, and, of course, heady political discussion for putting the world right. The Congress was dominant in Suri, but the moulting Asim found communist friends, too, and the emotive anti-Bengal-Bihar merger issue of the time exposed him to the fiery rhetoric of the local communist leader Tejarat Hosain.

The fifties ended with considerable erosion of middle class confidence in the Congress, identified more and more with the moneyed classes. The young man, caught in the leftward drift which initiated the crash of right wing politics in the sixties, digested well the lesson of his father's stagnant position in the Congress party. The lack of money to spend at election-time perennially blocked nomination of the senior Chattopadhyay as an electoral candidate, an excellent choice otherwise. He, himself, lost the drive he had found in himself after the Abadi session of the Congress, where dreams had been floated only to decay into status quo in little time. (In fact, he had finally to leave the party. When Asim was a CPI(ML) leader, Siddthartha Ray, in a speech at Suri, called on Biswanathbabu to hand over his son to the police. Exclaiming that Congress had not taught him to become a tiktiki (police informer), the old man quit his post as District President and also primary membership of the party, narrowly escaping mauling by Siddthartha's goons.)

At the stage of Asim's life under discussion, Biswanathbabu was just being slowly engulfed by the struggle to keep some eighteen to twenty heads, comprising the Suri family, above water, and the trouble and bitterness of running the boarding. To his eldest son, the third of twelve siblings, the family saga was also the source of essential lessons in human relations.

With time being spent at 2 or 3 universities of the world, little surprise that Asim was not to satisfy his teachers' hopes of a rank in the state-wide higher secondary examinations. The school might have been disappointed, but the ambience of the school itself encouraged a degree of debate and free thought, in addition to attention to conventional studies, and discipline. Of course, he did well enough to make it to the physics department of Presidency college(he was number 30 on the list of 34 candidates, a salutary reminder to the widely-acclaimed 'good' student that there were many good students like him ; of course, our protagonist had already formulated the law that knowledge and understanding were in inverse proportion to marks, a law quoted by him both seriously in evaluating educational norms and serio-comically with respect to his own attainments!). He had, moreover, topped the Bangla examinations in the state with 148/200. His prowess in recitation had already made him well-known in Suri. Soon, Kolkata would be assailed by his oratory in Bangla.

From 1960 started Asim Chatto-padhyay's long innings in Presidency college, peppered with a leftist adda in Sanjivani Cabin chaired by Arkaprabha Deb, a charismatic students' leader and a pioneer of the Presidency SF, and the interactions at Vidhan Chhatrabas, where Asim resided as a free student. Here he saw at close quarters Congress leaders like Atulya Ghosh and PC Sen, and regrets acceptance of later canards against their personal probity. He became friends with the superintendant Indranath Mazumdar, an original, a really indigenous intellectual if Asim saw one. A friend, also a boarder at the Chhatrabas, was Santosh Rana. This encounter would, in time, bring the drums of Naxalbari to Rana's home territory of Gopiballavpur, where Asim Chattopadhyay would be Bhaiyya Das among the peasants, the Santals and the Mallas, who believed in their own invention of a Bhaiyya the police could not catch because he could become clay or man at will. Important were his SF friends in Presidency college, and the light of profound scholarship emanating from the simple lives and unpretentious conduct of the legendary teachers walking its paths.

From all these ingredients, some years later, would emerge what the author calls "our pre-organisation team which," according to the him, "transformed not only Presidency college but the land as a whole. On the immense foundation of the leftist movement flared Naxalbari—spring thunder across the Indian firmament. Nothing remained the same after Naxalbari."

Apart from the people around him, especially his friends, his milieu if you like, a factor he emphasizes, the influence, example and political tragedy of his father was salutary in shaping his preoccupations and proclivities. This much is clear. That the mind of Kaka of Presidency college carried the scar of his early trouble of post-meningeal facial paralysis, which never went away, is also a permissible deduction from his heartrending description of what the condition entailed. Yet, anyone who remembers the fiery young rebel and revolutionary, wise beyond his years, of the sixties, will find the story in Hate- Khari a little unsatisfactory in that it tells us why the orientation arose but fails to or refuses to explain the passion and the fury. The author would like us to view the book as a reading of the transformation of the mental world of a boy from the rural backwaters through a decade of post-independence dreams and their shattering. Truly, this view is worked into the narrative . But, still, and, in spite of its attractiveness and readability, the book carries, if you will, a whiff of the political correctness which would, as if be appropriate to an account of the making of a leftist statesman of today. If he undertakes the presentation of an account of his post-1960 life, Asim Chattopadhyay will have to decide afresh how much of himself he chooses not to reveal and yet bring to life his incarnation as Kaka.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 22, Dec 9-15, 2012

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