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By the time five or six months had passed from the elections, some people may have wondered when Calcutta would bear the marks of visible change; others would have been surprised if it had. It was too soon. If someone had boarded a time machine in March and been transported forward to November, they, on disembarking, their atoms reassembled, may not have known they were no longer in Marxist Bengal. They might or might not have noticed at once, though, the dim, ghostly racket emanating from the traffic lights: the garbled sound of Tagore songs. This repetitive loop, comprising old recordings by Hemanta Mukherjee, Suchitra Mitra, and others, is what didi — Mamata Banerjee — in one of her early gestures to “civil society,” had prescribed for stressed drivers. Some people felt that listening with half your attention to Tagore songs at a red light subtly heightened, rather than reduced, anxiety. My feeling was Mamata Banerjee was gently — perhaps unwittingly — attempting to simulate, everywhere, the characteristics of a petit bourgeois para such as the one she grew up in, in Kalighat; or like my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road. Here, at any opportunity — usually festivals and public holidays — amateur singers would sing from loudspeakers, as would professional singers of local repute; or, more often, recordings would be played of Hindi film and Tagore songs. One would wake up to that tinny, melodious, intrusive atmosphere; one could nap to it; in the end, when it was gone, one would be disoriented by its lack. Mamata Banerjee would have a deep memory of that ethos — indeed, given she still lives in Kalighat, it must be her perpetual present.
In November, it was reportedly too early for Bengal’s future to take shape. And people wanted to know if didi would enter into a dialogue with the Maoists in “jungle mahal” (an inaccessible region roughly sixty miles north-west of Calcutta, girded by forest), since, at one point, she’d expressed her readiness to hold talks; or whether she’d crush them, as the free market demanded; or if “jungle mahal” might even be her Vietnam, as it had once threatened to be the Left Front’s. Then, well into “study leave,” on 24th November, I woke up to read how Kishenji had been shot dead, in a joint operation in the forests near the Jharkhand border, by the upliftingly named Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) and the Central Reserve Police Force, historically lauded for restoring order to difficult areas. Who was Kishenji? I’d never heard of him. He was the Maoists’ military leader. In a photo, the lower right side of his face seemed to be missing, probably from close-range gunfire. There was talk about Kishenji having been killed not in a battle, but — as is frequently the case with terrorists-criminals-revolutionaries (the categories are a matter of perspective) — in an “encounter”; that is, a staged escape or confrontation meant to dispense with the fugitive after his capture. For a few days, there was no official confirmation that the dead man was Kishenji; and, following the confirmation, no public response, unusually, from Ms. Banerjee — though, on occasion, it might feel either premature or impossible to exult openly.
When I saw, on TV, Kishenji’s mother mourn in her home in Andhra Pradesh, I was struck by how middle-class the family looked, with a dated bhadra socialist air even in grief. Kishenji’s name was Mallojula Koteswara Rao. He came from a family of poor village Brahmins, but Kishenji’s father was a freedom fighter, and he himself had graduated with a degree in mathematics and then begun to study law. He’d ended up a martyr to the revolution. In all but the final development — revolution and death — his life mimicked one of the classic routes taken in the time of colonialism by the “great men” of Indian culture, especially of the Bengal Renaissance, and even by men who were born in its wake (I’m thinking of Nirupam Sen): the beginnings in small-town or village poverty; a context of educated utopianism, often created by the father; the emergence into the professions, such as law, or into writing, or into politics and nationalism, and, occasionally, into a kind of greatness. I’d thought the constrictions of independent India had shut down such trajectories in Kishenji’s generation (he was a little more than five years older than me); but here, summarised in his life and death, was that trajectory again.
In a room in All Souls College, Oxford, straining to listen to the faltering voice of Prof. Braja Dulal Chattopadhyay as he spoke of the Ramayana, I became aware of the timeless lineage of these conflicts now assailing our land. Prof. Chattopadhyay’s lecture concerned certain inexplicable actions perpetrated by the virtuous Lord Rama, the repository of Hindu dharma. One of these was the heinous slaying by Rama of Vali, the valiant monkeyking of a forest kingdom, whom he killed with an arrow shot from behind as Vali wrestled with his own brother. Rama’s action is attributed to Vali’s conflict with this brother, Sugreev, Rama’s friend: for, certainly, Rama and Vali had not been antagonists, and the former had no other reason to kill the latter. In fact, as Vali lies dying, he asks Rama: “What was my crime?”
Prof. Chattopadhyay, if I remember right, pointed out that independent forest kingdoms often sprang up in India, and were seen as a threat to the ethos and sovereignty of the mainland. It was for this reason that Vali would have had to die; because, for Rama, he represented a threat to the norm, to the absolute sway of dharma.
As to how much Bengal would open up again to the world, as it had in the eighteenth century, was a question left hanging in the air. People were trying to shrug off, in a sheepish way, the feeling of having missed the boat that had troubled them until May 2011. For the middle class, international isolation was measured by the number of direct flights there were to London; there was none. Lufthansa, too, providing the last umbilical lifeline to a tarnished but persistently desirable Western capitalism, announced, in December, the scrapping of its flight to Frankfurt, a punishment for poor business-class activity. Nevertheless, we in Calcutta were still in the year’s most paradisial time, heading for another Christmas. It was around now I was reminded, because of an academic paper I happened to read, of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a record of a year (1935–36) spent under duress in two obscure towns in Southern Italy, Grassano and Aliano, the latter renamed “Gagliano” in the book. Levi, exiled there by Mussolini, says, “The title of the book comes from an expression by the people of ‘Gagliano’ who say of themselves, ‘Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli’ which means, in effect, that they feel they have been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself — that they have somehow been excluded by the full human experience.” I once saw a Penguin Modern Classics edition of this book in Oxford, in 1987; picked it up; put it back again. My memory refreshed and piqued by the paper, I was thinking of Levi’s memoir while listening to Rakhi Sarkar, active in the Calcutta art world, married to Ananda Bazar Patrika’s Aveek Sarkar, give an impassioned account at an event of why she and others had resolved in 2003 to put into motion the idea of KMOMA, or the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art; for the first major Picasso exhibition in India had come to Delhi and Bombay, but bypassed Calcutta for its paucity of museum space and infrastructure. The insult was deep — to a region of the world that had fostered India’s first home-grown style in modern art, the Bengal School, and where (it was doubtful if Calcutta itself remembered this) the works of the Bauhaus painters were exhibited in 1922 at the prodding of Tagore — who much admired Paul Klee — and as a consequence of the critic Stella Kramrisch’s enterprisingness. I happened to be in Delhi during Picasso’s visit there, and, no great admirer of the Spaniard, went obediently from room to room to study again what I’d seen reproduced in encyclopedias and magazines a hundred times. But the hurt hadn’t healed in Calcutta, or so it seemed from Rakhi Sarkar’s speech. Flippantly, I considered naming the book I was writing Picasso Stopped at New Delhi—but remained tempted, at the same time, by the all-purposive, ambiguous Calcutta.