A crowded, intelligent tale

If Harry Potter had been born a Chamar somewhere in Bihar, turned into a Communist and then a Naxalite, had been fired upon by the police and had a chance to describe his life and the society he had lived in, this would have been the book he would have written.

The book is named after a paradox. One cannot see through stones, but if one could, what would one see? Opacity? Or a fuzzy depiction of reality? The author, one of India's most incisive and intelligent chroniclers of the growth and development of the Indian Communist movement, seeks to describe life in Puraina, a semi-mythical village somewhere in Bihar-Jharkhand through real-life incidents that have occurred in this region. Semi-mythical because you might not find Puraina on a map of India. But those who are familiar with the region know that there are hundreds of Purainas all over northern India where feudal upper castes rule society and politics through their own caste-based armies and through judicious interventions on their behalf by the State.

Mahendra Chamar, born a Dusadh, does not become a Communist overnight. His being is overlaid by decades of history beginning from the freedom movement, a time when lower castes and tribals in this region conducted their own parallel struggles""both against the British and against caste. The story of the decaying economy of feudalism and the degeneration of the ruling castes is told through Hari Pratap and his uncle-father, Chote Thakur. The lives of Hari Pratap or Harry and Mahendra Chamar and their families intersect throughout the book""sometimes through Ashok Sharma, the police officer posted in the region enjoined upon with hunting down Maoists, sometimes through Rani, the doctor wife of Sharma, whom Chamar knew as a little girl. The central point in the book is the confrontation between the upper castes and the Chamars in a historic encounter in which the haveli of Chote Thakur is attacked and male descendants killed. This is the catalytic event that transforms benevolent feudalism into a lifelong struggle of lower castes against upper castes.

There are lots and lots of characters in the book: Baguna Oraon, the tribal villager who becomes Chamar's lieutenant; Bhola, the informer who causes Chamar to be captured and almost killed during a shootout; Chamar's escape from hospital, where Rani Sharma is treating him; and Mohan Ram, the Dusadh, who turns Communist in the belief that this would liberate him of caste but finds history and society a bigger shackle than ideology. There is also Sister Lilian, a nun radicalised by her association with Naxalites, and Mahendra Karma, through whom is told the story of the factional struggles in the Naxalite movement. The novel skirts the reasons for the rise and decline of Naxalism in the more rarefied environs like St Stephens College (where lecture room blackboards carried slogans like "Reactionary Teachers, We will Have Your Skin for Shoes for the Poor"). There are repeated allusions to "Spring Thunder", the 1967 split in the CPI (M) by Charu Majumdar, and the launching of the Naxalbari movement against Communist revisionism, the power struggle between Jyoti Basu and Pramode Dasgupta and the Communist view of the Congress.

But interspersed with these 'real' events are magical encounters of the protagonists: through visions, half-remembered dreams at dawn and oral history of battles won and lost by tribesmen told by their kinsmen around campfires to 'Komrets'""which is how the tribals refer to Naxalites. The life of Mahendra Chamar and his associates is laid out against events in recent history: the rise and decline of leaders like Jagjivan Ram, the Emergency, the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, the electoral rise of the OBCs, and the restoration of the primacy of the village. But the social attitudes of the protagonists do not change. Towards the end of his life, Mahendra Chamar, a half-crazed Lear-like old man, watches assaults by descendants of the upper castes in Puraina on a statue of himself. He dimly perceives that for his sacrifices, the villagers have elevated him to the status of a God. But for the upper castes, he remains a symbol of all that is dirty, an eyesore, a dangerous thing that might talk back.

The only flaw in the book is that there are probably too many characters. Names pop up from all over the place, making it confusing to follow the lives of all of them. It is also sometimes confounding to leap from event to historical event unless you can read the author's mind and follow the invisible logical progression that ties these events together. But this is recent history from below, humbling for those who think they know Indian politics.

SEEING THROUGH THE STONES
A tale from the Maoist land

Diptendra Raychaudhuri
Vitasta Publications
Price: Rs 300; Pages: 349