CALCUTTA DIARY
Ashok Mitra
Authors Upfront
300 pages; Rs 345
"I am not a gentleman, I am a communist," Ashok Mitra had shot back at a bureaucrat in the late 1970s.
This was to become the signature riff of his persona of an angry, an uncompromising and a radical Marxist. In real life, Mr Mitra is a communist and a gentleman. At his high-rise home in an upscale neighbourhood in Calcutta, as it was originally known, he would personally serve tea to visitors, listen patiently, dismiss praise with an air of self-deprecation and see guests off at the elevator.
In an eventful career, Mr Mitra has worn many hats: economist, administrator, politician, activist. But what has endured is his dexterity as a rare bilingual - Bengali and English - writer of eloquence and insight, sometimes lapsing into dreadful polemic, but almost always readable. Political economist T J Byres described Mr Mitra as a "puritan" with a "conscience deeply offended by the poverty, squalor, inhumanity and injustice which are rampant in India".
This collection of 46 essays that he wrote under his famous byline "A.M." for the Economic and Political Weekly between 1972 and 1975 offers a glimpse of Calcutta, the state of a beleaguered nation and his own restless soul, among other things. The national landscape is unrelentingly bleak: jobs have dried up, food is scarce, inflation is rampant, foreign exchange is scanty and the streets are angry. Mr Mitra doesn't mince his words when writing about this turbulent time. He's acerbic and lyrical, angry and anguished.
In a bunch of essays, he turns his angry gaze on Calcutta, where Mr Mitra has lived most of his life. He writes with doom-laden, Dickensian clarity: time hangs heavy in a city overflowing with squalor, women and children rummage through garbage, people cheat boredom by writing indifferent poetry, the hopeless young roam its tired streets.
He writes about the humiliating spectacle of a group of listless old men and women, resembling "sad, morphia-choked circus lions" taking a train from Howrah to Delhi to pick up their freedom fighter awards. Back in the city, the police are killing "dangerous extremists every day" and newspapers faithfully reproducing the official line, for "corpses are incapable of issuing rejoinders". Joblessness is so rife that there is "standing room only, even in the underworld".
Even the Bengali cinema presents a hopeless picture. They are potboilers, Mr Mitra writes, but "in fact are able to boil few pots". Calcutta's film makers and technicians are confused. "They want to make money, but they also want to be talk of Antonioni, Ozu and Wajda. This is preposterous. They must suffer, and await death," Mr Mitra declares with characteristic disdain.
For a Marxist, Mr Mitra elucidates with remarkable candour on what ails Bengali enterprise. "Stagnation has come even before maturity," he writes in a prescient 1973 essay. "The Bengali industrialist has claimed to be an entrepreneur, but he has never really broken away from his domestic moorings. The more he has failed to enlarge his assets, liquid resources and technical capability by taking in outside funds and expertise, the more helpless he has felt in the face of the growing complexities of the world," he writes. So true.
Very few are spared Mr Mitra's whip-lashing. Calcutta's boxwallahs - "unadulterated illiterates" - are guillotined for no particular reason: "they deserve liquidation, not summary treatment, not compassion". Not surprisingly, he has no love lost for capitalism and its practitioners. "It is an altogether laughable idea that they will be catalysts of industrial revival in this part of the country," he writes in a 1972 piece. But, to be fair, Calcutta's "stymied leftists" led by "high caste, high breed" Hindus also get some rough treatment. He doesn't spare the Maoists and bemoans the splintering of the Naxalite movement, divided not over ideology but by "crass, petty bourgeois bickerings". Poets and their little magazines get the savage treatment: an "excess of poetry has numbed almost all possibilities of activism". There's droll humour, too: little magazines of flaming prose and poetry are, among other things, are a form of "transmutation of libido", their pages replete with "naïve snobbery" name dropping, gushes of lyricism, revolutionary fire and "crass dishonesty" co-existing with integrity.
Some of Mr Mitra's finest pieces then - and now - are his profiles. Anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose is given a rich tribute - "a man of immense civilization" who hated scholasticism. There's a luminous essay on a "timid, raja-fearing, self-effacing, petty" sharecropper called Indra Lohar who is dispossessed of his land and crops. There is the utterly sad story of Sadananda Roy Chowdhury, a clerk - "a clerk is a clerk, he must not dream, he must meekly return home every evening, he must learn to wither away" - and father of two bright boys who are picked up by the police and killed for their suspected Maoist connections. Actress Sadhana Bose dies a "pauper, uncared for, a prematurely old woman whom the world has forgotten". The pick of the crop celebrates the greatness of an ordinary man. He is Amal Sen, impoverished homeopath and dreamer who remained loyal to his friends and to the "cause of social and political change". One could possibly say that for Mr Mitra, too, although he's far from an ordinary and impoverished man.
The reviewer is India Editor with BBC News' website
