INSIDE CHHATTISGARH
A POLITICAL MEMOIR
Ilina Sen
Penguin Books; 307 pages; Rs 399
When Ilina Sen's flat in Raipur was searched in May 2007, soon after her husband Binayak was arrested and jailed on the charge of being a courier for Naxalites, she found herself being asked by police why there were so many maps in the house. "The plain truth was," writes Ilina, "that I loved travel and, through maps and travel magazines, I tried to pursue an interest that my material circumstances did not allow..."
This book could be read - idiosyncratically, since this is not the author's thesis - as an argument for not straying too far from home. Only a long encounter with one place could have produced an account as full of subtle insights, ethnographic details, little-known histories, and memorable characters as this one.
For Ms Sen, an academic researcher, and Binayak, a paediatrician, that place was Chhattisgarh. Young, post-Emergency idealists looking for a fulfilling life in the "real" India, they stumbled upon this region, not yet a state, but with its distinct language and identity, in the early eighties. They became part of an inspirational trade union movement. They then had a stint at a mission hospital, where their "haunted" home had to be cleansed by a local pastor "ïn shamanic style" since locals were terrified to enter it. They laid down roots properly when they moved again to set up an organisation to work for education and healthcare in the Gond heartland.
For all its promise, the writing is, sadly, uneven. At its worst, the book lapses into a monotonous, and un-memoir like catalogue (once, even in point form) of facts and activities. At its best, it is evocative and sharp, as in the account of eight years in the eighties that the Sens spent in the mining town of Dalli-Rajhara, working with the trade union Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangathan (CMSS), led by the legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi, who was later murdered. Ms Sen evokes the world of iron-ore mineworkers, mostly locals and tribals, living in the shadowlands of one of the designated temples of modern India, the Soviet-aided Bhilai Steel Plant, in a memorable way. Her Dalli-Rajhara is a schizophrenic town, with a neatly laid out "township" for regular mine workers, where children learnt gymnastics in true Soviet style, and an insalubrious "camp" for contract workers.
While Ms Sen captures the euphoria of an iconic working class movement that gained national attention, she does not romanticise it. Critiquing its authoritarian and patriarchal side, and the much invoked guiding principle of "democratic centralism", she writes: "I am no clearer about this magical (and pompous) phrase than when I first heard it." Women members were marginalised over time: "When life was basic, women were comrades, when it improved they were wives".
What also lifts the book is Ms Sen's endearing eye for the absurd in grim situations. She recalls the keenness of the manager of the hotel in Malda, Bengal, where the electronic media caught up with her after Binayak's arrest, that she say "a few words of promotion for his facility". In her recounting of the increasing "Hinduisation" of the official narrative of Chhattisgarh (useful to read in the current climate), there is a story, spiked with black humour, on how the state's ministry of religious affairs "created history" by declaring Rajim, a temple town near Raipur, as the site of the "fifth Kumbh mela". It even got an Act passed in the legislative Assembly for this purpose, says Ms Sen, undettered by the fact that there is no mention of Rajim in the Puranic legends on the Mela. Tucked away somewhere in the book is a poem composed by someone who had worked in the Indian Audits and Accounts Service, to the mahua flower whose intoxicating brew "can turn sahibs into advisasis and adivasis into sahibs".
Only the first 44 pages deal with her husband's arrest, jailing, conviction for sedition and criminal conspiracy by a trial court in Chhattisgarh, and the recovery of his reputation, after a spirited campaign, in the court of public opinion, though not in the courts of law (his appeal is pending at the state's high court). It is a moving telling of how their world changed overnight, but much is familiar, since the case was copiously reported.
However, whether in demonising him as a Naxali dakiya (Naxalite courier) or extolling him as a middle class hero trapped in a surreal nightmare, much of that reporting centred on Binayak Sen. In Ms Sen's political memoir, the protagonist is Chhattisgarh. She uses memory, knowledge and research to relive - and reclaim - a love affair with the place and the people. And, as she focuses, in the latter half of the book, on Chhattisgarh's accelerated industrialisation after statehood in 2000, its new conflicts over land, resources and environment, its murky web of interests between politicians and corporate entities, its growing militarisation, which split tribal society down the middle, she makes an important point: the Sens' story is one among many thousands of stories, of those caught up in these devastating disruptions.
