Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘What good will the degree do?’ he had once said to me. ‘There are hundreds of thousands like me, graduates who are sitting twiddling their thumbs because there are no jobs. I’ll be joining that great herd of unthinking cattle. The thing is to get to the heart of the sickness, not tinker around with the symptoms, do you understand?’

Of course, I did.

I headed towards the westernmost region of Medinipur with Samir and Dhiren, towards its border with Bihar — past Jhargram, past Belpahari, near Kankrajhor in the Binpur area. Sometimes the places were so small that they didn’t have a name, they called themselves by the name of the nearest village. We operated in Baishtampur, Gidighati, Chhurimara (what a name! ‘knife-stabbed’; still haven’t been able to find out the history behind it), Majgeria, Chirugora.

There were jungles on the near horizon everywhere, dense, dark forests of kendu and sal. It was not accidental that most of our comrades worked in or near areas under the cover of trees. The jungle provided protection, obviously. In our line of work, the ability to go into hiding quickly was a matter of life and death. Literally. These were the forests that received the tribals of the area when their land was grabbed by a landlord, a moneylender, a coal or iron company. There were mines nearby — coal, iron-ore. Jamshedpur and Bokaro were just a short hop across into Bihar. And north, across Purulia and Bankura, there were the big dams, Maithon, Massanjore, and the mining towns of Dhanbad and Jharia. All these had been built on the lands of tribal peoples, flooding or displacing them. Who was going to listen to 100, 500, 1,000 or even 10,000 dark-skinned, backward, jungle-dwelling adivasis, the so-called ‘scheduled tribes’, over the collective might and muscle of Steel Authority of India, Tata Steel and Hindustan Cables?

These areas had been seeing agitation for some time now. We decided to begin here because, in some sense, our work had a ready, if somewhat basic, foundation in the region. Naxalbari happened in North Bengal because unrest at tea plantations there had been brewing for a long while — the labour movement, agitating for rights, better working conditions, better pay, rights over the land. The beginning of our revolution there didn’t come out of thin air. Similarly, here too there was a continuing history of great wrongs. We could build on that.

Have you seen how I cannot keep away from talking shop? Awful, I know. There I was, trying to tell you the story of my journey to Medinipur and, without being aware of it, I got pulled back into politics. I’m sorry. I keep thinking of you reprimanding me gently, saying, with so much laughter held in check in your voice — There goes the parrot again, reciting its textbooks.

Yes, our journey. That was what I really wanted to write about. From Gidhni Junction the railtrack became a loop-line, my first time on one such. Nature seemed to change its looks and personality as the loop-line separated from the broad-gauge. The earth had turned dry, dusty and red. The distance between the large trees became greater and greater. Instead of those big ponds, surrounded by coconut and palm trees, we saw little ponds — large puddles, really. The density of everything, vegetation, human habitation, people, thinned out. Huge fields of rice, then a few dots of thatched mud houses. Some dwarf date palms, that was all I could recognise.

Actually, to tell you the truth, I thought they were betel nut trees until Dhiren laughed and said — You’re such a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, you don’t know your betel nut from your date palm; really, what are we going to do with you? We’re going to be living with peasants and you’ll stick out like a pylon in a flat, empty field and embarrass us all.

More laughter. Because he was not from the big city, Dhiren fancied himself as a bit of a Nature man, at one with trees and birds and flowers and such things. He was always playing this game of one-upmanship with me; his way of reducing the distance between us, I suppose. There had been several times in the past when I’d had to bite my tongue to stop myself from saying — Dhiren, it’s Uttarpara you’re from, the mofussil, hardly open countryside and the very heart of Nature, is it?

Then Dhiren pointed out simul trees — not in flower, so I wouldn’t have been able to identify them anyway. I can hear you laughing and ganging up with Dhiren, saying — He’s right, you’re a through-and-through city boy, you can’t even put a name to the simul tree? To which I can only say that this is the tyranny of you rural folk. .

When the train left the main railway line and went over the cutting, the music of the wheels changed. The people at the stations were taller, darker than city people. They had curly hair. The women who boarded the train were much shyer. They did not want to sit on the benches, but sat on the dirty floor of the carriage.

At a tiny station we bought tea in small terracotta cups. Dhiren said — Have your fill, there’s no tea where we’re going, and it wouldn’t do to drink tea anyway when we are with the farmers, because they don’t have any and it’s considered an urban luxury. Where would they get money to buy tea?

Ufff, Dhiren did talk so. . jabbering away constantly: squad formation, methods of warfare, teaching class politics to farmers, how there was no transport where we were going, we would have to walk scores of miles. . unending, his chatter. No wonder he was the de facto leader of every activity that required talking — speeches in assemblies, canvassing votes during elections, student-body meetings. . anything you could think of. I kept looking with suspicion at everyone in the carriage. Whose ears were picking up on all this? I made a sign to Dhiren to stop. It took some time before he caught on.

Then, suddenly, scrubland. And the promise of forest beyond the horizon. I didn’t know how I had sensed it.

Red earth. Have you ever seen it? The dust that catches in your hair, in your clothes, when you walk over the dry soil, is red. I had never seen red earth before.

We got off at Jhargram. Samir said we should look out for police at the station, we should get off the train and walk out singly. From Jhargram to Belpahari in a bus. Right at the other edge of Belpahari, from where you could see the forests of this corner of Medinipur spreading out in all directions, was the home of Debdulal Maity, our contact in this region. He ran a cycle-repair shop and we put up in the shed where the cycles, tools, spares, tyres and all manner of jumble were kept. It wasn’t a good idea to stay at his home. First of all, there wasn’t much space there. Besides, it wouldn’t do to implicate his wife and children. What they didn’t know, they could neither confess to nor reveal.

So his shop it was: mats on the floor, no mattresses, only a few layers of folded-up shataranchi, mosquito nets. Only one hurricane lamp — he could not afford more kerosene — sooting up rapidly. The little flickering yellow light that it cast seemed like a timid, jumpy prey, which knew that the darkness around it was going to get it soon.

— Only four hours of electricity every day, Debdulal-da said, and that too after paying 500 rupees' bribe to the man who had come to connect it. And the four hours that we get are so weak that it’s not worth the name of electricity. All these villages: not a single one has electric power.

— But you are in dams territory, there’s so much hydel power in your back yard, I protested.

— That’s hardly for us, he said, that’s for the cities and the big companies. We are little villages in the backwaters here, mostly full of tribal and lower-caste people and harijans and scheduled tribes. Who cares about us? We’ve been forgotten.

Samir opened his mouth to say something, but stopped himself. I knew what he was going to say: that the land for the dams and the mines belonged to the tribals and lower-caste people. It was their villages that got submerged, their livelihoods that got destroyed, they did not get even a minuscule fraction of the resettlement money; in most cases they got nothing for being kicked out of their homes and their land.