Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

At these meetings there were farmers who had no money to buy seeds for the next season, but without planting they would die, so they got deeper into debt. A few of them grew vegetables by the side of their huts; this was all the food they had in some months of the year. And when the season for waxed gourd and ridged gourd and bottle gourd was over, they would starve.

We told them that sacks of rice had been smuggled out at two in the morning.

We began by taking small steps: the reversal of ‘the crop belongs to the owner of the land’ to ‘the land belongs to the cultivator of the crop’; the 1⁄3: 2⁄3 rule of harvest grain distribution. At night, Samir, Dhiren and I again and again debated the relative merits of economism versus militancy. We told the farmers about the uprising in Naxalbari last year. Without putting it in so many words, we knew we were moving towards militancy. The business of living with them, learning to be them, was not an end in itself, as we now began to understand. It had always been a stepping stone towards more radical action.

I knew from the moment that Dhiren brought out The Little Red Book, pointed to it and said — This man has freed eighty crore people from the noose around their necks, the kind of halter you have around your necks now — and I saw every pair of eyes in the room turn to look at the book, that we had crossed the line. Our work had begun. From the dissemination of the words of Chairman Mao and Comrade Charu Mazumdar, we will soon move on to squad formation and, from there, to ‘action’.

As I was saying, the farmers were not totally innocent: Anupam Haati told the meeting — The city people who came here when we were sowing, they showed us a small red book too, they said the book will show you how to punish jotedaars.

Before coming here I had often wondered how difficult it would be to convince and mobilise villagers. I had made myself exhausted thinking about the months of talks and meetings, posters and expounding. It had felt, in my imagination, like the effort that would be required to move a giant crag by pushing at its base. Within a few days of our arrival, however, that sense of impossibility had become its opposite: an easy, achievable optimism.

Do you know why?

Because I saw the kind of lives they led: going to bed on an empty stomach for over half the year; drowned in debt without any hope of ever surfacing; their unborn generations bonded to service those debts; their blood sucked dry (talking of which, the Bengali word for ‘sucking’ and ‘exploitation’ is the same, have you ever noticed?); their children bony but with swollen bellies, arms and legs like reeds, hair bleached to brown with malnutrition; their lives shrivelled by worry. Because their lives were like this, I thought they would be simmering with anger and all we needed to do was a bit of stoking and there would be a giant conflagration that would bring down the blood-suckers and burn them to cinders. How hopeful it all seemed.

Then that hopefulness curdled: what I hadn’t reckoned with was that decades and decades of this slow-burning flame of resentment and deprivation had burned them, not the perpetrators. The embers of anger we had thought of fanning had burned down into the ashes of despair. They were already dead within their lives. They had no hope, no sense of a future, just an endless playing out of this illness of the present tense until its culmination in an early death. In other words, we had to kindle a fire with ashes. Have you ever tried doing that?

Once again, the three of us by the pond near the bamboo grove at night. The cry of an animal in the distance is picked up, briefly, by more cries, all identical, then they stop.

— Jackals, Dhiren says.

— Nocturnal, like us, says Samir.

— Not quite. We work in the daytime too, we don’t sleep it away.

— Tomorrow we have to walk thirteen miles in the dark.

We were going with eight farmers from Majgeria to Munirgram for a huge poster exhibition and mass assemblies organised by the Medinipur Coordination Committee. It was going to be a big day. Farmers and activists were coming from villages all over the western Medinipur region. Our aim was to educate them in class dynamics, arouse hatred in them against their class enemies, explain the events of Naxalbari and Telengana to let them know that they were not alone, that class uprisings were happening throughout the country, peasants were snatching their land and crops back from landowners, shaking off the yokes of their slavery. We were going to explain to them in simple, direct language that their lot would never be improved by the corrupt, slow process of parliamentary democracy and elections, that their freedom could only come about through armed rebellions of the kind that were erupting everywhere around them.

In Munirgram, endless prattle. Endless. Sometimes I felt I was chewing on sand. Should we work with ex-hooligans who had been the domestic pets of the Congress, but now wanted to join us? Were they motivated by ideology, as we were, or did they only want to settle scores, or an easy path to quick material gains? What if, under pressure, they betrayed us? For that matter, the exhibition and assembly were teeming with card-carrying CPI(M) cadres: we didn’t know if they had made their break from the Party, or had been expelled, or were drifting towards the ideology being outlined by Charu Mazumdar and others. They were as dangerous as the paid ex-Congress criminals, if not more so. What if they betrayed us?

Jaw, jaw, jaw. . my temples began to throb. I stuck to my line and quoted Chairman Mao: ‘If you set a ball rolling, it will reach its target at some point. But if you keep being hesitant, and stop to discuss matters at every point in the trajectory, it means slowing down the ball. It may then never reach its destination.’

While writing all this I found myself hesitating at one point, the bit where I mentioned going to bed on an empty stomach. I saw your calm face suddenly worried by such a disarmingly predictable question — Did I too eat half-stomach?

I won’t — I can’t — lie to you. Yes, I did. Most days.

On some days there was nothing to eat, only water to drink, drawn from the well shared between this neighbourhood and the Maheshwar colony next to it. Most of the time it was not a fast, but a fraction of a meal: a plate of cooked gourd and mashed yam, once a day, not enough to fill your stomach, but just enough to see you from one day to the next. Nobody will die eating only this, because you’re getting something to eat, but nobody will live either on this, only subsist. The picture of starvation here, the picture that we city-dwellers carried around in our heads when we thought of rural poverty, of bony, half-naked people withering to death, was wrong — that was what happened during times of famine. In ordinary times, like now, the truth was different: the boniness remained, but it was no longer day after day of fasting; instead, weeks and months of hunger, of not having enough to eat, of meagreness and undernourishment and weakness.

I remembered Mejo-kaki once commenting on the food eaten by the servants, Gagan-da and Kamala-di and Malati-di, and especially the temporary daytime staff — Look, just look at the amount of rice on their plates. It’s a hillock.

The comment was mocking: it was a matter of amused condescension for her. I was too young then to read the observation for what it was; I too had giggled.

It is true that rural people eat a lot of rice, but not for the reasons she had assumed. They eat rice because there isn’t much else to eat: the vegetables they grow; the roots and leaves they forage; the occasional fish from the ponds and canals; the even rarer duck, which sometimes appears on the flooded rice fields during the early part of the growing season. But that is the ideal, almost aspired-for, scenario. The truth is more naked: they eat so much rice because they are filling themselves up against the time they know will come when they won’t even have this staple to fill their stomachs.