Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

As a socialist, he ended, his voice breaking, it had filled him with pride to work in such a nation.

His emotion was very real. He had meant every word he said, and his audience was moved, despite the falterings of the translator. For months afterwards everybody they met talked about Dr Mishra’s speech.

It was not that she objected to what he said, for of course it was all true. But, still, at the end of his speech she had had to stifle a laugh.

Maithili Sharan Mishra a socialist! Even while he was saying it, she had heard old Hem Narain Mathur’s voice in her ear, telling her how bright young Murali Charan Mishra had come back to Lucknow in the thirties with a degree from the London School of Economics in his pocket, the Indian Masses on his lips, and a Scottish pipe in his mouth. That was the kind of socialist he was.

His son, too, for all Lucknow had known that young Maithili Sharan’s one ambition was to follow his father into politics. Only, by then, old Murali Charan knew better, and even though his decades of fancy footwork in various legislatures had earned him more money than people could even begin to guess at he had ultimately forced his son into the safe certainties of the medical profession.

It was not that Mrs Verma was self-righteous politically; her father had talked to her too often about the ugliness of socialist in-fighting. But certainly, if anyone had a right to point his finger at Murali Charan Mishra, it was old Hem Narain Mathur. For he was a real socialist, as true as the new-ploughed earth, and he had died in unsung obscurity while Murali Charan Mishra was still fattening himself on ministerships. It was a debt which had to be paid some day.

In 1933, a few confused months after he left Presidency College, Hem Narain Mathur gave up a fine job with a tea company and plunged into Bihar’s villages with Swami Sahajanand and the reactivated Kisan Sabha movement. Often it was a forlorn and lonely life: in the villages he battled vainly to explain his theories, the glories of science, and his vision of the future (which he only half-understood himself); and back at the innumerable party conferences and congresses he battled no less vainly to explain to Murali Charan Mishra and the party theoreticians that people were not atoms to be dealt with in formulae.

And while he was away, organizing that movement or this, at some conference or the other, the party was always splitting and splintering. At the centre of it all was Murali Charan Mishra, his pipe hidden under his various man-of-the-people disguises, reading out his evolving theses — first, on the Uneven Development of the Economy; then on Progressive Bourgeois Nationalism; and finally on the need for a Guiding Hand at certain stages of history, and the absolute necessity for an immediate tactical alliance with the classes and parties in power.

And so, while Murali Charan Mishra climbed his way up the political ladder on the rubble of the crumbling socialists, Hem Narain Mathur grew old before his time, torn between certainty and history. He wasted away with the obscurest of diseases, bewilderment, as he watched the world spinning beyond his grasp; as old comrades began to out-scoundrel scoundrels once they had been given a whiff of power; as fledgeling peasant unions withered inexplicably away or simply vanished in puffs of smoke as the membership was roasted alive by landlords. He had one final surge of energy in the fifties when Ram Manohar Lohia kindled the last spark of hope in the socialists. But by that time he was already too ill and too tired to carry on long; all that he really longed for was the solace of his bookcase, of J. C. Bose and Huxley, of Tagore and Darwin, Hazlitt and Science Today , and of course of that beacon which still lit those unsteady shelves — the Life of Pasteur . His mind was made up for him when his wife died suddenly of meningitis, leaving him with a daughter to bring up on his own. It was then that he took a job in a small government school in Dehra Dun. And there he lived out the rest of his time — a tired old man who, as he said so often, had only one worthwhile thing left to do. And that was to introduce his two redeemers, his old bookcase and his growing daughter, to each other.

But right till the very end he had stayed a socialist; never once was he tempted by the simple-minded attractions of cynicism. Lying on his deathbed with the spoonful of holy water from the Ganges already at his lips, he had found the strength to place his daughter’s hand on his bookcase and say: My love, make my failures the beginning of your hopes.

If anyone had a right to object when Murali Charan Mishra’s son called himself a socialist, it was her father’s daughter.

To tell you the truth, said Dr Mishra, I thought it went off quite satisfactorily last year. He was a short, stout man in his early fifties, with a round face and a bushy, unkempt moustache. His head was shinily bald, except for a crop of curly hair which ran along the top of his neck to his eartops. He was never still: a crackling, restless energy coursed incessantly through him, sparking out of his bright, bespectacled eyes and keeping his hands continually busy.

Some more meat, Mishra-sahb? Mrs Verma said, emptying a spoonful into his plate.

So, Verma, what do you think? Dr Mishra said, a little too loudly. I don’t see the need for a change. Shall we just have the same kind of thing again this year?

Dr Verma did not look up from his plate; nor did he by the slightest gesture acknowledge that the question had been addressed to him. Mrs Verma busied herself with the rice: she had to be careful now; she could tell that he had already guessed something; that he was trying to draw her out. She laughed briefly: It was very nice last year, Mishra-sahb, really wonderful. And, of course, if you feel strongly …

She left the sentence strategically unfinished and turned to Mrs Mishra: No more rice, Manda-bahen? Then have some prickly-pear custard — we got them from our own cactus. It tastes just like mango really, if you don’t worry about the smell too much.

Dr Mishra was ripping a chapati into minute pieces. So, then, Verma, he barked, you do have some other idea, do you?

Not exactly an idea, Mrs Verma said smoothly, but, yes, I did think that this year we could have something a little less cerebral … something lively … Of course, we must have your speech, too; we can’t possibly do without it. But in addition, if we could have something on the stage maybe, just something small to give everyone a glimpse of our country and our culture, our village life …

So that’s your idea, is it, Verma? Dr Mishra snorted.

Dr Verma sleepily mopped his plate with a chapati.

So you want to give them a glimpse of ‘our culture’, do you? Dr Mishra said. What exactly did you have in mind, Verma, could I ask? A pageant of the costumes of Indian brides perhaps, like the bureaucrats put on for foreigners in Delhi? We could dress up our elderly Miss K. and our own shy little brides, and you and I could be the bright young grooms, couldn’t we?

No one suggested that, Dr Mishra, Mrs Verma said sharply. She could feel her temper rising.

Oh, no, you didn’t suggest that, Dr Mishra snapped. What did you suggest, then, Verma?

Dr Verma quietly collected a few plates and went into the kitchen.

Can I suggest something, then? Dr Mishra went on, talking at the empty chair. Why don’t we give them a more realistic picture of our culture’? Why don’t we show them how all those fancily dressed-up brides are doused with kerosene and roasted alive when they can’t give their grooms enough dowry? Why don’t we show them how rich landlords massacre Untouchables and raze their villages to the ground every second day? Or how Muslims are regularly chopped into little bits by Hindu fanatics? Or maybe we could just have a few nice colour pictures of police atrocities? That’s what ‘our culture’ really is, isn’t it, Verma? Why should we be ashamed of it?