With its shades of sepia and brown, the cover is striking. A tram looms in the foreground, thrusting out of the page. The Howrah Bridge, with the Hooghly beneath it, is in the background.
Quintessential Calcutta. (Or the Calcutta cliché depending on your point of view.) The perfect cover for Calcutta Diary, a collection of Ashok Mitra’s pieces for the Economic and Political Weekly, all published between the late 1960s and the mid 1970s.
The sepias and browns are obvious clues that this book is about times past. (The tram and the bridge are still present and active.) But just halfway through the essays, you have to stop and gaze at the cover again. No. The sepias and browns will not do. The cover should have been in colour instead. Because these essays may have been written and published in an earlier century, but they bear a striking resemblance to the links I find in my Twitter feed today: links posted by indignant Left liberals to articles highly critical of the establishment that cover issues rarely touched upon by the mainstream media. And the issues I read about every morning, courtesy these non-mainstream media links, are pretty much identical to the issues Mitra was outraged about roughly 45 years ago.
Ashok Mitra is an economist who once served Indira Gandhi’s Congress, working as the Government of India’s chief economic adviser and then chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission. Later, he became a staunch Marxist, serving as West Bengal’s finance minister between 1977 and 1987. He resigned after disagreements with CPM chief Jyoti Basu, but returned to active politics in the mid-1990s when he became a member of the Rajya Sabha and the chairman of Parliament’s standing committee on industry and commerce.
This is enough to tell you what you can expect when you pick up Calcutta Diary, because the title can be misleading. The book is not an affectionate, flaneur-style look at a city that seemingly prides itself on being eccentric (though at least one of the essays on Bengal’s “army” of poets is just that, with a brilliant economic angle). Rather, it’s a series of outbursts against the government and its corruption, the plight of the poor, the sadistic might of the state, the decline of true culture, the sycophantic media and lots more. Some of these outbursts are subtle and sarcastic. Others simply in-your-face rage. But all of them achieve one thing: they make you feel sick inside.
Consider “The Emancipation of Kamal Bose”. Bose was arrested on two criminal charges. The court granted bail. But before he could be freed from prison, another police station charged him with more crimes. The court granted bail again and yet another police station filed criminal charges against Bose. This went on for a while. Then, because there was no evidence against Bose, the court ordered his release. Whereupon the commissioner of police used the preventive arrest clause of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) to incarcerate Bose again. When one of MISA’s clauses was struck down by the Supreme Court, Bose should have been released, but the police arrested him under another section of MISA and clapped another criminal case on him too.
This went on and on, till Bose applied for anticipatory bail, telling the court what had happened before. And 16 months after he first went to prison, he was finally free. “Dolly Bose has never read Franz Kafka,” wrote Mitra, “but she and her husband, between them, can now furnish enough material for works that could put Kafka in the shade.”
Now read “Fascism Shall Not Pass…”, the story of a middle class family with two sons, both with bright futures till they were picked up by the police. “But look at the brighter side of it,” urged Mitra. “For Sadananda Roy Chowdhury and his wife, the ordeal is over, they will not have to worry about their children any more, both their sons are dead… The Lord giveth and the government of the land taketh away…”
While this sort of outrage goes on, Mitra reports that according to the newspapers, the people of Calcutta are talking about one thing only: that “The Planes Do Not Land Here Any More”. Why must they fly abroad via Delhi or Bombay, they grumble. Is this the class of people who will revive Calcutta’s fading glory, asks Mitra.
But interesting though it is to read about the city as it was roughly 45 years ago, I’d dearly love it if Mitra wrote a Calcutta Diary today. (It would be called Kolkata Diary, of course.) For one, I’d love to see how a Marxist would write about a Calcutta that was so desperate to be post-Marxist that in 2011 it leapt straight from the frying pan into the fire.
Kushalrani Gulab dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea with a huge library of books to read and write about. She blogs at tomeofmylife.blogspot.in
