My birthplace has been burning for the past couple of days and all I can do is fiddle with the computer 2000 miles away. Okay the Nero simile is not exactly applicable in my case but this sort or helplessness I have not felt very often in my life. My birthplace and I share a very awkward relationship. We do not love each other, but we cannot ignore each other either. It has made and shaped several aspects of my personality because I have spent the first 22 years of my life there. Quirks of life and profession have ensured that I will probably never live there permanently but as they say it is impossible to take that little place out of my system, no matter wherever I go or whatever I do. Clumsily translating a cult expression of (now Kabir) Suman, I too can claim that it has seen all my firsts. To this day, I remember all its nooks and corners, and my long solitary walks across its lengths and breaths. No matter how much it changes, it will never be alien to me.
It is not a particularly distinguished place, with none of its sons and daughters having made it horribly big. Its two modest claims to fame are its resident goddess and a rather eccentric character that appears in several science fiction stories of Satyajit Ray. The second is decidedly a condescending reference for I am quite certain that Ray chose to house this literally prophetic character there because his funny name rhymes with the name of this place. I am a great admirer of Ray like all Bengalis but I have not found a single topographical reference to this place in any of the stories where this character is featured. His place of residence is always perfunctorily announced in two words,( ……te thaken) as if to suggest that the strange name of the place had anything to do with his unusual gifts. In effect, he is estranged and treated as an abnormality, in contrast to his hero professor Shanku. This is an old literary device dating back to the nineteenth century English literature which shaped the worldviews of almost all major Bengal renaissance figures including Ray. In terms of absolute spatial distance, it is not more than 20 kilometers from those localities in South Calcutta where Ray spent his life but I am pretty sure he has never been there in person. But for its funny name that lends itself easily to caricature by the sophisticated south Calcutta sensibility, this place had no role to play in the stories. Digressions apart, I am only suggesting that the place has never been particularly distinguished for anything, except for such occasional snide references.
This is precisely why I have been terribly disturbed by the way it has been hogging so much media attention last couple of days. All publicity is certainly not good publicity and murder and mayhem is definitely not a great way to burst into public consciousness. I do not know in detail about the actual course of events and I do not have access to Bengali news channels. But from my hourly conversations to my family and friends I have gathered some fragments that I must put on record. And I want to make a few general points about the inept handling of the problem by the local and district administration. This lapse is especially glaring because we now have a young cabinet minister from our place, who had been a very upright and honest man when I used to know him many years ago during his occasional attempts to entice young school students to party training courses.
Now there is this ritual observed every year on the Ekadoshi during the Debipokkho in the temple of our resident goddess which is but a local version of the omnipresent Bengali goddess Chandi. Every para where Durga pujo is held brings forth a range of offerings to the temple to perform a special pujo ceremony which culminates with the ritual sacrifice of a goat. Probably this is some sort of a passage money or customs duty you pay to the resident goddess for daring to ignore her for four days. Historically speaking, such practices probably owe their origin to the medieval accommodation that saw successful insertion of the local ‘tribal’ deities within the Brahmanic pantheon in the form of the great Bengali mother goddess and her local deputies such as our resident goddess. One of my professors wrote a whole book on this process that he called Religious Process. But since he is a very busy man, I can supply you people with expert knowledge on the question when you invite me for a paid lecture.
Each of these passage money ceremonies lasts typically for half an hour or so and their anthropological details form part of the paid lecture. One point that needs to be made, however, is that the Drummers (Dhakis) of the respective para pujo committees often break into impromptu competitions with each other in the temple hall while these offerings are made. Poor souls from poorer places, they try their best to play to the gallery and attract generous donations from the assembled crowd. The crowd too keeps rewarding these chaps with currency notes of small to medium denominations. When the drums reach a crescendo it is indeed a bit of an entrancing moment. The sound of drums still rings in my years as I write this although it must have been more than a decade since I last heard these Dhakis. With twenty or so Dhakis playing in tandem in a medium sized hall and dancing and moving around in a circle, going back and forth in a rhythmic motion, it is not that difficult to break into dancing ourselves and I too always found myself literally dancing to their beats as did everyone else present there.
During such a moment of exhilaration, one of the onlookers reportedly threw a coin or two of appreciation towards a particular Dhaki who then stooped to collect them. Probably then this Dhaki had a collision with someone standing nearby and he fell to the ground. This in turn sent the chaps to whose para he belonged into a fit of rage and they went for this chap who caused the collision as it were. Obviously then the boys from the para of which this bystander is a resident sprung into action and the minor collision soon relapsed into a full scale street fight. Within a few moments the temple was turned into a battlefield as the warring sides went for the jugular. The narrative is not very clear from this point onwards. A stampede must have ensued and many would have run for their lives through the three gates of the temple. This stampede must have wounded some people seriously but I have heard of no such incident. This is, to borrow the pet phrase of another popular Ray character, ‘highly suspicious’ and so here I give up the pretense of trying to reconstruct a linear narrative.
Events moved in quick succession from this point. Some of the chaps now reportedly snatched the keys of the three exit gates and locked them for good. These guys reportedly do not hold any Durga pujo ceremony in their para and so logically should not have been in the temple. This is actually a complicated issue. Contrary to the popular belief that caste is not much of an irritant in Bengal, it is very alive in and characterizes the spatial distribution of our village. In effect, each para roughly signifies the concentration of a particular caste, although these days it is not so obvious. But beneath the surface the identities are fairly robust as are the propensity to take to certain professions. It so happens that the chaps who happened to have snatched the keys belonged to Dulepara, a concentration of the low Dule caste. Most of them are abysmally poor and consequently do not hesitate to take to petty crimes. I do not mean that others are squeaky clean—they just hide behind masks of sophistication—but it’s just that for a range of socio economic reasons these chaps are often a little more reckless with law. The local politicians cynically exploit their vulnerability, using them to carry out petty crimes of vendetta. In exchange, they also protect them from police and so on and so forth. Frankly though, the demand that only people from those paras with valid pujo license be allowed entry into the temple is utter crap and totally unenforceable.
By now a youngstar called Pradip from Karuripara, largely a concentration of petty traders and shopkeepers, was unfortunately cornered by four or five or more chaps from Dule para. They allegedly hit him on the head several times with a large clay tub, the kind on which you grow cactus on your terrace garden. They must have picked it up from inside the temple premises because I remember there are several of such tubs there, housing creepers, money plants and other such decorative saplings. There were other boys from Karuri para who too were critically injured in the skirmish and quickly rushed to hospital where they continue to battle for life. Unfortunately, it was Pradip, whose name literally means lamp, who faded out while on his way to hospital. I wonder how not a single soul from Dule para is reported injured. The chaps from Karuri para were certainly taken by surprise but not so weak that they could not land a single blow. It is not clear how or when the locks were opened or how the chaps escaped. Apparently there are several eye witnesses to this act of attempted murder although charges of anything more than culpable homicide not amounting to murder will be hard to sustain in a court of law for several reasons. First, it certainly was not a premeditated act and second, if it can be established that the miscreants did it under influence of some kind of an intoxicant—which given the pujo revelry is not an impossibility—the case will indeed become very weak. But I am jumping the gun.
The fact remains that nearly 48 hours after the incident, not a single culprit has been nabbed despite eye witnesses having named several of the suspects. In retribution—which I condemn just as strongly as the alleged murder—the youth of Karuri para and other paras have gone on rampage, burning buses and damaging properties in and around the village. Under the impression that some in the body that administers the temple were hand in glove with the culprits—because they could so easily lock the gates—they have also reduced to ashes some factories and shops that these guys or their relatives and neighbors own. I am deeply disturbed by this neat alliance of all the upper and middle caste paras and their easy dubbing of the Dules as the habitual criminals but for more on this question you’ll have to wait for the paid lecture.
The main arterial road remains blocked and police has completely sealed off the locality. There is much debate over whether article 144 has been imposed but an hour ago a friend said it was not required. Some paramilitary forces have been deployed to bring the situation under control and the body of Pradip was reportedly cremated this evening under police protection amid a 3000 strong crowd conducting a silent protest march demanding the arrest of the culprits. The local crematorium has been a favorite haunt of mine—I became an expert in performing funerals by the time I was eleven and a half—for many years and I can tell you that even at the best of times it cannot accommodate more than two hundred people. I mean it is one of those small burning ghats typical of medium sized villages of yore, although the newly erected temple on its premises has now added a bit of gloss on its rather mundane appearance.
My mother has already prohibited my brother’s external movements and for once he does not seem to mind it, for today at any rate. They said even the cable connections were suspended until this evening and the mobile connections remained irregular at best. But more importantly, two things completely beat me.
This minister from our place has reportedly been missing from the scene. I would have thought the he would drop everything else and rush to the spot, taking charge of the situation and trying to restore calm, besides doing everything under his command to apprehend the culprits, especially after they had been explicitly named. On the contrary, he has not even once spoken to the press nor seen to do anything substantive during the last day and a half. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that he has been negotiating a compensation package for Pradip’s family so that they prevail upon the agitators to withdraw their struggle. A very practical move no doubt, one which will certainly hoist him up by a few notches in the party pecking order. The money too will certainly be useful to the family for Pradip worked as a humble car driver. But I wonder whether he would have done the same if the slain belonged to his own extended family. Frankly, this is definitely not the Kurta Pajama clad whole timer who used to travel in a bicycle and had time for inquisitive school students. I hear these days he only travels in closed ambassadors and people only get to see his ambassador passing twice a day. I also wonder why so many TV channels that had been camping there decided to spare him an interrogation. Very strange, isn’t it? Last heard, he was seen walking next to the dead body in the crematorium. He was reportedly also instrumental in a quick disposal of the body which the Karuri para youth had threatened not to cremate until the culprits were nabbed. His senior colleague Subhas Charabarty, the hero of the Balak Brahmachari (the copyright holder of the Ram Narayan Ram chant) dead body rescue episode would have been pleased.
At this point I find myself smoothly veering towards a particular subject position and need to ask a few hard questions. Do we have a Dule para version of events? Just how credible is the charge that those chaps started the brawl almost unprovoked? What right did the Karuripara (and others) crowd have to (systematically) destroy others’ properties subsequently? In fact, the retribution appears to be more organized and methodical than the alleged murder in that the targets of violence were chosen with some discretion. Anyone with the slightest familiarity to legal provisions would agree that planned violence attracts more stringent penalties than spontaneous brutality. I have personally known some of the Dule para chaps for many years and I know they have a volatile temper at the best of times. But quite a few of them I remember as extremely talented footballers who could never make it big because they had to get down to supporting their families. I know quite a few of them are addicted to country liquor and soft drugs and probably also participate in petty crimes. I have played football with them and even now get to meet some of them when I visit home. I have always enjoyed the rawness of their company and found their bluntness a very refreshing departure from the sophisticated pretense and opportunism of some of our local intellectuals and leaders of society. These are mostly hollow men with almost zero originality who inherit their worldviews from their inward-looking milieu and always refuse to call a spade a spade. In a cultural sense, they are the petit bourgeoise—unable to compete with those above for lack of caliber and guts, they are in mortally afraid to be associated with those below. Now that almost the whole of Dule para has been reportedly torched, who is going to ensure the rehabilitation of those poor families who had nothing to do with the attempted murder? Are not these acts of rage going to breed many more criminals?
The police has not exactly covered itself with distinction. Not only have they comprehensively failed to pick up even a single suspect, they have arrested a number of youngstars who obviously had little to do with the crime. If it is a tactical measure to douse the violence, it has clearly not worked. More importantly, is it credible that the police does not know anything at all about the possible hideouts of people who had already had some petty crime records? But of course, it is always easy to blame the police and the administration in a bid to shift the focus from our own abysmal conducts.
For me the larger question here is one of rage. It is a bit like those cars where you can switch from 0 to 150 km/hour speed in a matter of seconds. If so many people can get so angry within such a short span of time, is it really possible for the administration to handle the situation without conceding some innocent lives? What is it that engineers so much of rage within so many of us so instantly? What is so fundamentally wrong with us that we cannot even sit on our pent up emotions for a little while more? What is this huge emptiness within us that leads us to lose all control over our conscious actions? What is it that frustrates us all to such an intolerable degree on certain moments? Mind you it is only this pent up rage that brings together the aggressors and the victims in this particular episode. Actually I am no longer so sure about the distinction between the aggressors and the victims here. If you have followed my somewhat disjointed narrative, you’d also see that the only sentiment I have about this entire episode is one of incomprehension. This is a kind of incomprehension that is not dispelled by more ‘facts’. On the contrary it is, to borrow the title of a recent collection of essays on caste, ‘the blindness of insight’. It is a painful realization that no matter how much I brag about familiarity with my birthplace, there are aspects of it which have always remained beyond my comprehension and will probably always remain so. It is a pity that some surprises are never pleasant. It is ultimately having to confess that I did not know the brute that had always stayed hidden within my own self. I am enraged at my own helplessness but I am glad that I wrote it out.
