trick, given that all his time was devoted to ‘doing politics’, no one knew, but it seemed unlikely he was going to be able to hold onto his first in Part II. Or even sit his exams. How could he? He had abandoned all that and thrown in his lot with the roving revolutionaries. A classic rice-eating, timorous, creature-comforts-loving, head-in-the-clouds Bengali, you’d think, to look at him, and he was all those things, but behind that there was a core of steel. It took me a while to discover that.
Dhiren, on the other hand, had the toughness of someone who had known only want in his life. Mind you, Samir didn’t come from a particularly well-off family – his father was a clerk in the Electric Supply Corporation – but he and his family lived in a house built by his grandfather, so at least they had a roof over their heads that they could call their own. Dhiren came from Uttarpara. His father worked in a light-bulb factory, which had seen its entire workforce go on strike against its owners’ decision to fire nearly a quarter of them; the factory had been shut for three years now. The family had been without an income for that period. Meanwhile, Dhiren, the eldest son, on whose BCom degree course in City College the family’s hopes of sustenance rested, had barely attended college, choosing to change the world instead of adding to its aggregate of unquestioning petty-bourgeois invertebrates.
‘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
Dhiren, on the other hand, had the toughness of someone who had known only want in his life. Mind you, Samir didn’t come from a particularly well-off family – his father was a clerk in the Electric Supply Corporation – but he and his family lived in a house built by his grandfather, so at least they had a roof over their heads that they could call their own. Dhiren came from Uttarpara. His father worked in a light-bulb factory, which had seen its entire workforce go on strike against its owners’ decision to fire nearly a quarter of them; the factory had been shut for three years now. The family had been without an income for that period. Meanwhile, Dhiren, the eldest son, on whose BCom degree course in City College the family’s hopes of sustenance rested, had barely attended college, choosing to change the world instead of adding to its aggregate of unquestioning petty-bourgeois invertebrates.
‘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
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