In the extracted portion of “The Lowland,” the next nitpicking will be on Udayan’s death as a Naxalite at the hands of the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force), the paramilitary force mobilized and utilized to address and quell violent internal unrest in India. This central force is pressed into no-nonsense give-no-quarter and take-no-prisoner services when the concerned state’s own State Reserve Police (SRP) is discounted for many reasons: Possible partisanship, prejudiced partiality, fear of recognition leading to punitive retribution in future, possible lack of commitment due to being local and regional, and familiarity with the local terrains and attendant sympathy for their inhabitants, among other factors. [break]
In such delicate cases of the mofussils, the CRPF was everything: Police, judge, jury and – firing squad. They perfected what by now is known as “fake encounter” in South Asia, an efficiently engineered elimination method and systematic perfection of annihilation of suspects and targets. This way of technical termination of the apprehended “culprit” was in fact an open-air and public enterprise in the name of “maintaining” law and order, and “preserving” peace and security.
This trick was practiced in many ways. One way was to simply order the arrested suspect to run for his life, and while fleeing, he would be shot from the back. It would be along a street or in a marketplace where witnesses would be in profuse numbers. Another way was to civilly and politely inform the “incriminated” that nothing untoward was found to have him criminally charged and arrested, so he was free to go as and when it would be convenient for him, and “We’re sorry for the inconveniences caused to your goodself, Sir.
Please don’t mind!” The happy free man would have covered barely fifty yards, and a spiraling .303 Enfield bullet would neatly pierce his back. In every such case, the exit wound would leave a cave of mess, blasting the chest of the victim, with his innards nowhere in sight. So it was with the midriff, almost cutting the body in half; and many a target would have more than half his head blown off, making identification next to impossible.
Lahiri thus, though she does not use the phrase “fake encounter” in her excerpt, describes the final moments of Udayan in this way:
They [Udayan’s family members] saw one of the soldiers undoing the rope around Udayan’s wrists. They saw Udayan walking across the field, away from the paramilitary. He was walking toward the lowland, back toward the house, his arms raised over his head.
After the next intervening paragraph, the description continues:
For a moment, it was as if they were letting him go. But then a gun was fired, the bullet aimed at his back. The sound of the shot was brief, unambiguous. There was a second shot, then a third. “She [Udayan’s wife Gauri] watched his arms flapping, his body leaping forward, seizing up before falling to the ground. There was the clean sound of the shots, followed by the sound of crows, coarsely calling, scattering.
And that is it! The kangaroo court is held and its verdict for the final act is done and over with now. Admittedly, the above quoted paragraphs’ preceding lines chillingly build up to the crescendo leading to Udayan’s murder – the hassling and roughshod house search, the psychological war of sort waged by the uniformed men on the family, the scouring of the hyacinth-filled pond where Udayan is hiding in its thickest growth, and it is where he is discovered, and so on.
It is the comparative softness of Lahiri’s graphics, however, that needs another nitpicking here. This kind of officially sanctioned anarchy was much more frightful and tragic than the one narrated by Lahiri.
To prove my point, I indulge readers by excerpting a passage from my own novel called “EveryPlace: EveryPerson.” Its first full draft was completed in 1980, and my description is more than thirty years old. In it, there is a Naxalite character from the Darjeeling Hills, and I named him Madan. Though Naxalbari is merely fifty miles down south on the serpentine “high”-way from Darjeeling’s uplands, the troubled lowland plains were worlds away from our minds in those times, despite the disturbing fact that the town’s own native police inspector was the first government casualty in the Naxalite revolt. Yet in my novel, I exercised my creative freedom to implant an imagined high-hill Naxalite character to expect such infiltrations into the Darjeeling Hills as well. So Madan is my novel’s Naxalite in the Hills, and his unsurprising or not really unanticipated arrest takes place around one ominous midnight in a cinema hall in this way:
Madan obeyed [the order of the District Intelligence Bureau (DIB) detective to accompany him to the town’s police station). Outside, the streets were quiet, and the dim streetlamps were swarmed by moths. A few stray dogs foraged quietly in the garbage dumps. Madan heard the snorting of homeless beggars in the shanty shops beside the road.
The man led him through the shadows of the downtown lanes, where the night simmered in silence. As they walked towards the Police Station, Madan knew what was in the offing. But it would do him no good trying to run away. The entire length of the road was under the surveillance of invisible eyes stationed in dark corners, he knew. Fake encounters were the security force’s latest invention. He did not want to die like a mongrel, a fugitive shot and downed from behind his back.
And on his die-hard principles, he did not really want to go underground. He was not a rat to burrow into holes, was he? He was a card-carrying Naxalite.
They reached the Police Station. Madan followed the man into the building in a thoughtless vacuum. He felt a cool, calm relief that he had rarely experienced before. It was upto the police to make the first move. Until then, he could just wait and watch.
Madan’s incarceration and torture inside the police station at the hands of the regular West Bengal State Police, and not any external or central security forces, begin after the above description.
Of course, Udayan is captured and immediately destroyed by the unanswerable be-all and end-all CRPF while Madan is merely taken in by the town’s regular policemen on the suspicion of being a Naxalite cadre in Darjeeling – which is doubtlessly proven later in the novel.
What I am doing here is showing the uniform attitude of people in uniforms of whether khaki or olive green or spotted camouflage or just plain mufti of undercover sleuthhounds. In short, to be apprehended by lawless lawmen in South Asia is a most dreaded prospect best avoided at all costs. In such similar scenarios, which description is scarier and more menacing – Lahiri’s or mine? – is for readers to decide.
•••
The Naxalite Movement also crossed the Mechi River and spilled over into the eastern districts of Nepal where young Nepali Leftist politicos stormed the entrenched landowning feudal gentry, most of them of their own high castes and Hindu faith. The District of Morang had its Murder Miles and Killing Kilometers and Jhapa “Jharap”s were regular news even in the few newspapers controlled by the government. But its leaders eventually transported themselves to Kathmandu and ran governments on rotational and musical chair basis, got filthy rich on the capitalist highway, and forgot about all their land reformism in the eastern Tarai where everything remained the same, as in Naxalbari. No, nothing good ever came out of the Naxalite Movement, either in Naxalbari or in east Nepal.
Even the Maoist Movement that began in 1996 in Nepal did much, likewise, to destroy the infrastructure, causing social disruptions and economic fissures and disappearances of innocent and non-partisan Nepalis in which both the state forces and the guerillas played their own destructive parts. The ten-year havocs wreaked by Nepali Maoists and the state in Nepal’s civil war are yet to be properly dealt with in all matters of rebuilding, repairing, reviving, rehabilitating and reinstituting and remedying the wanton damages, mental and physical hurts, loss of peace of mind, and material deprivation at the very grassroots which the Maoists had planned to liberate in the first place but it was where most of the atrocities and highhandedness occurred.
Meanwhile, the Maoists themselves have by now become moneyed mandarins in Kathmandu, and Nepal’s Old Money and feudal aristocracy, whom the Maoists had “vowed” to “annihilate” to usher in their avowed socialist egalitarianism, have remained pat in place, and to boot, even more and newer anarchist groups have appeared in many political cliques and sloganeering garbs.
Taking stock of all the recent decades of cruelties, inhumanity and unfairness taken place in Nepal from practically all sides, from both within and without, the avowed Peace may make its comeback in some fashion but comprehensively soothing and comforting Reconciliation will never be possible in this land.
•••
Perhaps the only good thing to have happened in Naxalbari was Mithun Chokroborty, the local Bengali boy who went to Bombay and became Bollywood’s superstar for many years. This “I’m a disco dancer!” matinee idol perhaps had no appetite for Naxalbari’s apparent nihilism, and his departure in itself probably happened by default, too. However, his exile is one of the precious few of the best things to have happened in spite of his native Naxalbari making its brand of militant Maoism world famous.
Otherwise, Naxalbari and its Santhal and other ethnic villages remain the same today, if not in worse conditions. The roads leading through Siliguri, Bag Dogra, Jalpaiguri, New Jalpaiguri and Naxalbari to Pani Tanki and the Nepal borders across the Mechi River is full of deep potholes and breached bitumen, and the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Bajpayee’s central command to have India’s border highways properly macadamized and maintained have fallen into deaf ears to this day.
And as things that are happening at present, Naxalbari may also go the same way which some of its neighborhoods have already shown. Its indigenous lands are being purchased by outsiders – the nouveaux riche of Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills to Nepal’s opportunistic carpetbaggers to political escapees of Nepali roots from Bhutan’s subtle ethnic cleansing, and those Indian Nepali citizens who foresee further existential uncertainties in their habitats in the Seven Sisters states in far northeast India – and being sliced off and plotted for building safe houses, retirement homes, boutique farms, and business centers.
Therefore, “Amader Mithun!” is still the only sweet anthem in Naxalbari today!
•••
It was only in the 1980s I happened to read a few fictional pieces on Naxalism with its perpetrators, victims as well as those on the punitive side represented in those works. They were originally written in Bengali, and it was only those translated into English that suited my attention.
But even judging by the literary canons of the ’80s, the stories I came across required readers’ discretion for the gory details and excesses carried by these stories. Cleaving of the target’s body by a hatchet into many parts, the vividness of the anatomy smashed by a hammer, throats slit by knives, blood spurting out of bullet holes, butchered tendons and ligaments and arteries exposed and hanging out were some of the sadistic portrayals to be digested by masochist readers. The stories, depending on the principal perpetrators, conveyed the whooping joys of an exploited farmer while slaying his landlord, the first-time experience of hacking and chopping by an urban novice Naxalite, an educated police officer’s regrets turning into a sort of reeling madness after a shooting spree, a hopeless remorse leading to drunken stupor on the part of a Maoist apparatchik, a sense of vengeance and justice meted out by an indentured ethnic farmer against the excise official who had frequently raped his beautiful daughter, a noted newspaper correspondent who could not write his dispatches impartially and indifferently, as a professional journalist should do, after witnessing the Naxalite-state imbroglios for months.
These were but scant secondhand reading. By now, however, there are numerous references and inferences made available on the Naxalite Movement – in songs, feature films in various languages, documentaries, reportages and newspaper columns, investigative journalism, novels, plays and other mediums.
Since I am interested only in literature based on Naxalism, as dictated by the context of this review, I cite some Wikipedia references to the following authors: Mahasweta Devi (Hajar Churashir Maa, or Mother of 1084), Upamanyu Chatterjee (English August), Arundhati Roy (God of Small Things, and her travels with some Indian Maoists), Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger), Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance), Michael Palin (The Truth), Sami A Khan (Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia), and other works.
Therefore, since Jhumpa Lahiri’s forthcoming novel “The Lowland” would be the latest addition to the Naxalite narratives, we can only look forward to whatever refreshing treatments we can have in her new magnum opus. Will there be anything new, fresh and unique in The Lowland when practically everything looks to have been already served through all available means all these years? In this curious awaiting, eager anticipation is all we have at the moment.
And as for this reviewer, too, only so much for nitpickings – a la Sardar Khuswant Singh style!
The writer is Copy Chief at
The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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