The New Yorker Magazine of June 10 published a long – 15,000 words – short story as the issue’s fiction piece. Entitled “Brotherly Love”, it is written by Jhumpa Lahiri.
There is, however, no spoiler needed here to give away. There is no dénouement because Brotherly Love is an excerpt from Lahiri’s forthcoming novel called “The Lowland.” Therefore, no concrete conclusion of any literary sort would be in view in this piece, nor is there any need for a reviewer to delve into the details of the inner core of the story as published in the magazine, either, for these should be available only in the novel.
Here, therefore, it is best to imitate Sardar Khuswant Singh’s one approach to literary criticism: That the reviewer beats around the bush – the centerpiece – and narrates his own yarns that are enkindled by the relevant parts in the main skein. The peripheries, the backgrounds and foregrounds of the principal story provide the fertile fodder for the critique, leaving the kernel almost untouched. [break]
Lahiri’s narrative bases in Brotherly Love are the Tolly Club of Tollygunge – Tollygunj, Tollyganj, the Tollywood of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Bimal Roy and perhaps also of Ritwik Ghatak and other Bengali filmmakers – in the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Rhode Island in the US.
But its accidental germinating background and hinterland are the distant northern tropical plains of Naxalbari. The name-word means the farming fields/plains of Naxal. It is the sudden lowland near the strategic city of Siliguri at the foothills of the all-high-hills District of Darjeeling. Darjeeling appears prominently on the preliminary pages of Lahiri’s excerpts, about which some more later.
Lahiri’s story is about two Bengali Mitra brothers, Subhash and Udayan. They are born in the middle of the Second World War (this reviewer was born about the same time, in 1943, in nearby Shillong of the Burma Front when also the Bengal Famine was raging in the Undivided Bengal of that time). Her theme is Naxalism (Naxalbad in popular parlance) – a latter-day offshoot of Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, then the salad of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, a mid-20th century rendition of Historical Radicalism and Ultra-Leftism, a distant chapter of yet another Far-Left politics and Left-Wing politics.
Naxalism raised its militant Maoist hydra in the late 1960s, becoming more universally popular as the Naxalite Movement: a new recipe of Communism, concocted in India and South Asia, for the world’s consumption; a north Indian edition of ethnic convulsion that drew the notice of the Leftist movements in Europe, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to Japan in north Asia.
The pivotal year here is 1967 when two births took place: While the Naxalite (Naxalbadi) Movement raised its first revolutionary “land to the tiller” agro-reformist dust on a sharecropper’s plot in a village near Naxalbari adjacent to the Nepal-India borders, the other birth was of a Bengali girl child, duly named Nilanjana Sudeshna, in London, and later famously known as Jhumpa Lahiri, now an Indian American citizen but rooted to India’s Bengali heritage in what is sliced off as West Bengal.
The year 1967 is also notable for other “happenings,” a word coined by the Flower Children around the same time. While Lahiri mentions Che, the Argentine doctor, and his unsavory end in Bolivia while trying to spread Fidel Castro’s brand of Cuban Communism in Latin America, the decade-long Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Tsetung (Zedong) in China is one year old. On Kathmandu’s Freak Street, the Counter Cultural Movement of the Hippies is already one or two years on. Cohn-Bendit is also fomenting something in Paris that would later almost topple Charles de Gaulle. In Africa, the violent birth of Biafra has already taken place in 1967. Vietnam is more reinforced by American presence in every imaginable sector. And so on and so forth in the year’s timeline.
•••
Like most world upheavals, the Naxalite Movement ex-Naxalbari is also long dead and gone by now; its Trinity of Vision, Manifesto and Mobilization fathered by such Marxist Leninist Stalinist Maoists as Charu Majumdar, Jangal Santhal, and Kanu Sanyal is also reduced to ashes and dust.
All the three leaders of agrarian reform were from Siliguri which, to copy Lahiri’s sentence in another way, is much nearer to Tibet and the Himalaya than Calcutta, the state capital of West Bengal four hundred miles down south.
Strangely, as political movements are mostly wont to go in South Asia, it is the upper class, its educated, privileged and the feudal few who spawn radical turncoats as new and revolutionary leaders for the very indigenous communities exploited and victimized by their own. Charu Majumdar was a member of an affluent and enlightened Bengali Brahman family while Kanu (Krishna Kumar) Sanyal came from another high-caste landowning circle. Only the third Naxalite leader, called Jangal (jungle?) Santhal, belonged to the ancient and ethnic Santhals of the plains in the region. Nonetheless, all three were native sons of the soil of Siliguri and its adjoining areas.
Sadly, all the three Naxalites ended either prematurely or in tragic circumstances. Charu Majumdar died in police custody in 1972, a fact that in itself siring many “fake encounter” speculations. Jangal Santhal died in 1981, his legendary leadership forgotten by then, and he himself drowned before long in manic depressive alcoholism. Kanu Sanyal committed suicide 43 years later, in March 2010, surely remaining aware all along and for so long, to the end, of his disillusionment and the movement’s failures.
•••
Having dealt with the Naxalite story this way, it is time to nip and pick at Lahiri’s fiction, and do it selectively. On page 9 of my print, Lahiri writes, “In May, it was reported that a group of peasants, men and women, had attacked a police inspector with bows and arrows, killing him.”
That is what the author’s research says, simply “a police inspector” and the first nitpicking starts here. It is because the Inspector is the very person who comes to my mind. It is because he was a rare Indian Nepali, a Mongoloid Hillman from Darjeeling, who had rapidly earned his three shiny brass stars on his epaulettes when almost all the high-echelon job positions and appointments were claimed and occupied by Bengalis in the entire district, from Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Kurseong to the Siliguri subdivisions, including the district headquarters in Darjeelingtown.
Historically, this dominance was engineered through what was later dubbed as Brown Colonialism from the Writers’ Building in Calcutta. Locally, it was called “Thute Raj” in post-Independence Darjeeling, after 1947, when the British Raj ended in India. The word “thute” abominably means half stub, even suggesting twig and pencil penis.
The Brown Encroachment on the Darjeeling Hills began when the pro-British Bengali Maharajas of Burdwan and Coochbehar brought their clerks, attendants and palace minders along in the 19th century when the royals fled the stifling summer heat and suffocating humidity of the Bengal Plains and escaped to the cool and breezy hills of Darjeeling which the British had developed as their favorite Hill Station in the upper northeast for their seasonal rejuvenation and convalescences.
Shortly and eventually, many of these Bengali camp followers invited themselves to settle up in the lofty heights of the Hills and magnetized more of their fellow beings from Calcutta, Midnapur, Malda and Birbhum. In 1947, the Thute Raj automatically and monopolistically replaced the British Raj in Darjeeling and remained solely dominant even during India’s post-Independence secular and free-and-fair-competition decades as chartered in India’s new federal democratic republican preamble and constitutional construct. The Bengalis’ exclusive dominance over Darjeeling’s overall administrative affairs was uprooted for once and all only by the violent Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF) Movement in the 1980s which created the semi-autonomous Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) for the native inhabitants’ own self-governance in the district in 1988.
But the 1960s were completely oppressive, and the locals were suppressed and discriminated against by Bengalis whose machinations were aided and abetted by the chronic incompetence of the district’s Nepali leaders of the Indian Congress, the Gorkha League, the Communist Party of India and other caucuses. Therefore, many of us in the little town knew the fast-advancing Inspector as the eldest brother of a friend, somebody’s uncle or somebody else’s fast friend, or son-in-law. Now, a local hero and a native son of so much promise was gone. He was young, a rising star in the force and a potential Inspector General of Police material in the future. But now he ended so ignominiously, hideously impaled by arrows, like Bhishmapitamaha in the epic of Maha Bharat, by the very Santhals whom he knew, rather well, too, during his previous posting in their tropical areas.
That is how a simple statement in a story elicits untold details related to it.
•••
Lahiri’s cast of characters in her fiction has only Bengalis, usually migrants to the West and usually of high castes and educated in the best colleges and universities of the West, particularly of the US. We find her émigré Bengalis studying at such prestigious universities as Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Trinity, John Hopkins, Fordham, and Carnegie Mellon and where not! One critic even pointed out that one character, going to a modest college in Rhode Island – Lahiri’s home state for years – later found an impeccable place at an Ivy League college anyway. Her fellow Bengali heroes and heroines, studying diverse and challenging subjects at such highest temples of learning as Harvard, Yale and other similar institutions, are most likely to become another Rajat Gupta and Amar Bose to pit themselves against other non-Bengali Indians such as Deepak Chopra, Bobby Jindal, and Preet Bharara who have taken their adopted land by storm.
Why Lahiri is so pro bono Bengalico is a mystery. Is she trying to undo and remedy what Robindronath Thakur and Neerad Choudhury did to their own fellow Bhadralok? These two Bengali stalwarts hated their fellow Bangalis, one from Vishwa Bharati or Shanti Niketan, and the other from London where he exiled himself to for the rest of his life. In Kathmandu, too, one can think of Bala Krishna “Sama” for “abjectly pitying” his fellow Nepalis who were not “sama,” or at par, with him; he could never shed his high-caste and high-born aristocratic Thakuri identity of “Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana” exclusivity.
However, Lahiri’s choice of Presidency College and Jadavpur University for even such lower-class but academically deserving students like the Mitra brothers, though they are of the Kayastha Brahmin stock, is rightly justified. The two aristocratic institutions of the old British Raj in Bangal are now, by 1967, transformed into meritocratic learning centers of excellence in the 20 years after India’s Independence.
Subhash is the older brother, and Udayan is younger by fifteen months. By the dint of their excellence in academic studies, Subhash is able to join the chemical engineering faculty of the renowned Jadavpur University just outside Calcutta while Udayan joins the city’s Presidency College to study physics. In our time, the Presidency College, for instance, was known as First Divisioners’ deserved destination. Nothing less would do!
The irony, however, was that modern merit-based talents and qualifications had no place in Nehru’s Fabian Socialism which so wastefully continued atrophying India and Indians as his seventeen-year premiership dragged on. Lahiri herself writes, “After their [the brothers’] studies ended, they were among so many others in their generation who were overqualified and unemployed.” In other words, though meritocracy was encouraged and promoted, it had no matching marketplace in Nehru’s India.
So options are explored: Subhash leaves India for the United States and its golden opportunities while Udayan is drawn away from Calcutta to Naxalbari’s neo-Maoism. The older one leaves for the Land of Dreams while the younger one joins a native-soil awareness revolution. The divides and departures begin.
That was also how this reviewer himself and his generation left their native Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan and the Northeast. Choice is less governed by one’s fate or dictated by divine destiny; it is subject more to the prevailing political situations and economic circumstances to which one cannot afford to linger on for much too long in hope and expectations.
It is one such experiential stream of fiction which Jhumpa Lahiri’s forthcoming novel “The Lowland” may sail on to its merging with the ocean of prose literature in the particular Naxalite genre.
To be concluded next week.
The writer is Copy Chief at The Week/Republica.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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