#3: Luminous Kolkata-- How the War Came Home

Luminous Kolkata: How the War Came Home

          It is unfortunate that I am having to postpone my posting about the women whom I remember with fondness and gratitude as I was growing up in our Sadananda Road house. This delay is due to a frustrating technological mishap for which I must apologize. Next time I'll come back to those memories. Meanwhile, there are other things to talk about.

          In response to my previous (second) post, someone wrote to me asking whether I have any respect for "family values". My answer was simply that the functioning (or disfunctioning) of actual families seldom reflects the idea of a family from which those values are derived. Thus, family values have changed over time and are still different in different social, cultural and economic  formations. 

          These days we usually have in mind monogamous nuclear families when we talk about family values. On the other hand, there is a lot of self deception and denial of simple facts when we refer to "the good old days," or the joys of extended families. In other words, family structures are grounded within a space-time continuum but with "changes of state" so to speak. As such, like everything else families are saddled with many contradictions, some of which, in given circumstances, may be impossible to resolve when things fall apart. I don't know of any Indian publication addressing (for the general public, not scholars) the transformative character of families, but I do know a very interesting work in the U.S.-- Stephanie Coontz's book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Worth taking a look I think. 

          (In this context, I want to make a clarification about family history. I noticed that in the section of my poem ["Genealogy, etc."] I quoted last time, I have a reference to my father Arun the poet, his grandmother Soudamini and her sister Kadambini whom my father used to call "Daktar Dida". As a matter of fact, Kadambini was one of the first two women college graduates in the British Empire and the first woman doctor in South Asia. There's plenty of literature on her including a ridiculous Bengali vs Marathi feud about who was first. Kadambini became the second wife of the then widower Dwarkanath Ganguly, prominent Brahmo Samaj reformer and feminist of the time.  In any event, she did take Arun with her on many house calls. My great-grandmother Soudamini Ghosh was a true inspiration to my father and it was in her household that Arun discovered the world of books and languages, poets and writers, politics and social theory. All this was very enigmatic to me when I first came to know this part of my ancestry, including the fact that Kadambini was born in the same year as Rabindranath. In reality though, while this link was crucial to my father's growing up, it was quite distant from my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps because Arun's mother, my grandmother Jaminibala died before I was born. Life at 3 B Sadananda Road, in Satyendranath's household, is what was germinal for me and still keeps playing a significant part in my connection to the world as I cope with its many transformations.)

I

I had mentioned in the first segment that the violence of August 1946 in Kolkata began just over a year after the end of the Second World War (WW II) in so far as the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the imperial Japanese aspirations of civilizing the rest of Asia, and replaced these with the might of our newest “civilizers” of the world—bred or regenerated into the only superpower today—the United States of America, noted as the only user (so far) of nuclear weapons. Another huge burden for the white man to be sure! 

In trying to delve into a child’s experience of that transition, several things come to the surface, and I'll begin this piece kind of walking backward-- with some visual memories, starting with the end of the war and the arrival in Kolkata of American GIs from the Pacific front.

          I remember being told (not certain by whom) that Kolkata was a stopover for American soldiers for at least two reasons. Many of them needed medical attention of one kind or another, and I believe the Presidency General (PG) Hospital housed some of the sick GIs. Also, Fort William had facilities where these soldiers could stay and rest for a few days before embarking on the final leg of their journey home. The kind of R&R they might have hoped for didn't seem to be shared by the citizens of our luminous city as we discovered one evening in Kalighat.

          That evening, some American GIs had corralled a few open army trucks and driven through some of our main roads cheering and shouting. I suppose people on the street must have responded in kind-- the war was over after all and our "boys" too were coming home. At some point, one of the trucks had ventured into my neighborhood, in front of Hazra Park. Some of the soldiers got off the truck and decided to stroll on the sidewalk near where families-- children, parents, grandparents, were going in an out through one of the park gates. It appeared that those warriors from the Pacific front, conquerors of Japan, were hoping to find women who would succumb to their charm and to their valor -- their "josh". In the course of their solicitations-- including aggressive gestures from the sex-starved lot-- one soldier snatched the dupatta (scarf) from a woman as he tried to fondle her. The woman happened to be from the Sikh community.  

          The crowd that had gathered to get a glimpse of those white men in uniform-- alien objects of curiosity, was now angered by the humiliating "disrobing" and confronted the GIs. Soldiers from the truck, unarmed in this joy ride, jumped on to the sidewalk and called for reinforcements-- my father said. By that time, the husband of the woman had unsheathed his kripan (dagger) and lunged at the soldier who had his wife's scarf and in the process sliced off a piece of the man's finger. After that a fight broke out and soon more people joined the fray. Then a couple of other military trucks arrived-- this time with armed GIs-- and finally members of the Kolkata police, also armed. 

          I first came to realize something was happening near the park when I saw dozens of men-- including many Sikhs-- running past our house toward the crossing of Sadananda Road and Hazra Road. They had bamboo canes, iron rods and also kripans with them. Naturally, I wasn't allowed to leave the house, but my father and several neighbors had sauntered toward the strange battle between the people of Kalighat and victorious American soldiers fresh from the Pacific arena of WW II. So I came to know about the events from my dad. In the end it was the Kolkata police that stopped the fight and separated the opponents without any real bloodshed. The GIs went back to Fort William, led I suppose by their commanding officer and escorted by our police. And that was the end of WW II in my neighborhood. 

          Thinking about this incident, I remember that less than half a mile directly south of us, near the crossing of Sadananda Road and what's now Chetla Central Road was (and still is) a Sikh Gurdwara (temple). There was a reasonably large Sikh population in the area and news of that stand-off on Hazra Road must have spread rapidly throughout our part of Kalighat and brought so many people to the park. Also, it's always a good time to look into requirements in attire and religious rites for Sikhs. In this instance, the kripan (kirpan) is historically and ritually viewed as a ceremonial dagger/sword which men are required to wear as symbol of their faith, just like the turban, for example. 

          I can still remember the Sikh men of Kalighat wearing their kripans housed in a sheath (holster) attached to a shoulder strap. I was never frightened by that sight and I never thought for a moment that in that skirmish by the park, there was anything wrong in the way the man defended his wife against her molester. As for the American soldiers, the encounter by Hazra Park was a far cry from a victory march on Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris or a celebration in New York's Times Square. In fact, the soldiers passing through Kolkata were suffering from combat fatigue, many of them weakened by malnutrition and sickness. They didn't get the same recognition as their European arena counterparts.

          Even though the U.S. hadn't "officially" entered the war until the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the Asian arena has always been problematic for America. The American psyche, molded both by scholarly recounting and public perception, has internalized the Normandy invasion quite differently from the bombing of Hiroshima. Even before that, for American GIs, no war experience in Europe matched the grueling and often desperate combat in jungles of the Philippines, surrendering once to the Japanese after a major battle-- Bataan back in 1942. Less than ten years after that, Americans were fighting in Korea, in a war that ended in a stalemate and continues to affect American perception and policy regarding that peninsula. I mean, the story about John Kennedy's visit to West Germany (the same year he was shot dead in Texas) is highlighted by the one sentence from his speech "Ich bin ein Berliner." Here, JFK expressed the raw spirit of America I have been told many times. But can anyone imagine him or any other U.S. president on a stage in South Korea, inspiring millions of people with the same raw spirit and uninhibited passion, and ending a speech with the reassurance, "I am the Seoul Man"?

          There is, of course, a whole other story that comes later, and I hope to remember that another time. I mean, America's war against Vietnam.

II

          During WW II, occasionally we heard air raid sirens in Kalighat. I have disconnected memories, as if from a dream, of being hustled down to the first (ground) floor space under a staircase where we (whoever was in the house at the time) huddled until the "all clear" siren came on. I remember the two different sounds-- first the high-pitched start of the siren, waning to a lower frequency and continue in this "up and down" cycle, and eventually the midrange monotone of the all clear signal, dropping to almost a bass frequency at the end. For the purpose of our safety, against shrapnel I was told, my grandfather had a brick wall built more or less on the sidewalk, guarding the front door. How this "baffle wall" or "blast wall" may come into play I didn't quite understand. Even now I doubt the wall would have been effective against a real bomb. 

          As I remember it, there were a few other such walls scattered throughout the neighborhood. Of course, the "basti/বস্তি" (slum dwelling without any brick walls) on the Kalidas Patitundi Lane side of our house didn't have any added protection beyond tin roofs, but on the Sadananda Road side, across the street, the Lahiri household thrived well-protected by a new third floor. In fact, Mr. Lahiri was a shrewd businessman and brokered the sale of shola (sholapith) hats for the British army in the Eastern Front-- Burma and beyond. I heard he was also a black-marketeer. All in all, WW II made the Lahiri family very wealthy.  As for the basti dwellers, they were kicked out of the slum and sent somewhere else because the war didn't make them rich while it made money for builders and real estate speculators, one of whom demolished my neighborhood slum and replaced it with Kalika Theatre. This playhouse was to be South Kolkata's answer to the two prominent theatre halls of the North-- Srirangam and Rangmahal. Thus, while I never saw my basti friends after the "reconstruction", from my grandfather's room window I could see Kalika's green rooms and could even chat once in a while with some of the "commercial stage" stalwarts of the time like Chhabi Biswas. None of the people's theatre people acted on that stage, not until many years later. Perhaps they were trying to understand the discussion about war, survival and greed in the Bertolt Brecht play Mother Courage! 

          Down Sadananda Road, past Kalika Theatre, there was the local ration shop. Every family had a number of ration cards belonging to adult residents of each household. The cards had to be presented whenever we went to the shop to get the weekly supply of grains. Whole wheat kernels (gam/গম), wheat flour (aTa/আটা)rice, also refined white flour (maida/ময়দা) and sugar. I am no longer clear about exactly what other items we got through the ration shop, but I do remember tagging along with different people to get our weekly quota of rice and wheat. On occasion there wouldn't be any flour, but only whole wheat kernels. The shop (or one next to it?) had an electric mill and people would queue up to get their wheat ground-- the flour separated from the chaff.  That was fun to watch. There was a lot of grumbling too in the ration shop while customers waited to be served. From what I could tell, many families didn't have the number of cards to get an adequate amount of grains to feed everyone. Others complained that they had to buy grains and sugar outside these government store-- on the black market. I believe we did too. Poor people, predominantly the working poor like maids, servants, dock hands, mill workers, various kinds of slum dwellers, couldn't afford staples from the parallel economy and there was hunger in their families. There were also people who made money by forging ration cards and selling them to different families. That is, through the forged cards they purchased, families could invent virtual residents with fictitious names and thus increase the allotment of grains and other supplies from the ration shops.

          Of course, during the 1942 famine, the situation was far worse for everyone. Up and down Sadananda Road there were families of refugees wandering or sitting on the sidewalk, begging for a little gruel for their children. I was too little to remember all the sights, but the plea of desperate parents still rings in my ears: "Give us some gruel Ma, give us some gruel Baba!". In Bengali, "একটু ফ্যান দাও মা, একটু ফ্যান দাও বাবা!" I was told many villagers who came to Kolkata to escape the famine died in our streets, but I don't know how many. I suppose these days one can look up the stats. What I remember well is the beginning of the first performance of Uncle Bijan's Nabanna. One of the actors, Rabin Majumdar with a bare torso and facing stage right was wielding a torch/মশাল against a blood red backdrop. Perhaps there were a couple of others with him. Then over the speakers a voice spoke, "Bengal, 1942/উনিশশো বিয়াল্লিশের বাংলা". Then the play began. More on Nabanna and its cast members as I remember them throughout these postings.

          Back to air raid sirens then. The last time I heard them they sounded like the last gasp of the Japanese air force. That must have been sometime toward the end of the war, in 1944 and from what I have read about these raids there were two sporadic Japanese raids that year, one in January and the last one in December. That must be the one I am thinking about. It was during daylight-- late morning or early afternoon-- we ran downstairs and huddled together as usual. I remember peeking out the window just before being hustled downstairs and seeing two airplanes way up high and then disappearing to the west of us. I learned later that the planes had dropped a couple of bombs near the Khidirpur docks targeting gasoline/petrol storage tanks, and then they disappeared and that was the last time Kolkata saw bombers overhead. The principal air attacks by Japan on Kolkata had taken place in 1942 and 1943. Part of that time my mother, myself, my aunts Tripti and Smriti had been "relocated" to Jashore which is where my father grew up. My father and grandfather would visit us regularly with stories from Kolkata, which was a stronghold of the British army and could have been the target of a full scale Japanese invasion as I learned later. While in Jashore, obviously I didn't have any direct sense of raids like one in 1943 which killed or wounded over 500 people and caused considerable damage to the waterfront. There was a summary execution at Fort William to go along with that attack. Apparently a "half-Chinese" telegraph operator in the army corps had turned out to be a Japanese spy. The treachery was discovered because the man was not on duty during the air raid and supposedly had sent all kinds of messages to the Japanese air force brass before the attack. That very evening the traitor was propped up against a wall in the fort and shot dead by His Majesty's warriors. 

III

          The war made me aware of many events and many places as the years went by. Kolkata or Jashore, in our house, someone was always talking about the Blitzkrieg or Stalingrad, about Rangoon or Indian doctors in China. Others would spread out maps and atlases to identify how the war was going in Europe and in Asia. I learned to read maps by looking at these alongside adults and got a true sense of the continents and all the countries bundled into them. I remember the shape of Greece was very attractive to me and the country sounded like the Bengali name "Girish". Finding the Italian "boot" in Europe, locating Tokyo on Honshu, spotting Andaman and Nicobar where the British had imprisoned Indian freedom fighters-- these were delightful discoveries for me. 

          I keep saying "I was told that..." or something to that effect, but that's not quite accurate. Nobody sat me down and told me what was going on-- maybe once in a while. I absorbed most things by being around conversations among adults. That's why I keep remembering what was said at different times, but rarely who, where and when. In other words, it was precisely the lack of a personal space (such a big to do in families today), and to the contrary having a claim to many spaces, that was a wondrous osmotic experience for me and the origin of my epistemological path! I should provide some details to support this conclusion.  

          Our house had three floors stacked like a town house or condo I see in my neighborhood here in the U.S. A couple of years ago, I stayed across the yard from a similar three-storied apartment structure in Bangalore. Most of us have seen such things. But it isn't the structure of such quarters, but the function of the interior that is important to the Sadananda Road case. So a little description is necessary.

          At the ground level there were two entrances, one bypassing the living/sitting room leading to kitchen, pantry, an open space (উঠন) with a small water tank (চৌবাচ্চা), and a bathroom. The second entrance was to the living room which had sofas and chairs, but also a small, folding dining table in one corner and a single bed in the other. The inside door was next to the staircase which went up to the two floors above. The second level had three rooms, a small corridor and a bathroom. One room was my grandfather's where he had his bed and writing table, a bureau and I think a wardrobe too. On the other side of the staircase was my parents' room, including a dressing table, writing table, clothes rack and such. Adjoining that was a "catch all" third room where my aunts slept, but the room was also a place for writing, singing, painting and what not. The third level had one large room, again with a bed and many bookcases, leading to our roof/terrace from where on one side I could see a long way up and down along Sadananda Road, and on the other side, at a right angle, a good length of Kalidas Patitundi Lane. This room to roof connection was also our playground in the house. My friends or cousins and I would spend hours up there devising games. When I was by myself, the "big room" was the library where I would go and discover all kinds of reading material-- without any censorship. Apart from being a space for many books, this room functioned as our main guest room, and even a hideout for people on the run from the police at certain moments of political strife-- as we shall see.

          As I describe these details, something stands out for me: I didn't have (nor did my sister later) a room I could call my own. I studied and read and did my homework all over the house, wherever there may have been a vacant spot. Other people doing other things near me didn't particularly bother me-- hustle and bustle was a part of the daily routine. In fact, most areas of the house was shared spaces. Also, although I generally slept in the "catch all" room with or next to my aunts, sometimes I slept with my parents, or if I fell asleep in my grandfather's bed I'd just spend the night there. My aunts shared my mother's dressing table and mirror when they were getting ready to go out. Most of the music in the house was live and could be coming from any room.  Of course, there was a need for privacy for people in our household. I couldn't stay up all night with the adults. My grandfather needed time and solitude for his editorials most evenings. My father needed to sleep during the day when he was on night duty at the Ananda Bazar newsroom, and so on. 

          By itself, the matter of shared space is not at all unique to my childhood or my generation as I was growing up in Kolkata. Perhaps not to subsequent generations either. My point is that shared spaces and shared conversations were critical to my learning about how people thought and acted, loved and hated, how creative and cataclysmic events unfolded, how children and their grown-ups suffered and overcame their suffering. There was no room for ignorance and alienation in those surroundings. 

          So for me, sitting at my desk in Pennsylvania-- in a country with an enforced requirement for personal space, a question crops up again and again. What kind of physical and mental space do we need in order to discern the state of the world, or to talk about the measure of human beings and of our own selves? 

          (Some of you would know that my father wrote his best stuff at a corner desk in a tiny room of a tiny apartment in Tiljala, Kolkata-- from the mid seventies to the mid nineties of the last century. People from all walks of life, and from all over the world used to come to visit my parents in this dwelling across the tracks. One time a French television crew went out there for an interview but couldn't get their sizable equipment into the flat. So the resourceful TV journalist [of Bengali descent I believe] went about his interviewing work with a hand-held camera by his side.) 

          I suppose it is always worth revisiting Tolstoy's story "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" About Pahom the well-to-do farmer who makes a deal with the strange Bashkirs to get all the land he can circumscribe in the course of a day, for only 1000 Roubles. The story has many transitions and ends with Pahom dropping dead at the "finish line" where everyone was waiting for him:

           "Ah, what a fine fellow!" exclaimed the Chief [of the Bashkirs]. "He has gained much land!"

          Pahom's servant came running up and tried to raise him, but he saw that blood was flowing from his mouth. Pahom was dead!

          The Bashkirs clicked their tongues to show their pity.

          His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.
_____________________

          That's enough for this segment, except for a reminder. Any discussion of  personal space, living quarters, multi storied houses or flats (let alone mansions and well-kept lawns) is grounded in different kinds and degrees of privilege. I have no idea what kind of space welcomed the slum dwellers from across the street, and the real physical space starving victims of the Bengal famine had was to roam through an entire city-- to possess it with desperate defiance-- and then to perish on some sidewalk of our metropolis.


© Ranadhir (Gogol) Mitra  2014