#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
Labels: American GI, Arun, Kadambini, Kolkata, ration shop, Sadananda Road, Satyendranath, Sikh, WW II
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