On the 5th of November this year a friend of mine in India died. Actually, the word ‘friend’ in English does not convey my relationship with Sunil Mitra. He was my political mentor although he would never have thought of himself as such, and yes, my comrade in the 1980s. I can’t let this moment pass without commemorating him and to some extent remembering my young self and the ideals that he and I shared. In death everybody is remembered as being perfect or at least that is the way we do it in India. But I don’t want to remember him frozen in perfection; he was just an exceptional person. I last met him in January this year after almost twenty-five years and since then till his death he was part of my life as if the intervening forty years since we worked together had not happened.
We met way back in 1979 when I went on behalf of Oxfam (in a voluntary capacity) to survey a vast rural area in Burdwan district of my home state of West Bengal in eastern India where there had been the most devastating floods seen in a century. Everything was swept away with just a few buildings of cement and mortar left standing. People lost their homes, their livelihoods and many their lives. And in this chaos the people most active in providing relief and organising help were the ‘local boys’ (and not yet the girls who later became my responsibility) led by Sunil Mitra. But Sunil Mitra was not just the local leader helping out in the thirty or so villages in this area but had just been elected to the new Panchayat samity[i] (second tier of the three-tier local government structure responsible for a sub district) and was the vice President.
The Political landscape in the 1970s
A little bit about the politics of the time without which what I am about to say about my comrade will not make sense. He was above all a man of a principled left politics that had not lost its way. The 1970s was a time of mass uprisings all over India. In my part of India, the state of West Bengal, armed struggle and radical left movements predominated from the late ‘60s onwards. By the early ‘70s these were violently put down by the state. Many people lost their lives and many, many others went to jail especially young people. Others simply disappeared or were found dead on the street, some killed apparently in police encounters. It was a time of state sponsored terror. In India overall unrest and dissatisfaction escalated with massive civil protests paralysing life in the cities. The answer to the national situation was a state of emergency imposed by the then central government during which time parliament was suspended and civil rights abrogated. Prominent members of the opposition parties found themselves in jail at the slightest provocation. But in West Bengal the reign of terror also extended to all those who were remotely left, also in the rural areas and also the rank and file of the main left opposition party the Communist Party of India (Marxist). That’s how Sunil Mitra a member and local organiser of the CPI(M) found himself in jail.
The state of emergency lasted from 1975 till 1977 when the then Prime minister announced a general election. For the first time in the history of independent India the ruling party, the Congress that had brought independence, lost power. Indian democracy had come of age; the Indian people had repudiated the state of Emergency. We were all caught up in this euphoria especially those who in some way or the other had participated in and suffered for movements for a change, perhaps not the revolutionary change that the Naxalbari movement wanted but some change nevertheless. Unfortunately, it also opened the door to the right-wing parties but that is a story for another day. Suddenly there was hope that the vote counted, ordinary people counted, and they could bring about political change. It was in this atmosphere that a coalition of left parties won the elections in West Bengal state. And in the following year they won the local government elections in towns and villages. And that’s how Sunil Mitra was catapulted from being a grassroot level organiser to becoming the elected representative of the district; he was the vice president of the panchayat samity.
A man of the people
What struck me after our initial meetings is how Sunil da (brother) managed to turn relief and rehabilitation measures into a movement, a political project of uniting people against the ‘common enemy’ the floods and its aftermath and imagining the new institutions of local government as revolutionary institutions. Untiring in his enthusiasm and inspiring in his zeal and organising capacity Sunil Mitra, a little thin man clad in a dhoti and farmer’s shirt, was always in motion touring the thirty villages on his cycle talking ceaselessly, persuading, explaining and cajoling people into understanding their role in the new political project of rebuilding not just the physical infrastructure but the social fabric of society.
As the Oxfam relief project morphed into a rehabilitation and reconstruction programme in the next year and finally ended, it was time to say goodbye. But not being an employee of Oxfam I took this opportunity to make a new beginning for myself instead. I decided to spend fifty per cent of my time in the area trying to understand and be involved in social and political change. Sunil da was very enthusiastic about this and he and Karuna di his wife took me into their home in Siur village. In the ensuing almost five years I gained an education that I could not have otherwise and made new friends who influenced me a great deal.
Sunil Mitra taught me that politics was about service to the community and left politics about always standing with the oppressed. As we worked together, I began questioning the dichotomies that I had grown up with between social activism (selfless) versus party political activism (biased); voluntarism (pure) vs professionalism (self-serving); and so forth. It was not the first time that I had lived and worked in rural India, but this was the first time that I was on my home turf, operating in a language that I grew up with, working voluntarily and learning to operate between dichotomised domains. And I learned to do this because Sunil Mitra was a natural, he didn’t live in a dichotomised world. To be Sunil Mitra was to be immersed in social and political activism. He called it ‘manusher sathey thaka’ meaning always remaining with and close to people.
In some senses Sunil Mitra was an old-fashioned social reformer. He was certainly somebody who was not only interested in social projects which he saw as a political task. He called it ‘samaj bikash’ or social development and he knew that this did not come automatically just because people had overwhelmingly voted for the left parties. So, when I suggested that we start adult literacy programmes for women and men in the area who were landless labourers and mostly scheduled caste, he immediately jumped at the idea setting up thirty centres in as many villages with volunteer teachers. I was made in charge of training the teachers, getting help from Calcutta, buying books and equipment and providing know-how. Of course, we needed money for all of this which at first we raised through donations in the area and from my friends in the city but soon it was not enough. We founded a non-governmental organisation, Chetana Bikash (literally translated as consciousness raising), to be a sort of holding body for all the social projects that we dreamt up over the next four years and which allowed us to raise money also from donors.
Organising women: neither revolution nor reform but a bit of both
One of my main responsibilities became setting up the women’s organisation and weaving training workshop which I thought was an old-fashioned ‘reformist’ project and not necessarily about consciousness raising or social activism (again the dichotomies). My scepticism unravelled gradually as we actually tried to set it up. And here again Sunil da’s analysis as to why we should be focusing on a particular group of young women over others showed what a perceptive and empathetic activist he was. The young women from lower middle class and middle caste backgrounds in the age group 15-20 who were neither in school nor married were in some senses socially invisible. Neither their families nor society at large considered them as a group needing any attention. Although in the early 1980s most of these girls had been through primary education they had stopped after middle school or earlier for several reasons; the secondary school was not in the village and mobility for young girls was a problem, they dropped out because their grades were not good enough, and because their help was needed at home. Marriage was an arrangement for reproducing caste and class status and it was the only career choice on offer for these girls. Unfortunately for them the age of marriage had gone up because of the socio-economic circumstances in the region but no other opportunities were available for these young women. As arranged marriages were the norm, the young woman’s parents had to be able to spend money on getting their daughters married to eligible young men. The more educated or better off the groom the more the money required to catch him. These girls, unlike their low caste counterparts, could not work in the fields in agriculture and nor could they travel anywhere to seek employment like the boys could because their womanhood would be in jeopardy, and their parents shunned socially.
I was I remember completely taken aback as I studied the situation. I had imagined I would be organising low caste landless women because were they not the poorest of the poor as we were taught in development or the revolutionary classes as I learned from the left politics. Instead, here was a whole group of women/girls who because of their gender remained completely outside the realm of left and feminist politics. In fact the low caste labouring women really had little or no time for us; they were just too busy with field work. Gender, as I learned from Sunil da, was not reducible to class. And so we began with a handful of supporters to organise the women who had no voice. The girls had to have something to do to justify their absence for long hours away from home and so one of the older women from a neighbouring village (a widow whose status gave her freedom to do things that the younger ones could not) suggested weaving. Over the next years we set up a weaving workshop, hired a trainer, set up a marketing channel with the help of a boutique run by an NGO in Calcutta. And in the process the girls learned several things besides weaving; they learned to organise as women, recognise their social position, and were introduced to values that hitherto had remained theoretical, as for example equality and equal treatment.
The weaving workshop was a physical space which had to be shared by everybody who was a member irrespective of caste, class and whether one was a Hindu or Muslim. Easier said than done. I found that that the girls from Siur village (mainly Hindus) were making sure that they did not touch anything that the Muslim girls did, and they had to change their clothes and take a dip in the freshwater ponds to cleanse themselves before they were allowed into their homes. The village had no running water (and no electricity) and most people bathed and washed their clothes in these ponds unless they had handpumps in their own courtyard. I didn’t really understand what was going on until I found this ritual cleansing being practised on chilly evenings in winter and enquired about it only to be told in hushed tones what it was all about. It was part of the purity and pollution rituals that were not spoken about. Hindu women were considered polluted if they came into physical contact with Muslim or low caste women. And the Muslim girls from the neighbouring villages seemed to take this in their stride. Neither side saw anything remiss in the way they treated each other.
Shocked and angry I spoke to Sunil da and realised that he was only too aware of it. These girls like everybody in the village had never been exposed to norms other than those that maintained spatial and relational divides between castes and communities. It was a little different for the men who had on a daily basis to engage with different communities and castes especially those in the rough and tumble of political movements in the 1970s. Women were the gatekeepers of the caste and community differences because they controlled the domestic sphere; they were the bearers of caste, class and community status. They were also heavily policed into acquiescence whereas men were not. I was for Sunil da the person who would expose these girls to other ways of being first because I was an outsider and second because since he being a man did not have the same easy association with them as I did. He also knew that caste and community divides could not be cemented over by the political rhetoric of the then ruling parties of the left. His party simply did not recognise caste as a problem in West Bengal (as in the rest of India) and nor communalism (Hindu/Muslim divides). We have to learn to work with it, he often told me. So we introduced rituals that would challenge these practices at least in our collective space of the weaving workshop; sharing tea and cups (pollution rituals extended to not using the same utensils for drinking and eating as low caste/Muslims); going on educational trips together to other weaving centres where we had to share our food and physical space; discussion groups on caste and community and so forth. And then a year after we began Gulistha, one of the members of our weaving group who lived in the neighbouring village and was a Muslim, invited us to visit her home.
This became a moment of reckoning. I said I was going and then asked the secretary of the organisation to find out who else would join us. Except for Hashi (pronounced Hnashi in Bengali) nobody volunteered immediately. Hashi’s background made her daring – she had nothing to lose. Her family were marginal farmers, the father dead, and mother a desperate widow who did odd jobs for people at her home. There were two siblings, a younger sister in school and the brother who should have been the income earner was a spastic with low IQ and physically and mentally challenged. People in the village gave him tasks to do that he could do and meals and presents as compensation. It was not ideal, and he did not escape being taunted and provoked by mischievous young boys in the village, but it was a kind of life that he could not have had if he had been institutionalised or worse lived in an urban slum. Sunil da had very early on told me to look after Hashi who I learned was hard working and helpful. She was also outspoken, a quality that I admired, but which did not endear her to many. Sunil da tried to put odd jobs her way that he could access through government programmes and as the weaving centre took shape, she became a good at it and was able to earn something from it.
On the day itself Hashi and I and the secretary of the women’s organisation decided to take a cycle rickshaw to Gulishta’s village. Since it was in the late afternoon that we were expected the weaving centre operated in the morning and then it was time to go. And suddenly I found that everybody was joining us. The initiative apparently had been taken by the eldest in the group, the widow who had originally suggested the weaving centre, but who was nevertheless as a Brahmin the most rigorous in her maintenance of caste and Hindu/Muslim distinctions. Once she crossed over the others felt secure enough to do so too. The visit itself is now a blur. I can’t recall if everybody accepted the tea and snacks that were on offer (the litmus test for crossing the divides) although some did. What I do remember is that when we returned to Siur village some of the girls did take a dip in the nearby ponds but this time to cool down as it was a very hot evening in May. Although these practices of separation may have remained, they morphed into tokens to safeguard our shared space from rumours, gossip and outright opposition. I learned to accept this and the need to compromise. Most importantly the young women learned of a world very different from their own which was not a bad thing, as Sunil Mitra kept reminding us.
The joys and sorrows of Chetana Bikash
Besides running the adult education classes and the Mahila Samity (the women’s organisation), Chetana Bikash was active in organising almost all the progressive programmes in the area over the next four years. We organised the biggest ever farmer’s fair and conference in the region to which experts in agriculture were invited to speak to the real-life problems that the farmers were facing; the minister in charge of land reform to talk about the progress of Operation Barga (land tenancy reform giving tenants more rights) and land redistribution. And we also organised cultural events and invited progressive theatre groups from Calcutta to perform raising money through ticket sales. To my great disappointment Nandikar’s much loved rendition of the Three Penny Opera (Brecht) was largely beyond the comprehension of our rural audience. Sunil da seeing my distress consoled me saying that people needed to be exposed to theatre other than those about gods and goddesses and kings and queens that they were used to in the ‘jatras’. For him all our endeavours had a pedagogic purpose: to broaden people’s minds and make them see another world. We also had spectacular failures as for example when plans to set up a cooperative paper mill from straw fizzled out because of our naivete, inexperience in business dealings, the obstructive bureaucracy and the tardiness of the financing institutions. ‘For those of us who live in mud houses setting up a paper mill was too big a number,’ said Sunil da consoling us.
The party of the people vs the party of government
Over the years that I lived part-time in Siur, Sunil da grew more and more uneasy about the functioning of the municipal body of which he was the vice-president seeing it as a bureaucratic hurdle which, although it was set up to serve the people, was doing anything but that. I remember him saying about something that needed to be done only to be told that the rules did not allow it, ‘we have to change the rules then’ not realising that for most of his party comrades being in government had become an end in itself and not the means. He also became restive with the functioning of his party now that they were in government and the fact that there were many more constraints to speaking up, criticising and questioning. As the CPIM settled into being the party of government the demeanour of party bosses big and small but especially the small changed and grew increasingly arrogant. Comrades became part of the political bureaucracy looking out for themselves and their promotions to higher echelons of power.
For a principled man like Sunil Mitra the situation was becoming intolerable. He tried to resign from his post as vice president of the Panchayat Samity only to be told that his post was part of the political mandate, a legal position that could only be ended when the term of office ended and there were new elections. And so he attended the meetings half-heartedly and did what he could. Once as I was coming back to the village, I saw Sunil da speeding past on his cycle. He waved and called out ‘I am off to the school’ (he was a primary school teacher in the neighbouring village) and then adding, ‘people will spit on us for not doing our jobs now that we are in power’. Sunil da was well known for his non-partisanship when it was something that concerned the community. He often invited a retired headmaster of the high school who was at one time a known Congress party grandee to chair meetings that concerned the whole community and whom the younger members of the party in the area considered reactionary. Sunil da explained to me why he was so indulgent towards him. During the terrible times in the early 1970s there was a state election which the Congress rigged; local criminals were mobilised to intimidate and prevent people in the area they knew were not going to vote for the congress party, mainly low caste and the poor in the villages. It was then that the now retired headmaster had resisted and stood against the goons pleading for fair play and democracy. Soon after he ended his active association with his party (although he remained a Congress party member) because of what he had witnessed. Sunil Mitra never forgot this and gave him the respect that was due.
Sunil Mitra was the go-to person for all those who had problems, needed help and/or were facing some kind of injustice, especially the scheduled caste people who swore by him. Karuna di his wife who was brought up and lived her entire life in the rural areas had grown accustomed to the fact that her house was not like that of other women in her family or in the village. She had learned very early on to manage without his physical presence either because he was away on some political campaign, or underground (in the emergency days) or because he was in jail. She had learned to live with the disapproval of her wider family because of her husband. She also had learned to accept that all kinds of people came to seek help and especially low caste, landless families and therefore she could not maintain the strict spatial divisions in her house (although there was a separation between the front of the house which was public and the inner courtyard which was private). We often talked about her life, just the two of us, and what shone through was her unspectacular heroism.
By 1983 Sunil da’s frustration and disappointment with the party reached breaking point. People he had mentored to work in the party started raising doubts about his loyalty to the party. There were also rumours and aspersions cast about his association with foreign donors (we had taken a grant from Oxfam). But what really was the breaking point was when I was harassed for my work, for the questions I raised in the adult literacy classes about caste and about being poor. The party comrades who were also members of the board of Chetana Bikash saw this as working against the party. Their advice just stay with your ‘social work’ and don’t raise political questions. Having heard this it took me some time to get over the shock. I cut down the length of visits to the area and then visited infrequently. I didn’t talk directly to Sunil da about what had happened, but he let me know he was aware. I finally decided to leave without making it sound final. But in reality I didn’t visit the area after 1984. There were no mobile phones at the time, not even a landline in the village and so contact was difficult. I received letters; people from the village visited me in Calcutta and members of the women’s organisation were sent as ambassadors to request that I come back. But I knew my time was over. I was in any way facing a critical time in my personal life and had to make a new beginning. I also knew that I had alternatives; unlike Sunil Mitra my life was not in Siur.
In 1995 I went back briefly en route to Shanti Niketan[ii] with my parents and with Heinz; both chose to remain in the background and let me do my thing. I went to Karuna di’s house but news got round that I was there and the whole village came to meet me. Sunil da was at work and Karuna told me that he had suffered a heart attack and was very weak. On the way out of the village I stopped the car when I saw a cycle rickshaw and a familiar figure in the passenger seat, Sunil Mitra. I greeted him; he was overwhelmed and wanted to take us back to the village. He talked about me in the third person to my parents even though I was there extolling my contribution and saying how much everybody appreciated me. It was his way of expressing his grief and shame at what he considered had been a betrayal; it was also his way of letting me know that I was his comrade and he valued me.
Reconnecting with the past
After 36 years since I left the area this year in January 2020, again on a trip to Shantiniketan, I visited Siur. I was accompanied by my friend Valerie who in 1978 had visited the area with me on a visit from the UK as a young Oxfam employee to see and report on the flood relief programme and who was now visiting me. I had asked a friend whose ancestral home was nearby to find out whether Sunil Mitra was still living and in Siur, which he was. We informed him that we were coming. As we drove into the area everything had changed from how I remembered it. The main tree lined tarred road had replaced the makeshift road with more potholes than road. I missed the turning to Siur village because of these changes and because the road to Siur was a tarred road which at my time was a dirt track. But help was on hand. Learning that I was coming Sunil da had sent his emissaries on motorcycles to accompany us. We came into the village and here too everything was transformed. The primary school had a new building at least newer than what I remembered. Many more houses were brick and mortar. In front of Sunil da’s house was a paved area with a stage which I later learned had been donated by a person in the village for cultural programmes and important events.
Sunil da was older but not much different. He was standing in front of his house; Karuna di was not there but instead a placard on the building said Karunamoyee Pathaghar (a library dedicated to Karuna). Where is Karuna, I asked. She is gone, she is gone came the reply from Sunil da, half acceptance half lament. Much later during the visit I learned from others that she had died in a horrific rail accident. Sunil da kept lamenting that he could not look after her as she had done many years ago when he had a heart attack. But knowing Sunil Mitra he had turned his grief into what he had always done and knew best – services to the community, ‘manusher pashey thaka’. He had used his savings to build a mobile library reaching books to the thirty villages where he had always worked. He paid the four young men who went around on their cycles an honorarium from his own meagre monthly pension. He had organised legal aid camps for women facing violence. The library was not a cement and mortar building but had been renovated to house books, a donated laptop and all sorts of other educational materials. The young man helping told me that they organised computer classes once a week for kids using his mobile phone as a hotspot! Even Sunil da had a mobile phone although as I learned over the next many months, he was really not very good at using it. He remained the go-to person for people with problems and sorrows.
In the subsequent months we talked to each other on the phone almost every day. In the first few calls Sunil da was at pains to explain how sorry he was that I had been treated the way I was and apologised which was totally unnecessary. He had ended his active party-political life soon after although he remained a member; but he continued to be there for people. He said that my visit had renewed his hopes and given him new energy to continue. He was full of plans and would ring me every second day with one more idea even when I left Calcutta and returned to Europe. He supervised the building of a what in India is called a ‘pucca’ building (brick and mortar) to house the library with donations I raised; extended the services of the mobile library; and was making plans to rejuvenate the government health centre which although it existed had no staff, beds, equipment etc. He talked to me a number of times about his plans completely ignoring the fact that I lived in another continent; I was his comrade again and together we were going to dream up projects and implement them. As it became clear to me that the Corona virus had put paid to my annual visit to Calcutta, I was afraid that I would never meet Sunil Mitra again.
And that is what happened; Sunil Mitra died in his daughter’s house after being taken there when he suffered fainting spells. But they brought him back to Siur and he was cremated there. With his passing an era ended for me. I regret that Heinz and Sunil Mitra never met because although they lived continents apart and had very different life experiences, they were both local boys who continued to live and work for people in their area. They were local boys who were local heroes.
[i] A panchayat samity is the second tier in the three-tier panchayati raj system which is the system of government of villages in rural India as opposed to urban and suburban municipalities. The system has three levels: Gram Panchayat (village level), Mandal Parishad or Block Samiti or Panchayat Samiti (development block level or approximately 60 villages), and Zila Parishad (district level).
[ii] Shantiniketan is a neighborhood of Bolpur city in West Bengal, India, approximately 152 km north of Kolkata. It was established by Maharashi Devendranath Tagore in the late 19th century, the father of Rabindranath Tagore Bengal’s pre-eminent poet and litterateur, who expanded Shanti Niketan in the 20th century to house his vision of wholistic education and which brought learners close to nature and the natural surroundings. It was his vision that gave rise to what is now a university town with the creation of Visva-Bharati. Shanti Niketan (the abode of peace) is a tourist attraction for Bengalis and a getaway for the Calcutta residents.
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