Like every Indian, I carry with me memories of riots, of curfews, of political violence. The day of Indira Gandhi?s death was my first experience of that peculiar untime, to borrow a phrase from The Satanic Verses; a sense of things happening in slow motion, of wisps of smoke from buses burning on a horizon, of men with bricks in their hand shouting and screaming…. As a recently published book on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India points out [hyperlink], the mob violence in Calcutta was quelled in an effective and timely fashion by state action.
In Calcutta, the famous rowdies, and lumpenproletariat of Indian political life… could suspend violence and the threat of violence for a schoolbus. And slum-dwellers in Calcutta refused to malign an entire community for the actions of two individuals, belying every stereotype of impoverished and irrational Indian masses being willing to riot at the drop of a hat. Compare this to the fact that highly educated politicians with Oxbridge pedigrees were willing to justify the pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi. Or that members of the affluent middle classes, men and women alike, have gleefully participated in the murder of Muslims in the name of Hindu pride in Gujarat. Or that the most ardent supporters of Narendra Modi are very successful and well-off Indian professionals and businesspersons in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US.
[But I?ve also had] ample oppportunity to witness and experience the hypocrisy of the professed socialism and communism of Jyoti Babu and his acolytes. Calcutta and the CPM cadres have had a long and indistinguished history of engaging in political violence and using the threat of violence as a tool….
Still, Calcutta embodied the possibility of an alternative vision of Indian cultural and social life. Calcutta was a reminder of the possibilities of social existence outside the reach of capital. It was testament to the necessity of a space for the autonomous production of art and freedom of expression.
Where else might you see people shirk work to visit a Rodin exhibition?
And what one always believed of Calcutta was this: even if you are always a slight outsider, you will not be lynched for the imagined community that you belong to or for your bad verses. That, even with all the visible shortcomings, there was some tradition of collective, civic life pulsating through this great city.
It is possible that this was simply naivete.
?Anti-history/In another life antihistory.blogspot.com
