Saga of injustice: ‘The Nemesis’ provides an interesting read on Naxalite movement of 1970s

Bimala was worried, like many mothers in the shanties of Kolkata’s Jadavpur, when a stormy wind of Naxalbari shook the city in the early ’70s. She could see her teenaged son, Jibon, undergoing an unsettling change as the slogan, shottorer doshok muktir doshok! (The Seventies is the decade of liberation!) began to appear on wall after wall. Jibon had stopped working and their family was once again in the grip of poverty. Bengali author Manoranjan Byapari’s The Nemesis, the English translation of the second part of his Chandal Jibon trilogy based on his life, continues from where he left off in The Runaway Boy, its first part that began with the flight of Jibon’s parents Garib Das and Bimala from Barisal in East Pakistan to the Shiromanipur camp in Bankura district of West Bengal, three years after Partition.

There are more similar flights for freedom, this time from poverty, that Jibon’s family is forced to undertake in The Nemesis, first published in Bengali as Thik Thikaanar Sandhaaney (Westland Books) last year. The book begins with the young Jibon picking up life changing lessons in cooking as baby cook in a motley crew of caterers who manage the meals at weddings in villages around Jadavpur, sometimes even further. At the makeshift kitchens, he comes across astonishing new foods such as fish fry, chhanar kaliya and pulao. The work allows Jibon and his fellow workers to take home the leftovers, keeping their families back home from going hungry. Jibon would return to cooking for a living many years later at the Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and the Blind in Khudirabad, which he would carry on for more than two decades.

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Byapari, whose writings question the country’s oppressive caste system, reflects on his life as a young Jibon who is struggling to find one’s footing in The Nemesis. Elected to the West Bengal Assembly as a Trinamool Congress candidate from the Balagarh constituency in Hooghly district two years ago, the author, a former chairperson of West Bengal Dalit Sahitya Akademi, focuses on displacement and despair, a recurring theme in Jibon’s life. As the Naxal movement, which sparked in the Naxalbari village in north Bengal in 1967, rages in Kolkata, Jibon quickly finds himself in the middle of it. Though it is his friend Swapan who adds the word L to a CPI (M) graffiti on a village wall, it’s Jibon, who can’t read or write, who is summoned by the local communist boss to answer what the Naxalites are doing in their neighbourhood. Brutally assaulted, he soon becomes a popular revolutionary, whom Naxal leaders like Ashu Majumdar want to meet.

As violence erupts in Kolkata and the West Bengal Armed Police swoops on villages, Jibon’s family moves to the refugee camps in the Bastar forests of Madhya Pradesh set up by the government after Partition. Persuaded by his mother, Jibon accompanies them to Bastar. “There were no habitations within a radius of five kilometres of Village No. 56. There was only forest, and more forest, as far as the eye went,” the book describes Jibon’s new settlement under the government’s Dandakaranya Development spread across the forests of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. “From as long back as 1956, every now and then, a few families from various refugee camps in West Bengal had been brought here. But even with strict vigilance, not all of them could be confined here. They eluded the guards or bribed them, and walked through the forest and escaped, returning to West Bengal, where they sheltered beside rail tracks, or along anals, or on the pavement and railway stations,” the book continues. Jibon, too, would leave Dandakaranya’s diseases and despair behind.It’s not easy in Kolkata either, where he returns to witness further political violence in neighbourhoods like Loharpara, “a locality of serial terror”, notorious for the saying, “Loharparay je jaay hete shey pherey khate!” (Enter Loharpara on foot and exit on a bier!). Living on the platforms of the Jadavpur railway station, where he had arrived on a train from Bhilai after a long, arduous journey from Bastar, Jibon becomes a member of the community of cycle rickshaw pullers in Kolkata. The Nemesis is a sketch of Jibon’s journey that saddles the Naxalite movement in the ’70s, the flight to Bastar and becoming a rickshaw puller in Jadavpur, a place where one day the author would come across Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, a passenger in his rickshaw, who would encourage him to write about his life’s lessons.

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If Byapari asks a lot of questions about society’s lopsided scales of justice and equality and its ugly face of caste oppression in The Runaway Boy, he lets Jibon’s journey answer them in The Nemesis. The author of My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit, is unsparing in his scrutiny of injustice and inequality and the class hatred rained on the Dalits. V Ramaswamy, who translated the first part of Chandal Jibon trilogy from Bengali, once again triumphs in transporting the travails of an eventful era in Bengal’s history through the life story of one man.

The Nemesis

Manoranjan Byapari

Westland Books

Pp 384, Rs 599

Faizal Khan is a freelancer