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66 pages

English

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Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite, he is now a withered shell; a man broken by torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shutting out the past. But when Ruhiton is moved to a better jail and eventually freed, memories return to haunt him. He looks back upon his youth, his marriage, his home in the Terai foothills-and he remembers too, the friends he has killed, the revolutionary colleagues he made, and the ideals he once believed in. Dark, powerful and full of ambiguities, the classic Mahakaler Rather Ghoda (1977) questions the human cost of revolution and its inevitable transience. A sensation in its time, it remains one of the greatest novels about the Naxalite movement.

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Political

Politics

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	23 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002782
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Fever
MAHAKALER RATHER GHODA
In this series:
Nashtaneer Dui Bon Malancha -Rabindranath Tagore Durgeshnandini -Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
Fever
MAHAKALER RATHER GHODA

Samaresh
BASU

Translated by
ARUNAVA SINHA
Introduction by
Shirshendu Chakrabarti
Published by Random House India in 2011
Translation Arunava Sinha 2011
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B, A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184002782
Contents
A Note on the Title
Introduction
Author s Introduction

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
A Note on the Title
T HE TITLE WHICH Samaresh Basu gave his novel Mahakaler Rather Ghoda means Horse to the Chariot of Time . Besides time, Mahakal also refers to the destructive force of the universe-the chariot becomes a vehicle not only of relentless time, but also of annihilation. And the horse that draws this vehicle-anonymous, harnessed to a cause that does not care for the freedom of the beast of burden-represents Ruhiton Kurmi, the protagonist of this novel.
When the novel opens, Ruhiton has for some time been afflicted by a low-grade fever and hoarseness. There is no apparent reason for the symptoms, mystifying the jailed revolutionary. The illness quickly becomes the symbol of the decay, doubt, and despair that assail Ruhiton, haunting him physically and emotionally till the end.
Encapsulating as it does the different kinds of sicknesses-in the socio-political power structure that Ruhiton and his comrades revolted against; in the gradual degeneration of the revolutionary movement; and in the betrayal of the toiling classes by the leaders of the revolution-the fever is the leitmotif of this novel. Hence, it is also the title of this English translation.
Introduction
T HE TITLE OF the novel Mahakaler Rather Ghoda succinctly captures the brutal irony that is so central to its structure. The title literally means Horse to the Chariot of Time , and in combination with the prefatory poem referring to the countless anonymous soldiers without whom the historical transformation underlying the Mahabharata would not have been possible, it highlights the tragedy of the subaltern revolutionaries in the Naxalite uprising of North Bengal in the late 1960s. This class, like a beast of burden, pulls the chariot of history and its rebellion is a direct and spontaneous outcome of the daily exploitation that it suffers, and yet it is not given its due in history; nor does it reap any benefits from the revolution. When the Adivasi protagonist of the novel, Ruhiton Kurmi, is released from prison and returns to his village under strict surveillance, he does not meet any of the impoverished peasants; the people who welcome him back as one of their own are either unfamiliar or his former political enemies, trusted supporters of the rich. Even his family members have joined hands with the state machinery.
The Naxalite uprising of the impoverished peasantry was largely led by middle class Maoist intellectuals with remarkable support from the urban student community. These upper class revolutionaries were immersed in theoretical debates informed by the literature of communism while the illiterate, landless peasant understood the same historical situation from his practical experience. The bookish and theoretically engulfed intellectuals differed bitterly among themselves from the very outset-as, sadly, in the history of the international communist movement-exposing thereby fissiparous tendencies which destroyed the movement from within. The subaltern revolutionaries were trapped between the retaliatory violence of the state and the theoretical divisions of the ideologues.
In this sense, the novel brings out the inherently tragic possibilities within the uprising. The uprising gave rise to several first hand/autobiographical accounts like Communis by Raghab Bandyopadhyay and popular fiction like Brishtir Ghran and Shaola by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Kaalbela by Samaresh Majumdar. Most of the stories and novels, however, dramatized the disillusionment and psychological debacle of the urban educated youth. In contrast, Samaresh Basu focuses on the perception of the subaltern activist and his tragedy: he was in a way a pawn in the hands of the urban middle class subscribing to a specifically Maoist theory of revolutionary transformation. No doubt many of the elite representatives suffered imprisonment, torture, and liquidation but what happened to the peasants who were the foot soldiers of the revolution? In the liberated areas, the nascent sense of a proletarian identity had been so infectious that the people had turned against traditional habits of drunkenness and wife-battering and the practice of witchcraft. But when Ruhiton returns in freedom to his village and family, he discovers that the community has lapsed back into superstition and obscurantism.
Actually, the movement may have begun in arousal of mass consciousness but not only did it fall apart because of the bickering of the middle class leadership, it also veered towards urban terrorism. As a result, it lost contact with the people to such an extent that it became extremely difficult to distinguish between genuine revolutionary and undercover agent. The underground nature of the movement made police infiltration easy. Thus in the very first chapter of the novel, we find Ruhiton bitterly ruminating about the large number of spies camouflaging themselves among the prisoners like green mountain leeches in the grass or earth-red snakes in the red earth. A greater threat, however, is posed not by disguised outsiders but by cynical and self-seeking insiders.
The author s knowledge of these political realities surfaces at times in the novel; after all, he had played an active role in the undivided communist party before deciding to dissociate himself from it. For instance, he writes about Diba Bagchi-who first taught Ruhiton to dream of a revolutionary transformation-and his strategy of encircling the cities by the villages where liberated areas would be created by a violent uprising. This is no doubt a reference to one of the strategies used in the Maoist revolution in China.
He also goes into some detail about the various categories of landless and semi-landless cultivators. But his focus is really on the changing experiences of the subaltern activist partly modelled on Jangal Santhal, the Adivasi Naxalite leader. He plays down the theoretical debates not in order to deproblematize the novel but to attempt to see the uprising through the eyes of the illiterate subaltern whose knowledge of exploitation is intermeshed with the very business of living. Ruhiton s freedom of spirit is also indicated in his boyhood itself in his somewhat reckless life, often spent in gambling, wild drinking, or hunting wild animals in the forest. His affinity with the untamed primal energies of nature is suggested in the attempt to instill in his pet pigeons the hunting abilities of the hawk, but the project failed because his intoxicated father had killed the birds for food. Does this episode anticipate the futility of the later attempt to create a revolutionary consciousness?
Barring a few exceptions, the educated bourgeois leaders were unable to overcome their class superiority, to give up their vanity of bookish knowledge and to develop a cohesive collective consciousness curbing their habits of possessive and competitive individualism. When Ruhiton is taken to a jail ward where he meets several other prominent Naxalite prisoners, his fellow warriors, the first reaction all around is that of solidarity. Some of the young prisoners openly show their enthusiastic admiration for Ruhiton. But chinks begin to appear as the imprisoned leaders inform him about developments in the outside world. Ruhiton is crestfallen to learn of the death of Diba Bagchi and then of the accusation that he had betrayed the cause of revolution and ultimately served the interest of his landowner father.
In contrast to the middle class leaders, Ruhiton s faith in Diba remains unshaken and he begins to understand the time-serving and slippery tendencies of the educated middle class. The hollowness of the demonstrative solidarity is exposed brutally when the symptoms of leprosy on Ruhiton s body are interpreted by the bhadralok leaders as venereal disease and they immediately want him to be segregated. But that is not enough. Despite their intimate knowledge of Ruhiton s character, they jump to the conclusion that such a disease is not unexpected, given the sexual habits of the lower orders to which he belongs. The divide between elite and subaltern had been perceived even earlier by Ruhiton and his fellow peasants when they were taken to Kolkata to demonstrate mass support for the uprising. Once the show was over, they were simply forgotten and not even given any food despite the presence of many women and children. Mangala, his wife, had, out of her measly savings dating back to her premarital days, given Ruhiton some money to bring back a token from Kolkata, but after this experience Ruhiton refused to do so.
One of the basic s