[Reader-list] Walking for Nandigram, November 14

[moinak biswas]

The
organizers were obviously not prepared for size of the turn-out. That it would
be big they must have known, as the outrage had reached a boiling point since
the second offensive against Nandigram villagers started on the 6th. .
But no one could have anticipated the multitudes that would render numbers
obscure on the streets yesterday. The organizers didn’t even bring enough of
those little badges which just said ‘Dhikkar’ (‘Shame!’). But then who were the
organizers? Some familiar faces were using a loudspeaker to issue basic
instructions – ‘Please do not carry organizational banners; do not shout
slogans; our route will be.. .’ No one was leading. Many people did not know
who gave the call for the rally; they still do not know. No parties joined, no
trucks and trains carrying obedient supporters; one lakh people on the streets,
smiling in the early winter sun - the smile of release from inaction, from
silence. They had been asking constantly over the last few days: Is there
somewhere we can go? Do you know if there is something we could do? I saw my
cousins, schoolmates, neighbours - many of whom admitted that this was the
first time in their lives they had joined a procession. We exchanged looks
across the street, from one row to the other; they smiled and said, ‘Could not
stay home’. Commuters, stranded by the endless human stream, often joined in.
Someone shouted from an immobilized tram, ‘March on, we are with you’. Flower
petals came raining down on the marchers from an old house near Wellington Square.
On Nirmal Chandra Street,
a group of locals stood by, displaying words of mourning and anger on small
placards. I was near the Calcutta
 Medical College
when Sibajida and Suman Mukhopadhyay called from Dharmatala, our destination,
to say they had reached. ‘Reached! But we have only just started here. And how
many are still following?’ No one had a clear idea how many; but someone from
the back reported that the tail was moving near Hedua, a kilometre behind us.
Calls were coming in from all points along the massive meandering stream,
‘Where are you? How long will you take?’ As if one was still receiving calls to
leave home and join. You could just inhabit these old central districts of the
city and wait for the march to pass through you, making you a part of its open
torso. I felt like telling the first-timers that we were also doing this after
a long, long time. A call came from Bankura; Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, missing
the rally sorely, shouted: ‘When did you last see such a michhil ?’ I
passed the question on to Sourin Bhattacharya, 70, walking in front of me -
‘When did we last see something like this, Sir? 'After Ayodhya', he says,
'After Guajarat’; he then adds, ‘But the CPM and the other Left in power joined
those rallies in droves. When did one last see a mass of this size without
political parties?’ The question is passed on, the students wait for us to
remember; we look to our dadas, the quiet, grey brigade walking with us. Maybe
the hunger marches of '66? But even then, they add, there were party workers.
Some bystanders are found managing the lines. No one asks who they are, the
most irrelevant question on November 14. We look around and find almost every
face familiar, but the wonder is we didn’t know so many unknown faces would
appear familiar. That's where numbers became obscure. We arrived at Dharmatala
at quarter to four, the tail end was to come and mix into the sea forty-five
minutes later. The protean mass in Dharmatala, standing, squatting on the main
thoroughfare, drifting about and chatting, reuniting with friends, forming
circles, cheering one another, singing, collecting relief for the affected in
Nandigram, created a perfect picture of a rally without a centre, or rather,
without the familiar centring. People weren't even sure for a while if there
was to be the customary dais around which we should finally gather. Some
suggested that the little truck leading the silent procession with the sole
loudspeaker be made the dais; but Medha Patekar was seen already addressing the
crowd from a make-shift stage. Let us have one stage then, the truck people
quickly decided. It was impossible to go near the spot. The space, recently
christened the 'Metro Channel' by anti-government protesters, was not meant for
such a massive gathering. Indistinct voices came drifting in from there, but it
was not designated as a focus for the eddying movements over the stretch
between Lenin Sarani and S. N.
  Banerjee Road. It wasn't possible to form the
usual semi-circle of spectatorship around a single voice. Was it Mahasweta Devi
speaking or Sankha Ghosh? Aparna Sen or Joy Goswami? Was it Pratul Mukhopadhyay
singing? Anjan Dutt materialized beside us with Gautam Ghose, who was asking
anxiously if Nabaneeta Dev Sen had been spotted. 'She is ill', Gautam said, 'We
asked her not to come, but she has sneaked out of home'. The stage had its own
little circle, like innumerable other circles of students, actors, office
workers, little-magazine wallahs, bespectacled teachers, journalists, holding
intense transactions of information and wisecracks. The circles opened and
closed to allow for a shifting membership, merged into one another. One could
not see the neat police circle around the gathering though, like those found in
the aftermath of March 14. Why? We were asking ourselves. The fairly modest
gathering outside the Kolkata Film Festival on the 11th had drawn an excessive
display of force from the police, who arrested 68 of a crowd singing songs. On
the 10th, they arrested stray people walking away from Medha's fast. Bodhisattwa
Kar, who has earned the distinction of getting arrested on both occasions, must
have been wondering too: where were the cordons, the neatly lined up
law-keepers? The police looked scattered and vaguely distributed over
Dharmatala. Were they mirroring the formless discipline of the crowd, a mass
that was swelling and flowing on all sides, not tied up into a bunch by a
single thread of harangue? Before people dispersed with companions in tow,
looking forward to an adda where the narratives would start, they were asking -
what next? A sequence of rallies and meetings, writing, image-making,
arguments. But what about a project, something more sustainable?  as Sourin babu kept on saying. If one tried
one could read many lips in the crowd uttering the same interrogative. The
question was no doubt carried over to the addas that followed. Organizing the
streets of November 14 into a legible sequence, a story, will perhaps be the
small next step in the direction of formulating the 'project'. One hopes the
story does not forget though that there was no one to pass a single thread of
yarn from the beginning to the end of the michhil yesterday. 


Moinak
Biswas


Calcutta, November
15, 2007






 


 


 




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