Past tense, present continuous

Ashok Mitra has never been a conformist. His stint as chief economic adviser to the Indira Gandhi government from 1970 to 1972 did not interfere with his criticism of the then PM. Finance minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 1986, Mitra is said to have quit due to differences with Jyoti Basu and his policies. Decades later, the economist’s rectitude needs no further examination, but a reprint of Calcutta Diary does help prove his iconoclastic credentials again. A collection of 46 pieces, mostly published in the Economic and Political Weekly during the first half of the ’70s, the columnist’s Diary demonstrates a careful empathy for Calcutta’s people and a scathing contempt for its ruling class. As Mitra confesses, “The author of the pieces is a prisoner of Calcutta: this may be as much his pride as his tragedy.”

Plagued by destitution, unemployment and the shadow of a Naxal revolution, the Bengal that Mitra describes becomes a cruel backdrop for the stories he narrates. The protagonists he picks are those made invisible by their commonness. Share-cropper Indra Lohar is beaten black and blue because he challenges his landlord in court. In a series of events that “could put Kafka into shade”, Kamal Bose has a number of false cases lodged against him and isn’t allowed to leave prison. Sadananda Roy Chowdhury’s two young sons are both killed in police custody. “Corpses,” Mitra writes in a 1974 article, “are incapable of issuing rejoinders.” Chronicling a society through the perspective of its most bereaved and marginalised isn’t only an evocative stratagem for the author. Far from being formulaic, these narratives are always representative of a beleaguered whole — “There are, one dares to say, hundreds of thousands of Indra Lohars.”

Mitra’s response to the times he lived in was certainly informed by an uncharacteristic courage. Defending Left-leaning revolutionaries, he equates their contentious spirit with patriotism, “the will to give up the lure of comfortable existence for the sake of an ideal”. Irony, satire and sarcasm bind together most essays made available in Diary. Mitra once compares delegates of the Congress to Al Capone’s Chicago mob. He later spends the better part of another piece calculating the “opportunity cost” of Indira Gandhi’s decision to skirt traffic on Howrah Bridge and cross the Hooghly on a motor launch. The communist, though, also reserves some scorn for his own kind. He castigates the “high caste, high-breed Hindu” leadership of Bengal’s Left parties and juxtaposes economists with Brahmins of ancient society. For Mitra, his fellows were simply India’s new “obfuscators”.

Even though poverty and unrest can be considered its primary concerns, the belligerent essays in Diary do more than detail political and pecuniary plight. With pieces dedicated to literature, cinema and music, Mitra brings to the cultural landscape of ’70s Bengal a focus that is informed by both economic rigour and social history. The state’s fascination with poetry has withstood the onslaught of four decades, and its film industry still fights Hindi imports for space in much the same manner Mitra had described. His lucid articles never pretend to be clairvoyant but, in the end, it is their pertinence that’s disquieting. If Mitra were to update Diary, he’d only have to tweak a few names and dates. The essence of his disparagement and critique could remain intact. In a Kolkata that is still marked by inequity, apathy and political hypocrisy, the octogenarian will find it tragic to note that his words continue to ring true — “Nothing adds up in Calcutta. Neither revolution nor revisionism.”

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