When I arrived in Kolkata as a 16-year-old in the late 1970s, not for a holiday but to live in this place of my birth, they used to call it the “city of processions and palaces”. Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was credited for this quote, as far as I remember. But whether or not it came from him, I loved the juxtaposition of palaces and processions— which, in Kolkata, translated to protests.
For a gawky wet-behind-the-ears cantonment kid, Howrah Railway Station, Writers’ Buildings, Great Eastern, Grand Hotel—all looked like palaces. And I loved the processions, those impassioned protests against wrongs and emotional marches for what was right, and never mind the traffic snarls and hold-ups that were routine.
Exactly 16 years ago, I witnessed one of Kolkata’s most powerful processions of protest: the civil society march on 14 November 2007 against the violence in Nandigram in which first 14 villagers protesting against the Left government’s land acquisition were killed in police firing and then political parties clashed to control the area and its people. The march sparked a wave of opposition that led to the most dramatic change in government four years later.
This was the pinnacle of a tradition of protests in this city that was once the capital of the British Raj, something that brought out the rebel in the Bengali at the turn of the 19th century.
But that Kolkata, I fear, is now waning.
Oh, the processions happen, long and winding ones that paralyse the city for some hours. But they are not always for a just cause such as, say, clean air, but for self-interest, usually a vote.
How else can you explain Kolkata’s silence on the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and led to the kidnapping of over 200 people? Or its apparent indifference to Israel’s retaliatory bombing of the Gaza strip over the last 40 days, leaving more than 11,000 people dead as of 13 November?
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Where have all the ‘buddhijibis’ gone?
There have been a handful of protests in Kolkata over the past month against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, some by Muslim groups, one led by a minister of the Trinamool Congress government, and another by Left parties.
But there has been no agitation by the students of the city’s colleges and universities, once famed as hotbeds of rebellion. There has been nothing by its intellectuals, the ‘buddhijibis’ who once thought today what India thought tomorrow.
Kolkata, it now seems, is a city without thought. A city, I fear, that may have misplaced its conscience somewhere along the way. I watched the protests in London on TV the other day, and campuses in the US are in an uproar too. In sharp contrast, Kolkata held its silence.
A far cry from the Kolkata of 1968, when Robert McNamara, seen as the architect of the United States’ Vietnam policy, could not drive into the city because of angry protesters when he landed here on 22 November. He had to be airlifted from the airport to the city centre in a helicopter.
Around the same time, in another gesture of defiance, Harrington Street, where the US Consulate in Kolkata is situated, was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani after the revolutionary leader of Vietnam’s war against America.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to do a Robert McNamara 52 years later on 11 January 2020. He was flown in a helicopter from Dum Dum Airport to Kolkata city by the police due to the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests planned along the road route.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had locked down Kolkata’s central district with roadblocks and marches, and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) had set up separate protests. To avoid blockades on the way to Belur Math for a Ram Krishna Mission event, Modi took a boat ride down the Hooghly River instead of driving through the city.
Between the Nandigram and the anti-CAA protests, remarkable civil society action erupted on 21 June, 2013 to protest crimes against women, including the Park Street and Nirbhaya cases of 2012, as well as the rape and murder of a 20-year-old-girl in Kamduni just outside Kolkata earlier that month.
There were no political flags at this march. Poets, writers, artists, filmmakers joined the march, many of whom had protested in the November 2007 rally against Nandigram and the Left.
Those were heady days.
In a 2008 interview, noted political scientist Ranabir Samaddar described Kolkata’s “unique streak” of protest.
“It is an anarchic city, disdainful of the law. That can be understood too, for its having been the second city of the British Empire, and having endured famine, partition, deindustrialisation, and the terrible anti-Naxalite violence of 1971, besides the whole intellectual tradition,” he said.
Samaddar, a politically active student at Presidency College in the Naxalite period himself, noted that Kolkata, like all great cities, provoked the imagination and stoked a desire for freedom. “Anything and everything was do-able, nothing was impossible. That was a distinct feature of Kolkata,” he said.
But there have been slumps. In the 1980s, Kolkata became “politically dead”, Samaddar said, only to be shaken out of its stupor by the Mamata Banerjee “phenomenon” before the Left’s ouster in 2011.
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A silent city
What happened to Kolkata after 2011?
There have been sparks now and then, but now the city seems much more indifferent than in the past.
Even the “distortion” of Karar Oi Louho Kopat, one of the most passionate songs of rebellion against the British Raj by Bengal’s legendary ‘bidrohi’ or revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, has not brought Kolkata out on the streets.
The song, which calls for the smashing of the iron bars of jail, was “re-composed” by Oscar-winning composer AR Rehman for the Bollywood film Pippa, released last week. The lyrics remain unchanged, but the melody has lost the rousing, anthemic essence of the original.
The film is about the Bangladesh Liberation War, so the use of the song composed by Bangladesh’s national poet seems fitting. But now Kazi Nazrul’s family in Kolkata and Dhaka has expressed disappointment at the ‘recomposition’. Social media has spluttered on both sides of the border. The producers of Pippa have issued an apology on social media.
That’s it.
Then, there’s the matter of the celebrated play Barricade running into a wall.
Written by the late actor and Left activist Utpal Dutta in 1972, it was scheduled to be staged from 23 to 26 November by the theatre group Chakdah Natyajan in Kalyani, 60 km from Kolkata.
But the group seems to have run afoul of the powers that be. The state authorities running the hall where Barricade was to be staged have reportedly informed the theatre group that the show is being cancelled because the venue is needed for a government event. So, sorry.
Barricade is an unabashedly political play, ostensibly about the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, but it is also a broader commentary on authoritarianism and fascism.
This is not the first protest play to be stonewalled in recent times, but probably one of the most influential. However, barring some predictable noises, no sign of a protest anywhere.
The Kolkata that once loved to break barricades now seems to have gone into a shell. When will it weep for Gaza and break the iron bars of the prison into which it seems to have locked itself?
The author is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)