Kalimpong Calling

Post-Agitational Literature

The fourteenth essay from my 2002 book Kalimpong Calling.

Most revolutions have spawned great literature. Ours did not, because it could not escape the pejorative of an “agitation” — a rather sorry word to define an exercise which, for a moment, seemed to embody the utopian visions of many here. Now it is remembered as a brief hiccup in history that threw up a host of anarchic possibilities, the aftershocks of which are still felt today. It killed whatever vestige of nocturnal life the late-night cinemas permitted. It also, infamously, normalized in everyday conversation a euphemism for decapitation — a punishment raised to the level of art and to which we gave the solemn air of a statement. The word here is fear. It is a lesson seen everywhere in the world: a sub-nationalistic upsurge often creates more problems than it resolves.

What the agitation killed was more than people: it also killed possibility. Consider the anomaly. In other places, the same word is called “revolution” — a grand word pregnant with consequence, as the Russian and other versions testify, not only as a political exercise but as a process that enlightens and fertilizes the Arts. Nepal, for instance, comes to mind when one speaks of great uprisings in terms of their reflection in the arts. There, the uprising brought in writing that would qualify as being of its time; here, we settled for a bleak scenario with the status quo repackaged.

Why did the intensity and passion our movement generated not find their way into the contemporary works of the time? The reasons are manifold, but one thing is clear: the agitation coloured the judgment of most writers and litterateurs so that what they indulged in was cheerleading, not literature. They were too busy paying tribute to the agitation in their own way to sit down and write; instead of being momentary chroniclers with style that rises above the rhetoric, they produced pamphlets with metrical ambition. Many poems of the time, for example, carry the indignation and hurt of rallies — watered-down versions of what was vented from the microphones — while the true reality that needed to be told with pristine spiritual passion was reduced to second-hand emotions, immediately gratifying but ultimately without staying power.

It seemed our moment had come and we would rise to it. After all, our canvas is littered with places, peoples and passions that beg to be documented with honesty. We do possess a sense of humour and a gift for the telling of anecdotes. We create new words and expressions. We have the ability to laugh at ourselves and yet be tender. And yet so much of what followed felt sanitized and contrived. Our best works mistook posture for reality, so that counterfeit poverty and manufactured backwardness were sometimes paraded in more up-market works, while the ordinary truth remained untold.

Truth is what is lacking — and the kind of education one imbibes by reading the literatures of Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I cannot but recommend the stalwarts from these regions to our would-be poets and novelists; in them they will find undercurrents that parallel our dilemmas and concerns.

A modern person of letters in Darjeeling will, I think, have to be bilingual, with an adequate grasp of English to see for himself what can be done to do justice to the material amply available in his own backyard. He needs to look at it with a new eye and tell it in a way not yet told.

We need a new breed of writers who hold as serious a notion of Art as they do of their image as writers. We need people who will get down from their high horses, abandon pecking orders and incestuous back-slapping, and do real soul-searching. After all, the proof of a good story lies in its telling.