Farewell is a story taken from a collection of stories (Half a Rupee: Stories) by Gulzar, and offered here as an independent read. It is from part five, which is about Naxalite movement in India, so named after the small rural place Naxalbari in West Bengal (east Bengal is what is now called Bangladesh, the half that split away from motherland in '47 at partition and then had to seek independence because faith based nations don't necessarily work when all other bases are diverse and diversity not acceptable to basis of the nation).
In essence Naxalite movement is the extreme leftist movement and while there are probably enough justifications for such a necessity - what with the British propagating and furthering the landholding consolidations begun by the previous foreign rulers for their own interests of holding on to a nation not their own (since it is easier to bribe a few rich softies than to control a few million who do well without need of protection and charity), and the government since then mostly consisting of the party that carried on the same system while mouthing leftist sentiments and carrying out half baked measures to control anyone who might do well but nothing to help general populace do well - the truth in spite of such dire actions of militant sort being necessary to wake up authorities is that this movement is not all indigenous, and a good deal of help in form of propaganda as well as arms and ammunition is supplied across one border or another to the north, the two neighbours that fought wars with India being interested in keeping India off balance for ever.
In Farewell again Gulzar attempts to do a bit of sleight of hand, and portrays a Naxalite as a mysterious hero whom the police is unable to even see much less catch, while the youth and intelligentsia is all afire and swayed by his poetry in spirit of the movement - thus evoking subliminally the Russian revolution era of writers and poets bringing people, or rather masses as leftists call them, to the movement emotionally, and the writer is not above cashing on the independence movement of India with the end of the story being reminiscent of some independence warriors' final words and end as they were caught or about to be caught by the colonial rulers, with reference to farewell to mother by which is really meant motherland, Mother India.
Gulzar had done this sleight of hand in a film he wrote and produced in portraying Punjab terrorists as human while painting the police as ruthless inhuman faces of authority who get humane treatment from the very people they have been treating ill, but refraining from mentioning why the fracas began or how it was carried out by the terrorists (who he painted as people forced to go to war due to police brutality, avoiding the beginning of the real terrorists that were caught in the propaganda war when they went for pilgrimage across the border into their old lands separated by partition, and supplied with arms and ammunition and training with aim of dividing India once again) - and so he attempts to do here as well with leftists terror of Kolkata or Calcutta as the British version of the city's name was.
Here he has introduced yet another not uncommon indirect way to deal with hero, by the intriguing notes appearing under the doormat of a student in a hostel in Calcutta that make no sense to him, except the rears are informed the student shares the name of the naxalite hero and thereby the general popular epithet the hero is known by being bestowed on the student by his colleagues. Then it is mostly descriptions of the movement and hero alternating with the student and his current life, and a surprising revelation to stun the reader at the end, replete with the emotional reference to a poetic farewell to mother.
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Gulzar to some extent and Sahir Ludhianavi to a far more committed extent were leftists - Sahir was about to be arrested for h in his chosen or default home in the other part of India as it was before independence, and had to escape to India as it is post independence, and yet he said it was lucky for Mumbai to have him, rather than admitting he was lucky he could get away and not be arrested to spend life in jail, rather than the respect and fame and prestige and satisfactory work he had during his life in India. Gulzar in that tradition sympathises with a suicide bomber who plans to blow up a prime minister, and writes a story and publishes it, apart from a film or more he made on the topic.
Wonder if they had courage enough to battle for Malala and her ilk. Easy to target a democracy, especially one that does not penalise you for being in minority politically.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014.
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