Bhaskar Roy’s ‘The Fifty Year Road’ blends the personal and the political

Debashish Mukerji

Noted film director Govind Nihalani’s ‘Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Ma’ (The Mother of No. 1084), released in 1998, is the story of a woman’s gradual political awakening as she probes the murder of her son, referred to by the police simply as ‘Corpse No. 1084’. Set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Jaya Bachchan playing the title role, it is adapted from a Bengali short story by Mahasweta Devi. When Bhaskar Roy, the author of ‘The Fifty Year Road’, asked Nihalani what drew him to the story, he said it was its “blending of the personal and the political”.

Roy’s reminiscences in ‘The Fifty Year Road’ are compelling for the same reason. Most followers of English print media since the 1980s would be familiar with his byline. This book covers the tumultuous 50-year period from the time he underwent his hathe khori — a Bengali ritual which initiates a toddler into reading and writing — in 1964, to the year of Narendra Modi’s taking over as the Prime Minister, 2014.

Roy recalls his parents (both of them freedom fighters, who became government employees after Independence), his grandmother (also a freedom fighter), the West Bengal towns he grew up in (Ashoknagar, a refugee enclave on Kolkata’s outskirts, which he calls a “hopeless town” sunk in “inherent gloom” and has little nostalgia for; Burwan, a semi-rural enclave in Murshidabad district to which his mother was transferred, with its “smell of freshly harvested grain and the rattle of bullock carts laden with hay”, and finally, Kolkata itself); and the schools and colleges he attended till he post-graduated in English literature from Calcutta University.

He remembers his early forays into freelance journalism, his first job, his shift to Delhi and subsequent jobs, his infatuations, romance and eventual marriage. Particularly evocative are his memories at moments of departure — from Ashoknagar, from Burwan, and finally from Kolkata:

“Leaving Calcutta is not easy. The city pulls you, holds you back with all its sounds, colours, fragrances, memories and intensely human moments. Hungry after watching a nerve wracking football match, we would go to Dacres Lane to be assaulted by a host of sumptuous smells of cheap food… Deep inside Gariahat Market was Kali Maiti’s pice hotel serving French fries as thin and crispy as paper strips… In the Park Street area, you could walk into a passage off the main road and right onto a rectangular lawn or courtyard around which stood neatly arranged buildings. Years later, I discovered the same feature of city planning in London and learnt that these are called mews.”

Politics entered Roy’s life even as he was a child, with the massive disruption caused by the Naxalite uprising. Like most of those who lived in West Bengal during that period, he is conflicted about the movement — he acknowledges its delusionary aims, but also its idealism; the horrors its cadres unleashed, but also the horrors that were unleashed on them by the State. He correctly notes that while it was former Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray who brought peace back to West Bengal, he is also the most hated man in the state’s history for his brutal repression of Naxalite activists.

From then on, Roy weaves the larger story of the country’s politics into his own life story with finesse — the Bangladesh war of 1971, the Emergency of 1975, the historic elections of 1977 which ushered in the first non-Congress government at the Centre and soon after, brought the Left Front to power in West Bengal as well (to rule for the next 34 years). He moves through Indira Gandhi’s re-election as Prime Minister in 1980, her assassination in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi’s ascension as PM, the enormous hopes he raised and swiftly belied.

By then, Roy had moved to Delhi, and, as a political reporter, was able to provide a first-hand account of the emergence of VP Singh, who went on to defeat the Congress and succeed Rajiv Gandhi as PM in 1989; the rise of communal politics in the late 1980s with the BJP capitalising on the Babri Masjid controversy; PV Narasimha Rao’s unexpected takeover as PM in 1991 following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination; the shock of the Babri Masjid demolition on December 6, 1992; the 1991 economic reforms which changed the country forever; the political turmoil of the late 1990s which led to three Lok Sabha elections in four years; the coming to power of a BJP-led coalition at the Centre in 1998; its unexpected defeat in the 2004 elections; the achievements and travails of the two Congress-led governments that followed until it went out of office in 2014.

Among the highlights of the book are Roy’s personal encounters as a reporter with a host of leading political actors from the 1980s onwards — Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Lal Krishna Advani, Mamata Banerjee, Brajesh Mishra (Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Man Friday as PM), George Fernandes and Jaya Jaitly, Somnath Chatterjee, Kamlapati Tripathi, Vijaya Raje and Madhavrao Scindia, Laldenga (Mizoram’s insurgent leader and later Chief Minister), Subhas Ghising (of Gorkhaland fame) and more. He often reveals unexpected nuggets; for instance, Advani’s admiration of the film ‘Taare Zameen Par’, or Narasimha Rao’s view that the English translation of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ read better than Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Spanish original.

His humanising of Narasimha Rao and Advani, however, does not hold Roy back from his scathing evaluation of both. He emphasises how the former could easily have prevented the Babri Masjid demolition by taking over the entire disputed area in Ayodhya — as he subsequently did — and installing sufficient paramilitary forces around it well in advance, but instead chose to play “a dangerous game” of negotiating with rank communalists. As for the latter, Roy pinpoints him as “the starting point of the chauvinistic, majoritarian politics of the religious right that has flourished tremendously in recent years”. At a time when both gentlemen have just been awarded the Bharat Ratna, it is sobering to reflect on the enormous damage to the inclusive, secular idea of India they wrought.