Have just finished reading a book titled 'Gangster State' by Sourjya Bhowmick. There was a short review of the book in Indian Express of 7th November which prompted me to buy the book. From the review, I came to know that the book is a novel which describes the CPM era in West Bengal. How they came to power and how they lost power and what happened in between. Since I have always been intrigued by the phenomenon of a popularly elected communist regime that lasted 36 long years with one man at the helm of affairs, the book came as a godsend!
As I began reading it, I had a feeling of being let down. The review called it a novel. And it does have a fictitious protagonist who goes to school and then to a university and breaks his teeth on the college-level politics and so on. There even is a brief mention of a love angle and a break up immediately thereafter: all the trappings of a novel.
But it isn't a novel. Shashi Tharoor does refrain from calling it one. Even though it is a fictitious person's story which takes place on the background of some very real historical episodes; it never becomes a novel but remains a crudely written news story. It is interspersed with description of political history. This narration of history does not blend with the story, the writer makes no attempt to do so; the accounts remain completely outside of what happens to the protagonist. The narrative streams come separately subject wise and the streams do not follow one another in a chronological order; which is natural since what they narrate overlapped to a large extent. But presenting them disconnectedly amounts to a simplification of issues, to reducing human (and societal) reactions to basic equations. Which cannot be called as positive feature of either a fictional work or an essay.
But as I went on reading it, all this became beside the point. The book became a subjective analysis of the 'Rise And Fall of CPM Rule in West Bengal'; written by someone who has all his sympathies with the CPM. He is a journalist but is not a professional political analyst. Far from it. But to me, that is what worked! The book presents a worm's eye-view of the epochal events there and having perused birds' eye-views aplenty; this was exactly what I was looking for.
The worm's view is scary though. It blasted away any romantic hang-ups I had retained about a Communist regime; a regime ruling in the name of the worker, the exploited, the commoner. It also wiped the hangover of an arty Bengal, Bengal of Ravindranath, Sharatchandra, of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwick Ghatak and so on. Bengal fascinated me. I am a great fan of 'Old Hindi Film Songs' and the names of Anil Biswas, Salil Chaudhary, Hemant Kumar are like angels from heaven. Luckily, the author does not share the spell I was under (a worm, after all has a different perspective!).
That Bengal and Bengalis became mortals in my eyes was not the scary part. The book revealed to me that the current Modi-Shah rule in India is not something that should scandalize you, on the contrary. They are just following the mainstream political activism here and it is the docile nature of my mind, of the minds of those like me, of us Maharashtrians and Mumbaikars which should be the cause of concern. Is it that we have been living in a cocoon of safety and security in this chaotic, violent, hateful and bigoted people? I don't know. I must find out.
This is Sourjya Bhowmick's first book. And I think he took a decision to present it in a form of a very loosely bound novel. I have translated P. Sainath's 'Everybody Loves A Good Drought' into Marathi and that book has 64 human interest stories roughly grouped under headings like health and usury and development and so on. Sainath has written excellent essays for each group supported by reliable statistics and succinct analysis. That was the way Sainath decided to present his book. Bhowmick follows a different path.
Whatever. 'Gangster State' is a bold book in which the author pulls no punches. I got what I was looking for. Thanks, Sourjya Bhowmick! And best wishes for more sophisticated and suave books from you in future.
