Textile Strikes and the Dialectical Montage: Looking at Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai?
Mantra Mukim In one of the early scenes in the film, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata hain?, we see Albert Pinto entering his house, and demanding a cup of tea. A harmless demand otherwise, becomes the first moment in the film where Albert voices his distrust of union politics, a distrust that sets his tea above and against his father’s association with the mill workers’ strike. Also present in the same scene, his father tries to justify the strike to his wife by pointing at inflation and low-wages. However ‘Strike-vrike’, as Albert brands it, makes it an event of complete banality which should not be seen as either radical or favorable. A garage-mechanic by profession, he cites his own non-participation in the strike at the workplace as a source of his upward mobility, which for him stands for knowing his upper-class clients by their first-names. As illusory as it sounds, the naivety with which Albert embraces it, is what drives his anger for the better half of the film. This obstinate anger is aimed at severing his class-affinities, his slice of reality. But before one tries to house Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s 1980 film, in the political context of Mill strikes, one needs to grapple with the complex history of the protest itself. H van Wersch’s work on the Bombay Textile Strike of 1982, is possibly one of the most comprehensive book on the subject. The lack of scholarly or artistic interest in the area contrasts sharply with other strikes like the miner’s strike in England (1984-5) which has already produced a vast body of literature. Thus, Mirza’s film, exploring what Marx would have called the ‘historical present’, adds to an otherwise unattended historiography of worker’s movement in India. And it is in order to contain this history that the film employs radically new techniques, like the montage and the vaudeville, something that I will discuss eventually. Anand Patwardhan’s twenty-two minute documentary Occupation and a recent feature film, City of Gold, are the other two representative ventures towards the Textile strikes. Textile Industry and its problems are almost as old as Bombay, or rather the city’s industrialized form. Under the aegis of the British East India Company, attempts were made to set up textile industry in Bombay but the initiative failed as it was impossible to induce a sufficient number of weavers to settle in Bombay which had not much to offer beyond swamps and stretches of marshy land. It was only after Surat lost the war to the Marathas in 1759, that Bombay became economically important. When the industries finally started to appear, in early nineteenth-century, Parsee Nanabhoy Davar set up the city’s first textile mill calling it Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company (1856).1 A far cry from this is the early Nineteen-eighties, where around two-fifty thousand workers went on strike demanding bonuses and better working conditions. Regarded as one of the largest industrial strikes in world history, this effort obviously had behind itself years of planned unionization and politics. ‘Meeting zyada, Kaam kam’, is the taunt used by an anxious manager in the film. The textile strike that rocked the trade union world in the eighties was for the workers an outcome of their pent up frustrations. Mirza too has to briefly work with the interview mode, in order to lay out the conditions that occasion the strike, and thus the film. These inter-generic moments are not rare in his cinema, Saleem Langde Par Mat Ro, a 1989 film, is a case in point. Nevertheless the film remains incomplete in its understanding of union politics. It shies away from the fissures that grip the union system itself. The performance of RMMS (Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh) has been mentioned time and again as one of the root causes of the strike. The RMMS became the sole representative of the textile workers under the Bombay Industrial Relations Act (BIR) dating back to 1946, a position it enjoyed due to the weakening of the communist union during the war. Congress’ role in the national independence struggle helped it to gain a certain monopoly as far as worker’s support was concerned. However, RMMS’s excessively formal structure gave way to a more aggressive, and unfortunately more individualist, unions like MGKU (Maharashtra General Kamgar Union), headed by Datta Samant. When textile workers struck work for a day in September 1981 there was no indication that this event, bearing the characteristic of a ritual, would in due time turn into the biggest strike the Indian subcontinent has ever witnessed. It is officially acknowledged that the textile strike lasted 18.5 months, or involved more than the 2.5 lakh textile workers. Albert Pinto came almost a year before the big strike, and thus it is just the ritualistic element of the strike that Albert is aware of, and that is what supposedly makes it unworthy of his attention. While workers around him, like his father, are registering their dissent, both by using RMMS and against it, Albert is content with the imported cars that he can borrow from the garage. Borrowed cars in his case also imply a borrowed voice. So not unlike the cars, Pinto uncritically borrows the vocabulary and cadence of the actual owners who, not surprisingly, belong to the class his father’s fighting against. The reason why the owners strike an easy relationship with Albert is that in him they find a suitable surrogate for their economic and moral ideals. The conversation that Mr. Briganza and Pinto share (at 58:00 to 60:00), tells us how Pinto is caught in an imitative act, where anger is the only a suitable medium for him, to float his anti-political stand and at the same time dominate Stella. As Wersch highlights in his book, the agitation was for proper bonus settlement and as before the prevailing expectation was that the unrest would subside after some positive result was achieved. But what changed in 1982 was Datta Samant, who declared that the fight would not just be for
Kafka’s Parable, or, Literature Between Past and Future
Supriya Chaudhuri Suhita Sinha Roy Memorial Lecture, Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 9 January 2015. This lecture was delivered in the evening of 9 January, Professor Jasodhara Bagchi having passed away in hospital that morning. It was a long day of great grief and bitterness, ending with this formal, pre-arranged public occasion. For me it was an occasion of profound sadness and double remembrance, a ‘speaking to spirits’, as perhaps all memorial lectures should be. ————————————————————– I was recently asked to lecture on Hannah Arendt, and I found myself re-reading her 1961 book of essays, Between Past and Future, where she quotes this parable from Kafka: He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. Kafka’s parables, says Arendt, ‘unique perhaps in this respect in literature, are real παραβολαί, thrown alongside and around the incident like rays of light which, however, do not illuminate its outward appearance but possess the power of X-rays to lay bare its inner structure that, in our case, consists of the hidden processes of the mind.’ I am not quite sure what Arendt meant by ‘incident’ here, since no actual event is specified: rather, the story itself gives us the structure of an incident which remains partly hypothetical, projected in the parable’s dream-like conclusion. In the tale, an unnamed ‘he’ is pressed forward by an antagonist from behind, and pushed back by an antagonist from the front. He fights both, not unaided, for ‘the first supports him in his fight with the second … and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first.’ Yet, as Kafka says, it is not just a fight between the two antagonists, since ‘he’ too is present, and who really knows what his intentions are? But he has a dream, or a hope – that in a dark night, he would be able to jump out of the line of combat and watch, like an umpire, while the two antagonists fight each other. I will return to this parable and what it appears to illuminate. But let us begin with an obscurity, for the dream presents us with a textual difficulty I have not yet been able to resolve. The story Arendt cites is taken from a set of untitled aphorisms entered in Kafka’s diary between the 6th of January and the 29th of February, 1920. All the sheets on which they were written, except the first, were then torn out of the diary, possibly when he sent his diaries to Milena Jesenská (with whom, as is well known, he formed an intense attachment, and who translated his work into Czech). The ‘Notes from the year 1920’ were included in volume 5 of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Max Brod and published in New York in 1946 by Schocken Verlag, which is the edition Arendt used. It is a revised and expanded version of the first 5 volumes of the Prague edition of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, published in 1935-37 by Heinrich Mercy Sohn. Arendt quotes the German passage in its entirety, and notes that she has slightly modified Willa and Edwin Muir’s English translation, which also appeared in New York in 1946 in a collection named The Great Wall of China (Arendt 227-28): Er hat zwei Gegner: Der erste bedrängt ihn von hinten, vom Ursprung her. Der zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorn. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn nach vorn drängen und ebenso unterstützt ihn der zweite im Kampf mit dem Ersten; denn er treibt ihn dock zurück. So ist es aber nur theoretisch. Denn es sind ja nicht nur die zwei Gegner da, sondern auch noch er selbst, und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten? Immerhin ist es sein Traum, dass er einmal in einem unbewachten Augenblick – dazu gehört allerdings eine Nacht, so finster wi noch keine war – aus der Kampflinie ausspringt und wegen seiner Kampfeserfahrung zum Richter über seine miteinander kämpfenden Gegner erhoben wird. Max Brod’s edition of his friend’s writings was of course notoriously subjective, even idiosyncratic: moreover, Kafka is every editor and textual critic’s dream – or nightmare. So perhaps appropriately, in the new critical edition of Kafka’s works published by S. Fischer Verlag between 1982 and 1999, based on the all the extant manuscripts and early editions, the dream itself – that is, the conclusion to the parable – is missing. I have checked authoritative transcripts of the 1920 Diary, as well as the new translation of the Shorter Works, Volume I, also published under the title of The Great Wall of China by Malcolm Pasley – whose collection of Kafka manuscripts forms the nucleus of the Kafka archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and not only are there slight variations in language, but the episode itself ends at ‘und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten?’ (‘and who really knows his intentions?’) Er hat zwei Gegner, der Erste bedrängt ihn von rückwärts vom Ursprung her, der Zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorne. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der Erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn
Two Glistening Wheels, a Bell and a Tiffin-Carrier
Krishna Kalpit Vishwa Hindi Sammelan The language in which we wail And shed tears They ride on it And fly up above those clouds One says I did not go Let me be counted among the tyagis Another says I did manage to Let me be regarded among the bhaagis One was tossing down the list-of-contents from the sky In the parched fields of Hindi-Patti A latest Hindi sheikh Had set up a harem of government committees Exiting one To enter the other Someone was being wrecked at principal The other at interest and the third in etiquette One was screaming: All life insult has been my lot Now let some honour be conferred on me too One was saying: Let me be given all the dough Into dollars shall I transcreate them The other said, no, I am the only one to play The unattainable veena An imperialist Was busy garlanding a communalist A woman, with the blood of the guiltless Went on signing strange advertisements A freakish soiree, this A piffling singer Was singing obscene bhajans An editor was looking for Repose at the shoes Of the foreign minister A reporter, in a Shastri-Bhavan drawer Fixed his permanent address One used to say I shall breathe my last in Italia One wished to be irrelevant in Spanish One would play hide and seek With an almost dead language One was sulking One was being sweet-talked One professor At Jawaharlal Nehru University Harlequin, ludicrous Spewing commentaries on Muktibodh One deadbody Was glued to the wings of the British Airways The other Had already chaired every Literary Circle, every Goshti of the future One soul had entered Next year’s every representative body A perplexing tableaux of globalization this In some strange brothel in Soho Someone was hoisting the Hindi langot And in the distant East In some dry, grainy desert village In a language in which the child stammered That used to be called Hindi Wherefore all righteous opposition? Shall only beggars of the future Barter and transact in this great language? A poet of this language Cuts into two his liver and regrets Chisels on with his poetry Tearing off page after page after page… —————– Tale of the Bicycle More humane than a human Is traipsing travelling hope A possibility, standstill The supple fingers of a flying kite The limber legs, their unwritten tale One can pick-out from the shadow of that kite Ganesh on mooshik Shivji on bayl Durga on sinh Kartik on mayur Indra on hathi Saraswati on hans Lakshmi on ullu Yamraj on bhaisa Mahajan in BMW President in airplane Mullah Nasiruddin on donkey Crowd in a train But on a bicycle, every single time a human being A workman—weary, spent A school going kid Or in the streets of Patna The wife of jankavi Laldhuyan Tied up sewing-machine on the carrier Cycle is the only conveyance in this wide world Which is not a vahan of any God There cannot be any memorial song for the cycle It is the only machine running towards life The oldest friendship between humans and machines Made into poetry by the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan And Vittoria De Sica enacted it in his film Through the dank and tortuous alleyways of poverty, pain and humiliation Where human beings live Till that point, only cycles can ply From the site of the event, one cannot come to the conclusion That the cycle was used against humanity When dead-bodies were removed and gunpowder-smoke cleared itself The glistening twin wheels of the cycle lay Right at the centre of the road The bell cast far away, adrift And that tiffin-carrier, in which—bomb not roti, That disappeared mischievously Till the end: the story of a bicycle Is the story of a man ——————– The poems first appeared in tirchhispelling.wordpress.com Translation: HUG adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Under Tiger-striped Skies
Parimal Bhattacharya ‘I don’t know how fear, like an enzyme, triggers a chemical reaction of memory and imagination. Perhaps it plays such tricks: it not only paralyses the present and casts long shadows on the future, but also cuts up the past and exhumes strange phantoms. Fear alters the past in more insidious ways than a battery of lathi-wielding fanatics in a museum…’ [Excerpted and adapted from Dyanchinama.] Thamma, my grandmother, would sometimes talk about Sajid Mian who visited the house every winter to sell gur, date palm jaggery. A landless farm worker, he lived in the village of Bhabagachhi, around eight kilometers from our ancestral home. Sajid Mian took the date palms around his village on lease before the onset of winter, tapped their juices and thickened them in slow wood fire to make gur. He was, according to Thamma, the finest gur maker in the district. Like most members of her tribe, my grandmother too was a great storyteller who could bring to life the quotidian things of a lost world. The way she described it, we could almost taste the sweet, granular, amber-coloured liquid that Sajid Mian supplied to our house in slender terracotta pots. But how could Thamma, an orthodox Brahmin widow, allow in the kitchen, let alone taste, a food item prepared by a Muslim is a mystery. Perhaps the holy edicts that guided all her actions exempted gur from the list of polluted food since it contained no cereal. It never occurred to my mind to ask her. During the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, Sajid Mian visited our house along with his family, his wife and five children. They were skeletons wrapped in skins, Thamma used to say, the skins so dark and wrinkled that they resembled burnt paper that could be blown away. Following that visit, his wife would come to our house every evening, trekking the eight kilometers from their village, carrying a terracotta pot, to collect the watery starch of boiled rice. But after a few weeks, as the famine peaked, her visits ceased. Our family too had stopped eating rice. Bengalis had had their first taste of rooti – flattened bread and a frail cousin of North Indian roti – made of wheat that had begun to arrive in ship-loads from Australia. Did Sajid Mian take his family to the city? One could never know. Every day, endless streams of famished village people were turning up on the streets of Calcutta. Feeble voices begging for runny rice starch buzzed in neighbourhood lanes through the day; as night fell, barking street dogs fighting with humans for scraps of food in garbage dumps rent the air. The city people could catch some sleep early in the morning, when it grew quiet, when the phantom men and women died silently in footpaths and parks. Packs of jackals came from the vast eastern wetlands, their teeth and nails flecked with the first rays of the sun, before the municipal dumper trucks could clear away the bodies. Nobody knew where Sajid Mian had vanished. Grandmother never touched gur for the rest of her life. *** In the year 1943, the joint family of my late grandfather and his brothers split up. They continued to remain in the same large ancestral house, but the running of the household was separated along fraternal lines. Thamma, recently widowed, and her seven children got a separate kitchen. A mysterious incident from that period has since become part of our family lore. It was an unbearably muggy evening in the autumn of that year. Under the dim light of a castor oil lamp (kerosene had vanished from the market due to the war, and electricity was yet to come to our house) my little uncles and aunts were trying to do their homework. A few of them were listless, from hunger and heat, had even turned in on the floor. My father, the eldest of them, was not at home. The dinner was yet to be cooked. Chhotopisi, my youngest aunt, had started to speak a few words that summer. She was toddling around her siblings, prattling to herself, scrawling on the floor with a piece of chalk. The oil lamp flickered and cast big shadows of hunched children on the walls, coils of smoke hung in the still air. Chhotopisi crept up to a window that opened to a tiny, weed-choked garden. There, in pitch-darkness, fireflies danced and crickets chirped in arum bushes around a ditch. Chhotopisi, it has been said, stood there gazing out of the window for a long time, holding the window bars, and intoned softly: ‘Fear!’ The word, that she uttered for the first time in her life, set off a frenzy. My uncles and aunts began to scream hysterically and thrash their limbs on the floor. One of the aunts had a convulsive fit: her jaws were locked and lips turned violet. People gathered in no time carrying sticks and lanterns, and the garden was thoroughly searched. But nothing could be found there. All the uncles and aunts were very young then. Father, the oldest of them, was barely seventeen. War and famine, followed by the split in the joint family, had forced him to give up his studies and enroll as an ARP (Air Raid Precaution) warden. People were fleeing Calcutta fearing Japanese bombs dropping from the skies. As an ARP warden, my father’s job entailed patrolling the streets after the air raid sirens rang in the evenings, carrying a torch and a whistle that he would blow if lights were seen in the windows. In the city and its suburbs, people waited with bated breath in their darkened homes for the sirens to sound all clear. All the government buildings were painted black. During the Indo-Pak war in 1971, pieces of black paper were pasted on the window panes in our house. Streetlights, too, were put out. Swarms of fighter jets scrambled from nearby Palta airbase and flew