Women in Unemployment & Revolutions at the Workplace
Avinash Mishra [Avinash Mishra is one of the most expressive, dangerous and suicidal voices in the world of literature today. The following reflection arises out of Agyeya’s Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, a novel published in two volumes. The writer, in a personal preamble, reminds us of Agyeya’s own words: “Shekhar was not any notable man. He was not even a good man. But he is trying to find himself with honesty within the palimpsest of human experience. May be he will not turn out to be a good companion, but if you care to travel with him till the end, your feelings about him shall not harden—that much I can assure. And who can tell, in this age, you and I may all be kindred characters. Perhaps you may discover a Shekhar within yourself, who is not great, or good, but he is forever agile, independent and honest, terribly honest.”] A Biography of a New Shekhar From the ashes of a few poems a life took birth. In order to live one must burn poems. Life seems to be at the centre of all projects and poetry lies beyond all such projects. Life is made. Poetry becomes—on its own. To become, on your own, is a test of dignity. But in order to become oneself, one has to keep away from all projects. For ages, no one takes any interest in Shekhar’s past. Everyone wants to know about prospects for his future.And his present—somewhat like our eyes, which, after being accustomed to darkness, cannot easily square with a sudden gleam of light. In the words of Nazim Hikmet: *** And he has no idea what all will happen to him Only I know what will happen Because I believed everything he believes I loved all the women he’ll love I wrote all the poems he’ll write I stayed in all the prisons he’ll stay in I passed through all the cities he will visit I suffered all his illnesses I slept all his nights dreamed all his dreams I lost all that he will lose *** ‘A long lost future shall turn golden with the advent of feelings’—this belief had become the past within Shekhar’s nowness. The future tramples all feelings. The moments of deep introspection too disappear. Irregularity becomes the only regularity. The nights do arrive as your own, but their very being there makes them untimely. *** Shekhar had learnt that love’s strains and traction are ultimately liberating. There is no more scrupulous a word than ‘No’ in love. When someone enquires: “Are you in love?”, there is no more precise and faithful a reply than ‘No.’ *** O God, Give the cats a life of vagabondage And to Shekhar, those roads that the cats cut across *** Water never returns and that is the opulence of its existence *** The river’s happiness is not the water, but the journey. *** Shekhar never went anywhere. Not to go anywhere is to truly travel. Sometimes not to go itself is sufficient. In order to express an untrammelled hatred for the dunces and the dolts of this world. *** Shekhar made an excuse of love so that he could pause. And he stopped in places where he sought a pause. He has never abandoned his steadily walking friends to hop into a car.Trains would try to lure him to those unknown, unheard of lands, but he did not choose the paths of animosity. An excuse of love is what he made, and stopped in the places where he wanted to pause. A little crazy Shekhar is not; meaning, he is – quite a lot. *** 18 days and Shekhar is still in the same pair of denims, and in those familiar pair of chappalsfor the past 3 years. Wife is happy with him at home and the mochi—the cobbler, outside. The landlord, like the universe, is unhappy. *** When Shekhar was in class 12, he eloped with a girl, who is now his wife. His wife was looking for a tall sweep. She said “In the neighbourhood and in society there is a lot of dirt. I need a tall enough sweep.” In those days he used to look like Ajay Devgan and Ajay Devgan like him–Premi Aashik Awara Pagal Majnu Diwana. ‘Phool aur Kaante’ he had seen 11 times. The kind of swains you encounter in the Phool aur Kaante predicament are gross and uncivil louts. They taunt girls in public. But the girls finally married these louts because these uncouth, ill-bred ones were not scared of the villains—the khalnayaks. These lovers used to be the examples of the victory of loutishness over villainy and such girls stood as symbols for the victory of tall sweeps over dirt. *** Shekhar likes labour. Not recognition. Salary, yes. Not awards. More than his rights Shekhar worries about his responsibilities. More than the Sundays he looks forward to Mondays. He knows that changing jobs does not mean transforming the world. When Shekhar used to be unemployed a friend used to pronounce—“When you will start at the workplace, all revolution will vanish in thin air.” The world of friends did not have revolutions. Revolutions were only in the world of women. Women were not friends. Friends were unrevolutionary, job seeking. Once in a while they tried revolution in private but for that they needed women. The point of it all is that without unemployment and women, one cannot have revolution. But women in unemployment and revolutions at the workplace were impossibilities. Shekhar likes jobs. Not bureaucrats. A little crazy Shekhar is not; meaning, he is. Quite a lot. *** Ambition is a good thing. But Shekhar does not have that in him. Like all those other things which are thought to be good. But Shekhar does not have them. He was weak in calculation right from his birth. Now the whole world seems to tie him up in knots. At every step he encounters crossroads… *** These days Shekhar can’t
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