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A traveller's tale
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It is ironical that just a few days after the release of his book, `A Traveller and the Road' Mohit Sen passed away. SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY, who spoke to this well-known communist-thinker and ideologue before his death, captures the essence of his life and book.
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IT WAS wholly appropriate that when the world observed solidarity on May Day 2003, a book devoted to a reappraisal of the Communist Movement in India was released at Hyderabad at the local `Odyssey Emerald House' book store. On May 1, 2003, a gathering of the city's leading citizens heard with rapt attention the readings from the city-based communist thinker and ideologue Mohit Sen's recent memoir A Traveller and the Road. And within a few days after its release, the author passed away.
How does one sum up a five hundred and odd page work? Veteran administrator, B.P.R Vithal's introduction came close to capturing the spirit of the volume: If Mohit Sen was the traveller, then the road was India. In Nehru's memorable words, "Sen was a communist with nationalistic sympathies." It is a combination of traits that might seem natural today. However, in the first part of the last century, it is worth recalling, that the movement was largely international in character and communists fought shy of nationalistic sympathies!
As Vithal said, Sen's narrative contains three well-crafted layers: the first offers a rare and restrained glimpse into the personal life of the author -- his distinguished pedigree, his early education in India and at Cambridge, his love relationship and marriage with Cambridge mate and eminent city-based mathematician-educationist Vanaja Iyenger. These comprise the exciting first layer. The second records the inner party struggle of the Communist Party of India (CPI): the various intrigues, shenanigans, loyalties and betrayals. The adherence of a multitude of bewildering party lines often according to external and extraneous dictates--- P.C. Joshi, Ajay Ghosh, S.A. Dange and C. Rajeswar Rao--these constitute an authentic history as seen by a close participant in the movement. Invariably, it is from Sen's own angle of perception, and therefore remains, despite all the truths it uncovers, a subjective account. Sen is quick to admit this. That's his supreme humility and graciousness! The third is a fascinating account viewed against the backdrop of the party struggle: the destalinisation era, the split in the communist movement, the Chinese invasion of 1962, the rise of Indira Gandhi and the Garibi Hatao Programme, the proclamation of the National Emergency, the Janata experiments, the militancy in Punjab, the North-East and elsewhere.
The three aspects were well brought out by a reading of carefully selected extracts from Mohit's book, movingly read by members of the Little Theatre led by the redoubtable Shankar Melkote.
At the venue, Mohit Sen himself- aged 74 - intellectually alert and witty, full of good humour, was a picture of modesty and near self-effacement. Speaking briefly with eloquence and conviction, he attributed the actual writing of the memoir to his spouse Vanaja's inspiration. The book is a testimony to the interesting life Mohit lived as much as his great love for his life companion. It is a celebration of a life of idealism effected through a partnership of two outstanding beings. "My life and wanderings far away from home," Mohit recalled wistfully "had its
compensations, but my long absences contained no worthwhile rewards for Vanaja!"
Sen's life story, full of drama, and action of epic proportions, are painted on an incredibly wide national and international canvas. He scores spectacular successes but meets with great reversals
as well. There is great friendship, but also great betrayals. He strides across Cambridge, Moscow, Beijing, Budapest, Prague and many other world capitals. He meets some of the most towering
personalities of his times: E.M. Forster, F.R. Leavis, Rajani Palme Dutt, Mao Tse Tung, Leo Tsao Chi, P.C. Joshi, Kalpana Dutta, Jaya Prakash Narayan, Indira Gandhi. At home, he says, he received intolerance and witch hunting from senior colleagues and party bosses. "After all, democratic centralism dictated that!" With a tinge of bitterness he recalls the treatment he received from veterans. C Rajeswar Rao, Party General Secretary asked him not to renew his CPI membership because of his continued support to Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and the Congress Party.
Born on March 24, 1929 in Calcutta, Mohit Sen came from an upper middle class, well-connected Bhadralok, Brahmo Samaj background. From his father A.N. Sen, a high court judge of Calcutta and mother Mrinalini Sen, a well-known singer and social worker, early in life he learnt the virtue of a life of idealism, generosity of spirit and nobility of action -- traits that took him logically, as he says, to the communist movement.
RAPT ATTENTION: Selected extracts from the book was movingly read by members of the Little Theatre.
Despite this, there still remain many blind spots and grey areas in Mohit Sen's account: the clean cheat that he gave to Indira Gandhi in spite of all the evidence to the contrary: her basically authoritarian nature and suppression of dissenting opinion, her promotion of a personality cult and `committed' institutions, and the inappropriateness of the situation in India in the 70s with the one with Allande's Chile that Mohit draws upon--- these constitute one significant area.
The other, a more fundamental, is the refusal to see the insufficiency of the Bolshevist philosophy itself: its promotion of the Party(in effect those who speak in the name of the Party, we must remember Molovan Djilas's The New Class) as the vanguard of revolutionary action, its `liquidation' of class enemies, its drive towards political, economic and social centralisation, its denial of faith and general disparagement of religion/spirituality as reactionary world views:, none of these is addressed frontally by Sen. He dismisses Koestler's The God That Failed, containing the testimony of several of the revolutionary writers like George Orwell, Andre Gide and Arthur Koestler who fought in the Spanish Civil War as Cold War propaganda. In fact these were. early warnings regarding the colossal aberrations that were taking place inside the Soviet Union in the name of the Revolution.
None of these basic critiques necessarily make one a supporter or a blind advocate of capitalistic democracy, or a supporter of a myopic Fukayama! This is a Manichean(`If you are not for me you are against me!') approach to social evolution which only the simplistic minded promote, alas!
Ironically Sen himself referred in his conversation as to how his book release in Delhi recently was ignored by the Party bosses, barring A.B. Bardhan. "Thank God," he said , "I am in a democratic state! And no one can kill me!"
Mohit Sen is firm that it is not communism that has failed but the practitioners that have let down the movement. It is their bigotry, arrogance and self-righteousness, their selfish and self-centred behaviour that have obstructed the realisation of the goal of a society based on equity. In future, the movement will be more humane, more charitable with a greater respect for dissenting opinion, there will be less purges and more accommodation. Communism will have a new incarnation as of a more humane kind. It will promote the cause not by competitive extremism but by a larger coalition with like-minded individuals and groups. As Sen concludes almost poetically: "There will be other kinds in the future but communists there will be. More open than we were less arrogant and going along with many others who will not be communists but whose aims, though differently expressed, will not be all that different from and not antagonistic to what Marx wished for humanity. He predicted fulfillment without insisting that a particular party was needed for it."
As Sri Aurobindo says prophetically in his Ideal of Human Unity before he passed away in 1950: "It is not that the principle of communism necessitates any such results or that its system must lead to a termite civilization or the oppression of the individual; it could well be, on the contrary, a measure at once of the fulfillment of the individual and the perfect harmony of a collective being. The already developed systems that go by the name are not really communism but constructions of an inordinately rigid State Socialism. But Socialism itself might well develop away from the Marxist grove and evolve less rigid modes; a cooperative Socialism, for instance, without any bureaucratic rigour of a coercive administration, of a Police State, might one day come into existence."
Communism, says Mohit Sen, will recognise the importance of the heretic in promoting the revolutionary cause. And it is perhaps as a heretic and not as a renegade that history will remember a man called Mohit Sen.
The writer is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Hyderabad.
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