My thoughts about my grand father.

Monday, July 11, 2011

It has not been comfortable for me to contemplate writing about my grand father. Firstly I did not, and still do not, consider myself really qualified to speak about the life and times of Kalimohan Ghosh, except to reminisce as a relative. But then, he died ten years before I was born, so there is really no question of having any direct memory of him.

But, I remember my mother talking about him. I remember her mentioning with regret, that his children and her brothers, some of whom were well established and accomplished as writers and journalists, and many of them champions and promoters of Rabindranath’s creative vision, did not take it upon themselves to highlight this important and inspirational persons silent work behind the scenes with the downtrodden and the out of site people living in villages surrounding Santiniketan.

It eventually became clear to me, that among all the children of Kalimohan Ghosh, of which seven reached adulthood and one died soon after birth, my mother was the closest to Kalimohan, and felt the loss of him the most. My mother did not consider herself gifted like her brothers, and did not feel qualified enough to write about her father. However, she was eventually driven to write, in absence of her brothers doing so, a lengthy article in the women’s magazine “Sreyashi”, a copy of which she sent to me. That had become one of my important introduction and reference point to my grand father, Kalimohan. Clearly, my mother idolized her dad and at the same time considered him as her true friend, guide and moral pathfinder, and losing him at the tender age of 15 was an indelible scar in her life. Even in her late years my mother often mentioned her father and wished he would guide her with his moral compass through trying times.

That moral compass played a big role in Kalimohan’s life and it left its mark on my mother, who also inherited my grandmother’s stubbornness and willpower. I now understand that my grandfather had acquired most of the strength of his convictions through Rabidnranath Tagore, particularly about the need to eliminate barriers people had erected between themselves in India over centuries and millennia of accumulated dead habit and selfishness. This involved caste barriers among hindus, religious barriers between Hindu, Muslim and other faiths, and ethnic barriers between mainstream Indians and the aboriginals and marginal people. Kalimohan had understood that the “root cause” of the inherent weakness, division and injustice in India, which made it possible for outsiders to rule this grand nation, was established on falsehood, but that the practice was deep rooted and would need enormous effort to eradicate. Lecturing people will not work. Promoting one’s own system and trying to convert others into it will also not do.

There would be a need to set example with their own lives, Tagore’s, Kalimohan’s and everyone else that joins this grand experiment, that they are above the smallness of such barriers. There would be need to rebuild trust between people, trust that had been missing for centuries.

Tagore was like a father figure for Kalimohan, who lost his own father very early in life, and was a rudderless teen when he was tending to fall prey to a violent form of Swadeshi, where one might physically create or support violence against the ruling British Raj, in order to drive them from India. A chance encounter with Rabindranath Tagore, in his thirties at the time, altered Kalimohan’s life. Rabindranath had spoken to him and shown him the real “root cause” because of which it was possible for a handful of Englishmen to exploit India, while Indians enjoyed perhaps a five thousand fold numerical advantage. If this root cause, the social evil that divides people, could be removed, and Indians joined hands with each other, there would really be no need to push the British out. They would go willingly and as a friend would interact thence with India as equal partners in a world of equal humans.

There is another angle that I would like to add here. The work done by my grandfather first in the Tagore estates in todays Bangladesh and later around Santiniketan really are efforts towards economic reorganization of the land, and finding a balance between both man and nature, as well as urban and rural communities. Rabindranath Tagore had realized, through his study of Indian history, philosophy, and study of the west, and applying that knowledge through his analytical mind, that India’s salvation did not lie in either merely aping the west or falling back on the orthodoxy of a divided nation. More profoundly, he had realized that  the real source of all of India’s philosophical and spiritual strength and creative zeal came primarily from a rural environment. The Urban centers  were for creation of material goods and there was a healthy exchange between machined goods from the cities and towns and agricultural produce, goods created by rural artisans as well as social, spiritual and cultural creativity from the rural areas. Quality of life in the past, was different but equal in the urban and rural landscape. This was no more the case, as India had changed to adopt a twisted version of the western economic model, whereby the Urban centers exploit the rural masses, impoverishing them both materially, economically, spiritually and culturally.

There would be a need to correct this imbalance and it was going to be a long and arduous task, requiring a multifaceted effort. There would be a need to re-evaluate our economic roadmap, our vision for the future. New studies in sociology and a deeper understanding of the varied people of this land would be needed. India may have to undertake complete reconstruction of her national economic and cultural infrastructure.

Tagore had realized that for a country that was colonized, this task was not going to be easy and not going to be funded by the Government. Therefore, he tried within his means, and with like minded people, to identify what could be done with limited resources and manpower, that might set a process and an example, showing the way for the future generations.  He knew India was going to be politically free one day, perhaps after he was gone.

To that end, rural reconstruction meant more to Tagore than just making a few roads, setting up a few schools, opening a few medical facilities and showing them better hygiene or ways to realize higher yield for their crop. All that was important. But to Tagore, the underlying need would be for the villages to no more feel underprivileged, and disadvantaged compared to the urban folks. The village life had to be fulfilling enough so that they can feel proud of their lives and have enough affluence so that they can have some leisure in which to engage in nourishing the rich cultural heritage of the nation, adding more folk value into our lives. The villages needed to get their dignity back and the relation between the Urban and the Rural had to be a symbiosis of equals and not one of an exploiter and exploited.

This was a work Tagore had figured would be task of the new generations to accomplish. He had no illusion that this was going to be very very hard to do, and simply copying the west was not enough. One would need all the help it could get, but one would have to find unique solutions, and create new path where none existed. Most importantly, it would need experimentation to see what works and what does not.

He found stalwarts that believed in his vision and came from near and far to join hands, some temporarily and some for their entire lives.

My grandfather, Kalimohan, was converted into this vision as a wayward teenager, and remained the worker behind Tagore’s vision on rural reconstruction till he died. Almost twenty years his junior, Kalimohan died a year before Tagore did, leaving behind a wife, six sons, and a star struck daughter of 15 that lamented his loss for the rest of her life.

Other than my mother, there was one more person that spoke to me often enough about Grand father, and that was my grand mother, Manorama Ghosh. She outlived her husband by some forty years, and spent long hours with me speaking with her when I was in my twenties and thirties. I remember most of those conversations, and intend to jot them down by and by.

Appreciate your comments or suggestions.

Santanu Mitra