Over the last few days, an Youtube video of the Bengal chief-minister, Mamata Bannerjee giving an English speech has gone virall. The title of the video was catchy: ‘ekti ingriji bhashon ebong ekti bangali mukhyomontri’, which literally translates as: One English Speech and One Bengali Chief Minister. A more acceptable translation would have been: ‘An English Speech and A Bengali Chief Minister’, but the essence of the Bangla numerical pronoun ‘ekti’ wouldn’t have been brought out that way. ‘Ekti’ usually goes with non-humans; while ‘ekjon’ is the pronoun that fits humans. This is presumably not a slip.
It shows Bannerjee is making a speech in English among a bunch of suited attendees who happen to be potential business investors. Her English was far from fluent, grammatically incorrect, accent broken and some information terribly wrong. I see now-a-days Bengalis wear suits everywhere they’re desperate to seek recognition: office parties, marriage ceremonies, academic conferences; and speak English everywhere they’re desperate to seek attention: with fellow Bengali co-passengers on airplanes, with waiters in restaurants, with spouse when angry.
The Bengalis, given this scenario, are understandably ashamed of a Bengali CM stumbling upon to speak ‘proper’ English. The Canadians say the Québécoise are more French than the French; and I say the Bengalis are more English than the English.
What dismayed the Bengalis more than anything else is the imagined incommensurability between the figure of a leader and her inability to speak English which is the language of the Indian Parliament, thereby puportedly the language of the people. I personally see this action of hers as totally subversive: a leader instead of carrying a pre-scripted speech drafted by some IAS from her cabinet is choosing to speak ‘wrong’ English before ‘bradraloks’, Bengalis and otherwise.What I found striking is the manner in which the archetypical image of the [Bengali] ‘leader’ unpacked in the discourse.
Unlike the Zapatistas, the Indian people’s movement has often been mobilized by vanguards from the ‘outside’, more accurately by the urban de-classed intellectuals. This explains why CharuMajumder and Kanu Sanyal are memorialized as the leaders of the Naxalbari movement, while Jangal Santhal is typically forgotten.
I had traveled across the peninsular Mexico extensively, with confidence there’d be some graffiti at some point hyperboling the golden trinity: Marx, Lenin, Engels for it was such a common sight across Havana [Cuba], not to mention India. I found none to my surprise. Zapata’s is the oft-quoted image everywhere; and the utmost surprise for an Indian would be the illustrations of peasant struggle by renowned artist Fernando Castro Pacheco right on the portico of the government headquarters at Merida.
The Zapatistas took their name from Zapata and they stress on the ‘difference’ such that they aren’t clubbed with any other ultra-left armed struggle, even though in the common sense their kinship with some seems obvious. The Zapatistas speak Tzolkin, and are known to have had several meetings and rallies where some obscure ill-clad peasant or an unknown cadre from the third or fourth tier made speech, on issues that’re theirs, in the face of all preparedness among the audience that Marcos or a ‘leader’ of similar stature would ascend to the podium.
The archetype of ‘our’ leader, on the other hand, is one of sagacity, learnedness and refinement: the ‘bhadralok’ as the epitome of the public intellectual [the legacy tracing back to Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’] That the Indian nationalist leaders, and of-course by no coincidence, almost without exceptions tried to set themselves apart from any Tom-Dick-Harry by irreproducible sartorial mannerisms [think of: Gandhi, Rammohan, Tagore, Tilak, Vivekananda, DayanandSaraswati to name a few].
I watched another Youtube video a documentary on Maoist camps in the remote jungles of Chattisgarh. The guy who is the coach at the firing squad doubles as a teacher of Communist doctrines in the evening. ‘Lenin, Engels, Mao, Stalin’, he confirms in the local dialect, finger counting the four names as though retrieving from memory, ‘are the leaders of the people’. He doesn’t even speak ‘proper’ Hindi and presumably haven’t had first-hand access to the thoughts of any he mentions. At best, he may be assumed to have heard on what they’re said to have said. Yet no Bhagat Singh, no Chityala Ailamma, no Titumir, no Birsa, but the quadruple occupies rock-bottom people’s fantasy of ‘people’s leaders’!
2.
As I sit in Tierr Adentro waiting for my sandwich I wonder what makes the Zapatistas so popular in the public imagination, while in contrast the image of the Maoists we’ve in India is one very estranged, ostracized, asocial.
Tierr Adentro is a cultural center-cum-café–and of course the most in restaurant in San Cristobol de las Casas, a pretty town in the southern Mexican region of the Chiapas, renowned in as much for the Zapatista insurgency against the state, paramilitary and corporate incursions into the Chiapas as for its coffee. The Chiapas is the second largest producer of cacao, yielding 60 percent of Mexico’s total coffee production. Harnessed, more accurately exploited, by the US-based United Fruits Company, it tops Central America’s banana export. Cocao, bananas and corn cumulatively make Chiapas Mexico’s second largest agricultural producer. Despite all its resources, Chiapas is one of Mexico’s least ‘developed’ provinces [at least in terms of the conventional socio-economic indicators]. While resorts climb taller on the touristy beaches of Mexico, most of the inhabitants beyond the towns don’t have access to safe drinking water, let alone healthcare and education. Resonance with the Indian North-East, Chattisgarh, and the Jangalmahal would not at all be far-fetched! The indigenous people of Chiapas, represented by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, organized under the leadership of Sub-commander Marcos, declared war on the Mexican government on January 1, 1994 the same day the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented. This had been an armed struggle that subsided and re-emerged in cycles, but hasn’t completely been resolved till now.
Throughout my stay in Mexico shots of excitement came from the tequila, 1910 Revolution, the Mayan civilization, Frida Kalho; but one mystery seems to grow larger the more I think about it: what makes the Zapatistas so popular? Souvenir shops sell posters and postcards of Marcos, Zapatista military dolls, movies and documentaries, shops sell and common people (to be met just across the street, not an ultra-left intellectual) wear t-shirts with Zapatista logos/slogans and images of Marcos, they have their own shop selling souvenirs, books, coffee, handicrafts, even have franchises. Hailing from Kolkata, the erstwhile leftist bastion and being groomed within a left-oriented university culture, I lament that I can’t imagine sporting a t-shirt with an image of say, Kishenji or Chatradhar Mahato. Is it because in fear of the state? I doubt how many of us would have sported Maoist gears, even if, let’s say, it wouldn’t have antagonized the state. Beyond the state machineries, our cultural grooming estranges the Maoists.
As such, there is little doubt about the fact the creed of Indian ‘Maoism’ is an extrapolation of the Naxalite insurgency that, back in the 1960’s, was vectored by the impact of student movements in China and Sorbonne, following which urban ‘de-classed’ elites went ‘back to the village’ to regenerate and fight for rural/tribal issues. They often became, no generalizations intended though, self-professed [as opposed to democratically nominated] spokespersons/vanguards, unlike the Zapatistas (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) comprising indigenous people who took up arms without having to be mobilized from the ‘outside’.
‘To make us visible’, says Marcos, photos always featuring him in a black mask and with a pipe, ‘we covered our faces…We bet the present has a future, and we die to live…We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.’ I bought a Zapatista doll that now hangs inspirationally from the wall beside my bed-side table. It is unfortunate though that the Maoists have anywayfailed to saturate the ordinary (wo)man’s heart. The CPIML Liberation had barely managed to win 1 seat (in Assam, that too not in belts they’ve stronger ghettos) among 56 candidates in 1999, which too they lost among 65 out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha Elections in 2004. Elections can be undemocratic and figures manipulable! Fair enough! But how on earth could the Salwa Judum, no matter how unconstitutional and divisive itsdeployment was, be constituted of youths from the Naxal-hit area itself? Far from being people’s struggle, the Naxals are, at least in this case, being seen as a discretely violent entity people needed protection against. Now that’s sad! I had traveled to ‘Jangalmahal’–Jhargram and Jhalda to be specific–where I came across local youths confidentially confessing to being forcefully recruited for para-military training by the ultra-lefts. Refusal would imply harassment, both for themselves and their families.
The Zapatistas, on the other hand, won the local hearts all without force. They don’t want to topple the government; all they want is to properly implement the Constitution protecting all its rights and resources for the indigenous people.
I’ve finished my sandwich, savoring every bit of it, while my laptop lay open before me for they offer free wifi. I occasionally look at the beautiful handicrafts, made by the rock-bottom Chiapas women to supplement their family income, if at all they had any. Those were on display and sale around the restaurant, housed by Zapatista Artists Collaborative. I leave 5 pesos tips for us white-collared employees, money comes prior to dignity–, and proceed to the next must-see tourist destination on my guide-book.
3.
She raises her eyebrows and her mouth gapes wide as I tell her about the farmer-suicides in India. ‘Why?’, she exclaims. She is a young woman who hosted me in Hoctun, a very small town one without a bank or a post-office in the Yucatan province of Southern Mexico. I understand she isn’t apparently on the same register as mine. I’ve just arrived from the Chiapas with the Zapatista memories still overwhelming.
200,000 farmers reportedly committed suicide since 1997, averaging some 40 a day. While cars become cheaper, costs of agriculture rises in India. While food grains rot in go-downs, people die of hunger. While people die of hunger, we gloat over ‘our’ nuclear power. I narrate this to her. We then proceed for dinner she has made: pasta with fresh seafood.
During our conversation over the diner, she tells, ‘No peasant across Mexico, I guarantee, has ever heard anything as weird as farmer suicides’. My mouth gapes this time! Following the 1910 Revolution 53,000 sqkms of land was distributed between 1910-28 among 500,000 peasants across 1500 indigenous communities, another 180,000 sqkms during 1934-40. The proprietorship changed, in what seemed overnight, from the landlord class to the peasants/tillers; and indeed 16,000 sqkms of land in the 2nd installment was seized from US-owned agricultural units, thereby risking Mexico’s foreign relations with its big-boss neighbor, in order to be handed down to the peasants.
I have been told that thousands of men, women and children marched across the roads of Mexico City holding placards reading ‘We all are Marcos’ back at the time when Marcos was ‘wanted’. Even Chewas assassinated in the obscure Bolivian jungles, but Marcos still rides his motorcycle freely across Mexico, with no security whatsoever!
We had a sumptuous diner: seafood is my all-time favorite and Yucatan is known for its subtle variations in regional cuisines. I walk to the kitchen to put the dishes on the sink. I see the thrown-away plastic wrappers the seafood came with. Those’re all bought from the Walmart! ‘Grocery, fish and meat, anything’, my host explains, ‘is way cheaper in the Walmart at the nearest city than Hoctun, if at all available here.’ She’s volunteering in an NGO, and understandably living on a strict budget, and like thousands of other fellow Mexicans, has to compellingly buy stuff from the supermarket although she hates to. Hoctun is barely 50 kms off the sea, and people rely on the Walmart for shrimps!
The Zapatistas have taken care of the Mexican peasants; almost all own their piece of land. What about the fisher, though?
[This unpublished piece was drafted in 2012, immediately following his trip to Mexico. We feel that some of the concerns expressed in this piece are still relevant. However, the statistical information used here–retrieved from Wikipedia–are now dated. The author had retrieved them at the time of writing. At that point, they were fresh. Likewise, the temporal references invoked in this piece are with reference to when the piece was drafted.]
Cover image, Images courtesy: Avishek Ray, reuters.com, pinterest.com, chiapas-support.org
