Notes from a Divided Land

Publisher – Penguin

Pages – 307

Price – Rs 399

Living for a cause is a difficult love. If it infuses an irrepressible spark in the soul, it also exposes one to confrontations with the self and the world. But staking one’s dreams against the might of reality and swimming against the tide is the stuff of fascinating lives. Ilina Sen’s Inside Chhattisgarh: A Political Memoir is about an activist couple, who left their homes and lived a near-nomadic life in this forested zone of central India, became a part of a major trade union movement and undertook several welfare initiatives for people. The family was eventually, in a way that should worry the Indian state, discredited — Ilina’s doctor-husband Binayak Sen was convicted for sedition and conspiring with the Maoists.

The skeleton of this memoir is marvellous, but the absence of soul pushes it below par. The writer mentions many characters and incidents spanning over three decades. She details the birth of the area’s first civil society movement, Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, and its charismatic leader Shankar Guha Niyogi. Like many other outsiders, Niyogi made Dalli-Rajhara his home and worked for the rights of workers employed in India’s biggest steel plant in Bhilai. There are awakenings, forgotten heroes and their experiments for a just society. But the people mostly come across as mere proper nouns. We do not witness their inner lives and the contradictions they lived through. An activist rarely leads a bland life. His is a matrix of passion and despair, street marches and clandestine activities, of smaller compromises to achieve the bigger goal.
A good memoir offers insights, hitherto unknown, about the author and her companions. But instead of lived experience, the book largely comes across as a historical account, which also often fails due to weak narration.

Even the Sen family and their daughters rarely appear as vibrant beings except for the chapter on Binayak’s trial. The book lifts in a few segments when she insightfully captures life in Chhattisgarh or that of her family. She observes, for instance, that people here consume a variety of leaves from trees, plants, even bushes and call them bhaji. “The distinction between a bhaji and a weed”, she notes, “comes from a philosophy of agricultural monoculture that is in complete contrast to the culture of biodiversity present in Chhattisgarh”.

Ilina’s perspective is clearly established. She correctly identifies the problems associated with the state, and repeatedly underlines the hunt for industrial land that denudes it. The absence that surprises is of the Maoists. Save for a few cursory references, the writer skirts around the insurgency that defined Chhattisgarh over the last decade.

The book is most truly a “memoir” while talking about the suffering the family underwent following Binayak’s arrest. The police case was clearly farcical.  Nevertheless, the case largely rested on his 33 meetings with the CPI (Maoist) Politburo member Narayan Sanyal in jail, and his alleged logistical support to the Maoists. As an activist, it was absolutely legitimate for him to meet Sanyal. But he has not yet convincingly responded to the question: was there any other occasion when he met any other prisoner in jail, even twice? Also, did he ever facilitate the stay of Sanyal in Raipur as the police alleged? None of this would make him guilty, but only help establish the facts.

Few in Chhattisgarh believe that the affable doctor was ever capable of sedition. His bond with Sanyal would, at the most, be a mere friendly association. Ilina passionately defends Sen, but skips the details. Perhaps one should wait for Binayak’s memoirs for that story.