Harbart Read online

  Dol (p. 23): Spring festival commemorating Krishna and Radha on their swing of love, marking the day when Krishna smeared Radha’s face with color. The word dol means “swing.”

  Old Ganga (p. 25): The Adi Ganga, also known as Gobindapur Creek, Surman’s Nullah, and Tolly’s Nullah, was the main branch of the Hooghly River from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century but has since virtually dried up. Located immediately behind the Keoratala Crematorium in South Calcutta, it is frequently used by mourners to immerse the ashes of their dead.

  Ashtami (p. 25): The Eighth Day of the Durga Puja celebrations in West Bengal. The ninth is Nabami and the tenth, Dashami, the names arising from the Bengali words for “eighth,” “ninth,” etc.

  Jaya (p. 25): Another name for the goddess Durga. Hence the use of the word divine in the letter which Khororobi writes to her.

  Rabba! Rabba! (p. 29): An exclamation in Punjabi, equiavalent to “Lord! Lord!”

  Vishwakarma Puja (p. 30): A day of celebration for Vishwakarma, a Hindu god, considered to be the divine architect. In many parts of Eastern India, especially West Bengal, the holiday is an occasion to fly kites.

  Manja (p. 31): Special string for “fighter” kites, prepared by gumming, coloring, and coating with powdered glass.

  Boudi (p. 36): Bou in Bengali means both bride and wife. Di is a shortened form of “didi,” meaning older sister. Together, it is a term of endearment, and respectful address, for the woman married to one’s older brother, and for a married woman by any younger person, in and outside the family.

  Morning Will Come Again (p. 32): Phir Subah Hogi (1958), Indian film produced and directed by Ramesh Saigal, starring Raj Kapoor and Mala Sinha: an adaption of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

  with money saved up from his tuitions (p. 40): Older, college-going students often provide tutoring to younger school-going boys and girls as a way of earning some pocket money.

  “Countless revolutionary martyrs have laid down their lives …” (p. 40): From Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government.

  November 19, 1970 was the night of the bloody Barasat killings (p. 41): “Eleven Naxalites were shot dead and their bullet-ridden bodies thrown along a highway in the Barasat area … Bullets of service revolvers found in the bodies of the youths in the Barasat area, and other reports published … as to how they were rounded up in the Maidan area while holding a secret meeting, left hardly anybody in doubt as to the ‘mystery’ of the massacre.”—T. Goswami, cited in Dilip Hiro, Inside India Today (London: Routledge, 1976).

  Charu Majumder (p. 41): Father of the Naxalite movement. Wrote, during 1965–66, various articles based on Marx-Lenin-Mao thought, the “Historic Eight Documents,” which went on to form the basis of the Naxalite movement. Founded the CPI(M–L) in 1969 after the Naxalbari Uprising (May 25)— a peasants’ uprising at Naxalbari in Darjeeling, during which they began to forcefully recapture their lands. He died in police custody in 1972.

  in his communiqué dated May 22, 1970 (p. 41): Charu Majumder, “Avenge The Heroic Martyrs” (October 27, 1970):

  “The incident at Barasat clearly shows how isolated from the people are these assassins and how panic-stricken and scared out of their wits are they. They had not the courage to face these youths even after getting their hands tied. That is why the assassins fired five or six shots at every one of these youths and killed them one by one. This gang of cowards knows that those whom they are murdering today are immortal sons of India—worthy of begin respected by every country, every nation. That is why the cowards murdered these youths, who knew no fear of death, in the darkness of the night and left their dead bodies on the roadside.

  “None of those political parties which are today carrying on a dog-fight among themselves for ministerial offices, shedding crocodile tears for the martyrs, and trying to utilize these murders in the fight for votes, can escape responsibility for the murders. The hands of each of them are dyed in the blood of the martyrs. They all are providing political arguments in justification of the murder of the revolutionaries and are secretly supplying the police with information about the whereabouts of the revolutionaries …

  “Every revolutionary cadre should take the resolve to avenge the heroic martyrs. These butchers are enemies of the Indian people, enemies of progress and lackeys of foreigners. The Indian people will not be liberated until these butchers are liquidated.”

  The Patriot and The Southern Country (p. 43): The Patriot is a translation of Deshabrati, the principal Naxalite journal. The Southern Country is a translation of Dakshin Desh, both the name of a magazine and the group that published it—a group within the CPI (M), which advocated/promoted armed agrarian revolution based on Mao’s thought, in place of parliamentary democracy.

  Police dog, Debi Roy (p. 45): Chief of the Detective Department at the time and notorious for his leading role in the violent repression of the Naxal movement in Calcutta.

  Roll shop (p. 46): The roll—eggs, onions and/or a skewer (or kathi, from the Bengali word for “stick”) of grilled chicken rolled up in a paratha—is a common roadside snack in Calcutta. The most common options at such shops would be a chicken roll, egg roll, egg-chicken roll, etc.

  Bhuidola (p. 46): “Earthquake!” in a Hindi dialect.

  Tarapith (p. 51): “A shakta pith [seat of shakti], and the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye. It is also the home of the great goddess Tara … notorious for the unsavoury Tantric rituals and animal sacrifices which were performed in the temple. Stranger things still were rumored to take place after sunset in the riverside burning ground on the edge of town, outside the boundaries of both village life and the conventions of Bengali society.”—William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).

  Ghutiari Sharif (p. 51): A tiny suburb in the hinterland of South 24-Parganas, Ghutiari Sharif boasts a mazaar or dargah of Pir Ghazi Mubarak Ali Sahab, rumored to have kept wild tigers as pets. According to legend, sometime in the seventeenth century, this village, then part of the Sunderbans, was hit by a severe drought for several months and it was only due to Ghazi Sahab’s meditation that the rains finally arrived. The residents were saved but the great man paid with his life.

  Eglinton-shaheb (p. 54): William Eglinton (1857–1933). “Of all the famous mediums in America and Europe of those days, Mr. Eglinton was supposed to be the best and the most reliable. He acquired a worldwide reputation as a psychical and materialising medium… While in Calcutta, Mr. Eglinton gave demonstrations of his wonderful super-normal powers in the houses of some European and Indian gentlemen. [Of these,] the following are worth mentioning: Spirit writing on slate, on white paper and blank card, materialisation of spirits, levitation (i.e. floating in air), apport (i.e. passing through solid substance), and conveying of letters between London and Calcutta in a moment.”—Mrinal Kanti Ghosh, “W. Eglinton, The Famous Medium” in Life Beyond Death (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1999).

  William Stead’s Borderland magazine … Miss Julia’s spirit (p. 55): William Thomas Stead (1849–1912), British journalist, editor, and publisher who founded the periodical Review of Reviews (1890). After becoming increasingly interested in spiritualism, he founded the spiritualist quarterly Borderland in 1893. Stead claimed to be in receipt of messages from the spirit world and, in 1892, to be able to produce automatic writing. His spirit contact was alleged to be the departed Julia A. Ames, an American temperance reformer and journalist whom he met in 1890 shortly before her death. In 1909, he established Julia’s Bureau, where inquirers could obtain information about the spirit world from a group of resident mediums.

  W. Stainton Moses (p. 55): William Stainton Moses (1839–1892), an English cleric and spiritualist medium. His automatic scripts began to appear in his books Spirit Identity (1879) and Spirit Teachings (1883). Also the author of Psychography (1882) and others.

  Richet (p. 55): Charles Robert Richet (
1850–1935). Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1913. Known for his investigations into the physiology of respiration and digestion, as well as epilepsy, the regulation of body heat, and a wide array of other subjects, including parapsychology. In 1891, he founded the Annales des sciences psychiques. As a scientist, he was positive about a physical explanation for paranormal phenomena and coined the term ectoplasm in 1894.

  Crookes (p. 55): Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), a British chemist and physicist who worked on spectroscopy. A pioneer of vacuum tubes, he invented the Crookes Tube in 1875, and the Crookes Radiometer. Late in life, he became interested in spiritualism, conducting experiments with the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home and attesting to the veracity of the ghost of Katie King, materialized by lady medium Miss Florence Cook.

  Meyers (p. 55): Mrinal Kanti Ghosh’s Life Beyond Death has a mention of F. W. Meyers, so it is safe to assume that this is the same Meyers being mentioned. Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901) was a poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research and believed that a theory of consciousness must be part of a unified model of mind derived from the full range of human experience, including not only normal psychological phenomena but also a wide variety of abnormal and “supernormal” phenomena.

  Sai Baba (p. 56): Sathya Sai Baba (born Sathya Narayana Raju; 1926–2011) was an Indian guru, cult leader, and philanthropist. His purported materializations of vibhuti (holy ash) and small objects such as rings, necklaces, and watches, along with reports of miraculous healings, resurrections, clairvoyance, and bilocation, and were a source of both fame and controversy. His acts were based on sleight of hand though his devotees considered them signs of his divinity.

  Thakurpo (p. 58): Affectionate moniker for the son (“pola,” “son,” shortened to “po”) of one’s husband’s older brother (“Thakur” or “god”).

  As strong as Balaram (p. 59): The elder brother of Krishna. Etymologically, Balarama derives from the Sanskrit words bala (meaning “strength”) and Rama (a name of a god). The stories associated with him emphasize his love of wine and his enormous strength.

  Washing powder Nirma (p. 76): A brand of low-priced detergent launched in 1969, which emerged as the competitor to Surf. Its advertising jingle, proclaiming it washed white clothes as white as milk and made colored clothes shine and sparkle, played continually on television and before the movies in theaters, was so popular that it remained unchanged for more than thirty years.

  Stoneman (p. 77): “He strikes only when Calcutta sleeps. His victims are street people, Calcutta’s helpless beggars, lunatics and rickshaw pullers who share their muddy concrete beds with the city’s rats, garbage and disease. And his is the perfect murder weapon in a crumbling city of broken streets—an anonymous, 50-pound concrete slab that is always taken from near his sleeping victims. He has killed seven people in the past three months, crushing their skulls with a single blow … They call him, simply, the Stoneman.”—Mark Fineman, “A Calcutta Murderer Slinks from Depths of Depravity,” Los Angeles Times (October 9, 1989).

  Gopal Bhaar (p. 80): “Jester and sometimes barber to Raja Krishnachandra of Krishnanagar in eighteenth-century Bengal. The raja, in owing allegiance both to his Hindu subjects and to the imperial Muslim nabob of Murshidabad, is continually faced with conflicts of obligation. He has the responsibility of keeping the peace, of reconciling the internal needs of the people of Krishnanagar with the external demands of the nabob. It is Gopal, the clown and trickster, who through his comic wit and playfulness inevitably enables the raja to perform this function.”—Lee Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  Harshad Mehta (p. 82): A financier (1954–2001), the prime architect of a bank securities scam, estimated to have involved fifty billion rupees, that shook the subcontinent’s banking system in 1992. Mehta was jailed that year.

  Chandernagore (p. 84): Established as a French colony in 1673, when the French obtained permission to establish a trading post on the right bank of the Hooghly River, and was, for a time, the main center for European commerce in Bengal.

  Saha-da–Swapan case (p. 100): Satyajit Ray’s cremation on April 24, 1992, was overshadowed by controversy after local goon Smashan [“Crematorium”] Swapan addressed Police Commissioner B. K. Saha as Saha-da [informally, as a brother]. The proof of proximity with the goon cost Saha his chair.

  CESC (p. 104): Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation.

  Dhanu, the LTTE’s live human bomb (p. 105): Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, known as Dhanu, was a member of the Black Tigers, the suicide squad of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). She assassinated the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, Tamil Nadu. When Dhanu bent to touch Rajiv Gandhi’s feet in seeming reverence, she activated an RDX-based device embedded with approximately ten thousand two-millimeter steel pellets held in a blue denim belt. At least fourteen others were also killed. The LTTE is a militant organization from Sri Lanka; at the time India had just ended its involvement, through the Indian Peace Keeping Force, in the Sri Lankan Civil War.

  Loadshedding (p. 107): An intentionally engineered electrical power shutdown where electricity delivery is stopped for nonoverlapping periods of time over different parts of the distribution region. Loadsheddings—which lasted up to twelve or sixteen hours sometimes—were very much a part of daily life in West Bengal during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.