Remembering Mandela

Nelson Mandela is dead. In the days that followed, the half-black president of USA, a nation that had Mandela on its terror watch list until 2008, has sombrely delivered platitudes to position himself as next great tall black man. In the sad state of things of the world, where powers-to-be determine memory and imagination, such cynical posturing might even work. Mandela, who among other things had actively organised the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK — Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the African National Congress and never ruled out violent resistance as a weapon of the weak who are violently repressed, will be suitably Gandhified. The spears have been suitably blunted so that they make docile museum pieces. In his closing years, Mandela had increasingly been packaged into a Dalai-Lamaesque smiling wise grandfather figure. In his later years, Mandela did not fight his new image too strongly. But some people in some parts of the world remember another Mandela from another time.

My first exposure to Mandela had been through a small pamphlet on him, a brief biography in Bangla, that I picked up from the stall of a small non-CPI(M) Left party during Durga Pujo in Kolkata (more Mother goddess connection later). Throughout its rule, the CPI(M), loath to any real radicalism in West Bengal, chose to pep up the faithful and the hopeful by showing glowing solidarity to radical underdogs worldwide through posters and meetings. Nelson Mandela was at the very top of this agenda till his freedom. My city, Kolkata, often sported posters declaring ‘Nelson Mandelar Mukti Chai’ (Freedom for Nelson Mandela!). Not that the CPI(M) cared so much for his freedom, but it did know that such a statement had some political currency in West Bengal.

The party wanted to cash in on the brand value of Mandela. In the late 60s, Kolkata had more people assemble in solidarity with Vietnam than probably the annual number of ‘adventurous’ Bombay and Delhi-wallahs who to go to Goa to ‘unwind’, or for that matter, the number of people who thronged  Anna Hazare’s ‘second independence movement’. Kolkata had this reputation.

Which is precisely why, in his first visit to India in 1990, Mandela chose to go to Kolkata — not as a short stopover, but as a destination. The city did not require the ‘cleanliness’ generated by the removal of ‘illegal’ roadside hawkers in preparation for Mandela’s visit, as was done during the recent visit by David Cameron. Mandela came into his own at Soweto, which, in his own words, was “the teeming metropolis of matchbox houses, tin shanties, and dirt roads, the mother city of black urban South Africa, the only home I ever knew as a man before I went to prison”. Kolkata was more home to him than London would ever be.

Mandela addressed the jam-packed crowds at the Eden Gardens of Kolkata on October 18, 1990.

That also happened to be the day of Kali pujo, the auspicious occasion for worshipping the dark mother goddess. A popular saying surfaced after Mandela’s departure. Why did Mandela love Kolkata?  Because, in the Kali pujo pandal, he saw the statue of a dark woman (goddess Kali) standing over a white man (Lord Shib) who lay on the ground, seemingly vanquished. That Nelson Mandela had a place in the popular imagination of West Bengal was undeniable. We had made something out of him — there was a place in many hearts where he met us. That was then.

What did it mean to remember Mandela after 1990, when increasingly the dreams of youth and early adulthood of the top 5 per cent earning class had space not for Mandela or the real world of browns, but for the life of a group of six white men and women living in New York City. Chandler and Phoebe mapped on to their solidarity-world. Mandela had quietly exited. Such was the tragedy of post-1991 times in sectors of urban Hindustan. Much of what we learned did not come from the real world, but from the make-believe spaces we inhabited. To create a worldview out of fictional artefacts of white people also means one needs Wikipedia to know about Patrice Lumumba.

Soon after Mandela’s 1990 visit to Kolkata, anti-imperialism became passé and uncool, even embarrassing, for those who had imported their ideas of propriety, aesthetics, values, sophistication, erudition, articulateness, fashion, lifestyle, knowledge, progress, selfhood and most ironically, rebelliousness  (if the contrarianism and rage of the desi 15-25-year-olds of top 5 per cent of income groups can be called so) from the white people’s previous year’s stale flavour.

Mandela’s death reminds me that there was a different time and imagination. The hunger index of the Indian Union, and the obstinacy of the people whose blood and sweat produce the satellite services that beam today’s white-people-sitcoms and other necessities of a ‘cosmopolitan’ life, also tell us that the time is not past. The time is now, around us, if we cared and dared to snap out of a trance-like fixation to white lullabies. Getting lost in book-learned tropes, narratives and other fashionable talk-things can serve the function of obfuscating reality — a reality that has too much non-whiteness and the shadow of our dark ancestors in it. “We were taught — and believed — that the best ideas were English ideas”, wrote Mandela. For the Gabonese, these were French ideas. For the Balinese, these were Dutch ideas. The global South still suffers from those who continue their belief in these ideas. In these times, when white domination is not ‘out there’ but inside our heads and souls, we need to find our selves, hiding behind whatever fantasy mask we have chosen to wear. The quest for justice, truth and reconciliation first needs the acknowledgement that domination is wrong. Domination by those with dark skins and white masks is doubly wrong.

The Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya once allegedly said something to the effect of ‘to hell with your obscure and pretentious theories. If you go a few miles south of Kolkata, real tigers of the Sundarban will eat you up’. In the thicket of reality, where the blood and hope of a dark people has still not been sanitized and appropriated into fashionable, marketable fiction, the ghost of another Mandela lingers. This Nelson Mandela now lives atop a tree in the forests of Sundarbans.

The author is a brain scientist at MIT