Memoirs of another day

It's taken him more than 30 years to chronicle the experiences he underwent as a strapping, young IAS officer. It had anyway been a long haul for him from the beginning itself, quite literally at that — from getting his bags packed in home Kerala to travelling all the way to farflung, landlocked Manipur.

The year was 1978, and insurgency was not yet so virulent in that Northeast state. C Balagopal had cleared the civil services exams, and had been drafted into the Manipur cadre. In the three years or so that he served in the state, he moved around as a subdivisional officer, and occasionally made desultory jottings in his journal. Family issues perforce made him move to Kerala in 1980, and he eventually resigned from the services in 1983.

After three demanding decades as an entrepreneur, Balagopal has finally had luxury to transform his sketchy jottings and vivid recollections into an anecdotal narrative that steers clear both of the political discourse and that of insurgents' call for right to self-determination: his book is about life, it is about people. The politics, the culture and the insurrections remain in the background; but they do form an invisible and intangible framework to the narrative.

It's been a long time since he returned to his native state, and the world has changed. So, how does a former civil servant contextualise his experiences? Says Balagopal, "One of the issues I faced at the onset (of penning this annal) was how I would be able to keep the knowledge of subsequent events from creeping into the narrative. The way out was to keep the entire thing anecdotal. It was about narrating events and incidents as they unfolded; it was about being anecdotal, rather than judgmental." His views, if any, come forth only in the epilogue.

Balagopal's insightful account, which took all of three months to meticulously stitch together, was ready in 2010 itself but gathered dust for the want of a publisher. In some ways, it fills a gap in the existing literature about Manipur; it is neither about culture nor politics.

It is the kind of documentation that was done by British anthropologists and officials in the pre-Independence era. Since he worked in Manipur at a time when there were very few books on the Northeast for an outsider to read up and enlighten oneself, Balagopal realised that one of the best source materials of knowledge remain chronicles and recollections of people who have worked in the field.

Continues Balagopal, "The British had a system of documenting everything — the district gazetteers being a case in point. It was the responsibility of district collectors to update the gazetteers before they would demit office. You don't have that (practice) anymore. Indians don't seem to be great chroniclers. We just observe and let things go. We talk about things orally, but don't write them out.

"In the West, the recollections of officials, bankers, businessmen, for instance, provide you with a rich source of material (for historians and researchers). Today, most of the current accounts that we have here are journalistic accounts. But memoirs are to be written not only by people like Jawaharlal Nehru and other luminaries, but also by people like us. All these go into the collective memory of the people."

Balagopal's contribution to that collective memory is 'On a Clear Day You Can See India: The Little World of the District Official', that has been published by HarperCollins. The author, whose wife incidentally hails from the city, will be in town on April for a book reading session at the Bangalore International Centre.