Remembering and forgetting heroes

If you were unaware of two important red-letter days in late March, you are not alone. Bhagat Singh was executed on March 23, 1931 and Shurjo Sen was born on March 22, 1894. Governments that utilise half a chance to put full page ads and billboards with various fathers, mothers and other demigods of the nation observed it, silently. Dwelling on these characters can cloud the mind of subjects who were sold only the ‘swaraj via Congress mid-wived ahimsa’ story. The anti-colonial struggle might start taking more hues beyond the Tricolour.In today’s Lahore, few want Bhagat Singh. In India, few remember Shurjo Sen. Such is the fate of the selfless and childless types. There is one thing common among the people the state wants us to forget.  They don’t have children and grandchildren sitting in parliament. But keeping alive certain fat cats’ ancestors’ names is not anyone’s duty as a citizen, is it?The Indian Union fancies itself as the ‘successor’ to all things sub-continental. It’s easy to appropriate the dead — they don’t physically spit back. Shurjo Sen’s armed insurrection in Chittagong and myriad such events, ideas, conceptions and ownerships get projected exclusively, onto the post-partition Indian Union. This has deliberately formed a misshapen, smug and imperial vision of one’s past. Shurjo Sen punctures this fancy. He remains palpably alive in East Bengal than anywhere else. Even in the recent protests at Shahbag, lakhs raised slogans in his name. “Shurjo sen-er banglaye, jamaat-shibirer thhai nai (No place for Jamaat-Shibir in Shurjo Sen’s Bengal).” Many here came to know of Shurjo Sen through two recent Hindi movies. India has never had jurisdiction over the area where the film plots were largely set. Bollywood has taken this location without its people and has managed to mangle it, to make it palatable and understandable to a Hindi-understanding audience. Shurjo Sen and his compatriots largely spoke Bengali and Chittagonian.Shurjo Sen and Chittagong can be packaged with technological finesse. The past is always better suited for appropriation. Hence Shurjo Sen, the ‘Indian’, can be sold – distinct and divorced from the contemporary ‘Bangladeshi’ backdrop of illegals and border-killings. Nation-states are the worst possible short-hand for identities, or for anything that humanity holds sacred. Not everything can be packaged like this. For example, to make a Hindi film on Chawngbawia, a legendary hero of the Mizho people or a war-film set in a Naga village with Naga characters, will be dismissed as absurd. Shurjo Sen talking to his comrades in Hindi is also absurd – but it can pass off. The Naga or the Mizo does not. It cannot be mere coincidence that most of the areas where AFSPA is in force are also those whose  heroes are deemed unfit for appropriation and marketing ‘nationally’, whatever that means.So there is a geography Bollywood has conceived, of what is ‘ours’, what is partly like ‘ours’ and what is very unlike ‘ours’. Though not spelt out, these conceptions need to be taken seriously. People kill and occasionally get killed with such conceptions in mind.Who is remembered and who is not, has to do with who has held the power to shape our textbooks and ‘common sense’ and who didn’t. Most official heroes now have well-heeled scions staying in what is what yuppies increasingly call the NCR. Albert Einstein said that ‘common sense’ is a collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen. The questions to ask are – How did we acquire our conceptions of the past? From whom? Is there a pattern in the things we have been told? Are there other stories to be told? Why were they not told? What is the connection between the ownership of the machinery and infrastructure of story-telling and the nature of our ‘common sense’? Could there be other senses, as ‘common’, for people beyond the pale of propaganda? Do they have lesser rights to voice their opinions? Why so? Because they can be put behind bars, or worse still, never heard of again? In short, do we have any understanding of our past (and present) that does not, in the final analysis, derive its ‘legitimacy’ from ‘might is right’ and ‘we are good’? Let us take the Bollywood make-up of Shurjo Sen. Let us study the silences of the textbooks, that pages that were excluded. We might be amazed and disturbed at we find. Adulthood, among other things, is the loss of simple heroes and self-affirming binaries. Unlearning common sense is painful – we build our conceptions of selfhood around them. But becoming adult humans, as opposed to being pupils of the state, is a necessity, to protect right from might.The writer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachuetts Institute of Technology (twitter.com/gargac)