A Bihari Story Of The Haar

The late Arvind Narain Das, whose 1992 book Republic of Bihar continues to be quoted in any authoritative discu­s­sion on the state, would often quip that the chattering classes of India knew more about Chechnya than Bihar. Alm­ost a quarter century later, the lack of understanding is still striking and came through in many reports from the ground and one could not help but wonder that if the prime minister and the BJP national president had read or known about the book, whether the two powerful Gujaratis (dubbed 2G in Bihar) would still have gone around the state telling Biharis how miserable they are. 

For the record, Bihar occupies half the area of Gujarat but has almost double the population. Unlike Gujarat, which has a coastline and is industrialised, Bihar is land-locked, primarily agrarian and rural. Every now and then, Bihar’s northern plains are flooded so badly that thous­ands are forced to take shelter on highways or embankments. And unlike Guj­a­rat, with its maritime trade history, it’s with Nepal that Bihar has a long and open border.

The state was bifurcated in 2000 and Bihar had to give up the mineral-rich and industrialised plateau with urban centres like Jamshedpur, Bokaro, Ranchi and Dhanbad to Jharkhand, a state created by the first NDA government at the centre. The pangs are still being felt in both states. But the two BJP leaders were clearly oblivious to the fact that Bihar has fared much better since than the smaller and richer state of Jharkhand, which has been ruled by the BJP for 11 of the 15 years.

***

On a short visit to Bihar last month, we stopped at Makhdumpur, a block headquarters with a bazaar, to have fruit juice. The two young vendors smiled easily and the elder, Rajesh, informed me that they were brothers and had put up the business in the last four years. Asked how much he managed to make, he casually said the sale of fruits and juice left them with a daily ‘income’ that ranged between Rs 1,000 and Rs 1,500. The brothers pointed to a glum friend sitting at a distance and laughed. He had been trying to make a living by selling biscuits, but the business was not doing well. Had the brothers been helped by a bank loan? No, they had not, said Rajesh.

On our way back in the evening, we stopped at Dhanurwa, known for lai, a condiment. Even at 8:30 pm, the marketplace was buzzing and it was a surprise to see people having tea, kachouri and lai at that hour. The shopkeeper, ano­ther young man by the name of Santosh, confided that they were people returning from work and would probably have to walk or pedal home before dinner. There was electricity in the bazaar and Santosh was clearly doing well. “Yes, things have changed a lot in the last few years,” he added.

Driving back to Patna later that night, I was reminded about a similar drive that had taken me and my photojournalist colleague Saibal Das from India Today to Jamalpur and beyond. We had planned to reach Deoghar by 8 pm and spend the night there in a hotel. But the Ambassador we were travelling in broke down thrice and around midnight we found ourselves still a 100 km from Deoghar. We had offered a ride to two Muslim brothers who lived in that area and they had travelled with us for the past several hours. The idea was to chat during the drive and learn more about people, politics and the economy.

At midnight, the duo insisted that since their house was barely 5 km away, we should stop there for the night. We reluctantly agreed. We stood outside while they went in to wake up the family and explain about their unexpected guests. Ten minutes later, we were ushered into a courtyard and given two clean towels and shown the washroom. Miraculously, a bucket of hot water had appeared for us to take our bath. Once both of us and the taxi driver had our bath, we were served hot chapattis. Then we were led to a room which had a double bed and a clean, starched bedsheet. We gratefully rolled over and went to sleep, not bothering to ask where others would spend the night.

We were shaken awake next morning around 8 am and told with some urgency to vacate the room immediately. It was expla­ined that the room had the only black-­and-white TV in the Muslim neighbourhood and it was time for Ramanand Sagar’s teleserial Rama­yan to start. So for the next hour or so, Saibal and I paced the short stretch outside. Over 40 Muslim men, women and children crammed into the room to watch Ramayan, the guests forgotten for the moment. I was again reminded of the episode­—that warm and spontaneous hospitality to complete strangers—when Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to drive a communal wedge during the election campaign and accused Nitish Kumar of plotting to give the benefits of reservation to Muslims. And when Amit Shah declared that if BJP lost by accident, there would be celebrations in Pakistan. The line may perhaps have wor­ked in Gujarat, but in the syncretic culture of Bihar, it was bound to be rebuffed.

***

Bihar has been known for its scholars, writers and historians and a story often recalled with relish in Patna’s academic and bureaucratic circles concerned the visit of renowned economist and Nobel laureate John Hicks to Delhi. When Hicks called on Jawaharlal Nehru, he expressed a desire to meet Prof Gorakh Nath Sinha, his contemporary, who had done pioneering work on the economics of food. Nehru had never heard of Sinha. Nor had anyone else in Delhi. Hicks was astonished and told Nehru he was shocked that India was not making use of Sinha. Gorakh babu was eventually traced to Patna’s A.N. Sinha College, of which he was the first principal, and arrangements made for him to meet Hicks.

He would also have possibly won a Nobel but for his wife, according to an apocryphal story. Peeved at Sinha’s preoccupation with books and research, the lady is said to have set his books and papers on fire one day. Since then, the economist stopped reading and certainly writing, the listeners would be told with a sigh. But then he was not the only self-effacing Bihari who delighted in academics, scholarship and the world of books. 

Fruit vendors in the Makhd­umpur market can make about Rs 1,000 daily

The redoubtable Ram Advani, whose bookshop at Hazratganj in Lucknow is a landmark, shared an anecdote when he learnt that I was from Bihar. His eyes lit up with an amused twinkle and he then proceeded to tell me that he had the good fortune of interacting with the first chief minister of Bihar, Sri Krishna Singh. Sri babu, as he was known, would often travel to Delhi. And the chief minister’s office at Patna would call up Advani and alert him, sometimes hours before the chief minister would board the plane. Ram Advani was then required to pick up all the new books he had and drive to the airport with the entire lot. Those days planes would take time to refuel at Lucknow and Sri babu would browse through the books in the VIP lounge and pick up what he liked. Advani would then prepare a list, raise a bill and mail it to Patna for payment.

Years later, I was privileged to see ano­ther chief minister of Bihar, Karpoori Thakur, who was then leader of the opposition in the Bihar assembly. From the press gallery, I would watch him sitting below with a pile of books with markers. His speeches and legislative interventions were invariably peppered with liberal quotes from the Constituent Assembly debates, the Constitution itself and books on parliamentary practices. When we caught up with him at the lunch recess and asked him to exp­lain some development in the assembly, he would drag us into the cavernous chamber, make us sit beside him and painstakingly refer to the books and passages.

Karpoori Thakur was one of a kind. Even in the last years of his life, he would often leave at short notice in the dead of night or in the early hours of the morning, whenever he received any message of a mishap. Karpooriji would invariably be the first to arrive at the spot. I’d often find him in the evening at the UNI office, furiously scribbling a press release on what he had learnt on the spot and what he expected from the government. On many such occasions, I learnt with awe that he had been on the road for 10 hours already and had spent an additional two to three hours at the spot.

Before travelling to Patna, to take over as resident editor of the Patna edition of the Times of India, I had casually asked Ajay Kumar, then resident editor, Delhi, whether Subhash K. Jha was the name of a real person. For years, Jha had been writing film and book reviews for virtually every English publication in the country. He would always be described as a “Patna-based writer and journalist”. Why would publications based in Mumbai and Delhi, and above all ToI, accept film reviews from Patna, I wondered. I was also convinced it was a pseudonym used by perhaps a serving bureaucrat with a passion for films. But Ajay just raised his eyebrows, picked up the phone and asked his secretary to pass on the phone number of Jha to me.

Jha was clearly knowledgeable about films made in India and abroad and about filmmakers. He also wrote in flawless English and seemed to have a sense of hum­our. He turned out to be in his early thirties. He came from a well-established family of academics, professionals and bureaucrats, but opted for the life of a free­lance writer. I remember feeling sorry for him and impulsively asked why he had not considered joining the ToI. His eyes had a mischievous glint and he asked how much ToI would be paying him if he did. When I suggested a figure, he laughed. “Well, I will not join for two reasons: first, because I earn a lot more than the figure you mentioned, but a more important reason is that you would have to first sack the sub-editors,” he told me in jest.

As I got to know him better, I discovered he was extremely well connected with the film world. He’d often interview stars over the telephone when they were overseas. They found it easier to spare time when abroad, he explained. He’d receive videos of films long before they were released. And yet, every Sunday morning, he and his industrialist friend Sudhir Patwari would drive to a cinema to watch a film he had already seen at home. The idea was to see it from the front benches and observe the reaction of the viewers on those rows. In the six years I spent as resident editor of ToI in Patna, I never managed to have him over for a Sunday lunch at home. On Sundays, Subhash and Sudhir preferred chewing on homemade sandwiches on the front rows of grubby cinema halls.

***

Just how remarkable Bihar is occurred to me when at ToI, we stumbled upon the fact that content for India’s first science magazine in Braille was being compiled in a village in Rajgir by an ex-serviceman and his Maharashtrian wife. The content would then be mailed to the National Alliance of the Blind in Mumbai for producing 300 copies in Braille.   

Not a week passed when Bihar did not catch me by surprise. One week, Apoorva Agarwal, who was in one of the first batches of the National Law University, Bangalore, drop­ped in to offer a write-up on NLU. The next year, another NLU student from Bihar dropped in to request that ToI sponsor his trip for a moot court in Europe for which he had been sel­ected. The Karnataka government was sponsoring his teammate. And since he had applied for admission to NLU after reading Apoorva’s write-up, he reminded me, ToI had a moral obligation to help him out.

While colleagues in Delhi were busy condemning Bihar as a ‘state of mind’, I was seeing from close quarters the hunger for education even among the poorest. While doing a project with the UNICEF, we stumbled upon an informal private school running in the open somewhere in Champaran. The school was named ‘St Bajrangbali Convent School’!

Anand Kumar of Super 30 fame would catch a train to Varanasi every Friday evening to spend the next two days studying at the central library of the BHU. He would undertake the six-hour train journey again on Monday early morning to be able to attend classes at Patna’s Science College. At BHU, he would put up with his younger brother Pranav, who was learning to play the violin under N. Rajam. Anand’s  head of the department told me his prodigious student had confided that he was under pressure to appear for the IIT-JEE, while he wanted to take up mathematics. Anand was told that if he studied maths, he would end up as a poor teacher. Three days later, the HoD confided with obvious pride that the boy had returned to inform him that he had decided to study mathematics and to seek his blessings.

Bihar is certainly a paradox. A retired chief secretary, Arun Pathak, was fond of reminding us that nothing survived in the state. Buddhism and Jainism first took roots in the state and then withered away. Pathak claims to have told this to Acharya Vinoba Bhave as well. A cheeky young IAS officer then, Pathak was pointing out the futility of the Bhoodan movement to him. Even later, Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for ‘Total Revolution’ came to nought. Revolu­tions in the state, he argued, are short-lived. But will the relatively poor state with rich and remarkable human resources ever prove the critics wrong?

By Uttam Sengupta in Bihar