Theft Of The Nation

It was a cloudy Friday afternoon in Chicago when my phone rang. It was my husband from Nashville airport.He had gone to Vanderbilt University to give a talk on Romanticism and Bengali nationalism. But he did notsound as relieved and happy as one does after a good lecture. Instead, his voice already muffled by thenetworking of our cellphone was quiet, disturbed and sad. Have you seen the New York Times today? heasked.

I knew immediately what he was referring to. I had read it this morning - Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Prizemedal had been stolen from the museum in Vishwabharati. I had immediately logged on to some Indian newspapersand finally found the item I was looking for in the front page of Anandabazar Patrika. Close to fiftyitems had been reported stolen. Baluchari saris belonging to Mrinalini Devi, ivory artefacts collected by theDebendranath Tagore, Rabindranath's certificate and medal. The chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya hadexpressed concern and the police were investigating.

The news hit me hard, just as it had my husband. Was it because we were historians of India and Bengal wasour main area of expertise? Or was it more personal than that - that we are devoted readers of Tagore's poetryand prose and ardent listeners of his music? Was it because we had deep intellectual admiration for thecultural and political experiment that was Shantiniketan? Or was it the case that as intellectuals we did nothave a framework in which to locate this incident and think about it as we are trained to - analytically?

Some time ago there was the rampage at the Bhandrakar Institute in Pune. Historians and humanistsinterested in India from all over the world deplored the incident. As intellectuals we expressed justifiedconcern about the Hindu Right's smothering of critical voices in the nation. Things had gone too far in Pune,to the extent of destroying old and rare manuscripts.

But today I am not sure what one's appropriate response ought to be. For as far as I am concerned, theShantiniketan incident is not a political event. The categories right or left have no relevance here.Politics, no matter what its orientation, has a vision. It may be a destructive or even a monstrous one aswith European fascism. . It might be nihilistic as was the case with the Naxalites in the Bengali sixties. Ihad grown up on tales of how students in Presidency college had once tried to destroy the Chemistry laboratoryor had taken down the busts of many nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectuals in the collegecorridors. At the time a young Jyoti Basu, or such is the myth that we heard as students, had summoned thestudents and given them a stern lecture on the anti-intellectualism of their stance.

There was something inspiring in these stories. They felt like part of a heritage. As a young student inCalcutta I had a sense of being the inheritor of a robust intellectual tradition, one that was ideologicallydivided but united in its respect for the arts and sciences.

But what happened yesterday (actually the police are not even sure when the thefts were perpetrated. Itcould have been two days ago) was theft pure and simple. And theft does not have politics. On the contrary,theft screams the poverty of politics. It announces to the world that we are so bereft as a people, so denudedof any sense of the past, any pride in our cultural accomplishments, that we now strip our museums.

Who is Tagore to these perpetrators? I wondered. An old bearded guy who lived sometime in the hoary past?But surely they knew that his winnings would be valuable? Otherwise why bother stealing? Or were theyattracted by the gold in the medal? What meaning does nationalism have for these people? Surely they celebrateIndia's cricketing victory against Pakistan? Or is it the case that unless it is about winning or losingnationalism has no relevance in our country today?

Much as I would like to, it is impossible to think about nationalism as it is practiced in our countrytoday as anything but aggressive. Gone is the sense of national pride that had to do with the making of anethical self, the cultivation of a self-reformed humane person - a project that was epitomized by Tagore inhis Shantiniketan endeavor. I cannot help thinking that even as I write about all this as a historian therehas crept into my own efforts a weird futility. History, thanks to our present is really too faraway, toodistant, too irrelevant.

Before I am dismissed for sounding flippant let me say that I am trying to work out in my head the profileof these people. Are we talking about educated folk? Surely. Persons who know that punishment in West Bengalis so tardy that it is impossible. They are probably confident in the strength of the union movement to knowthat even if the police cracked down they can bring things to a halt by calling a strike.

On the eve of the forthcoming elections when the parts of India are apparently shining, these people areprobably quietly celebrating their ill gotten gains nurtured by a political infrastructure that taught them noresponsibility, accountability or transparency. Is India still shining? Or is history so irrelevant that wecan shine without it, at its expense, celebrating its wreckage?

Rochona Majumdar is Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago.