Historicizing the Lived Masculinities in a Postpartitioned Metropolis

Autoethnography and Masculinities

In explaining the inadequacy of historicizing the high-level nationalist politics behind the partition, Gyanendra Pandey advocated a shift from the grand narrative to “a history of the lives and experiences of the people who lived through that time, of the way in which the events of the 1940s were constructed in their minds, of the identities or uncertainties that Partition created or reinforced” (1994, 194). Pandey (2012, 18 and 24) ascribes twenty-first century subaltern history as being “more ethnographic in their work […] more attuned to thinking histories through living through performance, through remembrance, through many different telling of the same stories.” This subaltern voice may find a new space and a new location through personal narratives or the autoethnography of lived experience (Lincoln and Denzin 2003). Autoethnography makes for a powerful narrative through a tradition that assigns authority to the subaltern voice (Warren 1997) by retelling stories and unfolding different versions of events with firsthand authority. The first-person narrative denominated in the form of a subaltern (Guha and Spivak 1988; Guha 1997) or postcolonial study (Bhabha 1994; Chakrabarty 2000) may break out of a situation that was a part of an interpretative trajectory in favor of experience that has been left outside or on the margins of the dominant scholarly tradition. Autoethnography, in general, is a “form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context” (Reed-Danahay 1997, 9). Rather than indulge in individualized and self-celebratory artistry, I felt that I had to take the side of a historicized, conscious social reflexivity (Reed-Danahay 2005) remaining wary of confessional excesses as a mode of disclosure (Lovell 2007). The broader, historicized events of Bengal, primarily articulated in subaltern/marginal voices, can connect the personal experience (Hutchinson 2005; Myerhoff 1978; Zola 1982) of that my family. My movements between the personal and the cultural, historical, and social structural (Ellis 2004; Reed-Danahay 1997) might offer the means to unravel the layers connecting the personal to the cultural (Ellis and Bochner 2000). My account is layered in the sense that it simultaneously analyses eyewitness accounts and second-person narratives (Glave 2005; Mccauley 1996; Pelias 2000) alongside data, abstract analysis, and relevant secondary texts (Charmaz 1983). I have made use of my family’s experiences, which I have been permitted to use in order to let me buttress my arguments satisfactorily (Adams 2006; Ellis 2007; Etherington 2007). As autoethnography is a personal journey that intertwines the conscious with the unconscious and the cultural. It is also true that, “[w]e recognize a continuity from our younger selves but there is also a sense that we are continually renewed” (Muncey 2010, 11). I also feel the need to acknowledge, “an autobiographical genre of writing. It is research that displays multiple aspects of individual awareness about the author’s critical embeddedness,” where the “main advantage of [the] method is to let the researcher act sometimes as a researcher and other times as a participant” (Cupane and Taylor 2007, 11). Thus, I approach a critical autoethnographic journey of my past to reconstitute the present and to plan on building up my masculinizing narrative in the postcolonial/postpartitioned milieu of an Indian city.

Besides the earlier ethnographic realism of masculinity (Cockburn 1983; Herdt 1981; Hunt 1980; Willis 1977), the Mexican ethnography of Gutmann (1996) came up with different categories of masculinity (e.g., the macho and the mandilón) as relational and essentially crosscut by other divisions. Connell (2007, vii) on the one hand suggests that the “ethnographic moment” in masculinity research is “extraordinarily fruitful, and has provided massive documentation of the diversity of masculinities, the interplay between different forms of masculinity, the patterns of hegemony and contestation, and the embedding of masculinities in economic and cultural contexts.” On the other hand, Connell (2003) sees it quite difficult to reconcile with the huge multiplicity of social constructions that ethnographers and historians have documented under the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Most of the research on masculinity began with an understanding of masculinity as not being essentialist and fixed but as a configuration of practices in social actions which can vary and differ according to the gender relations in any social or cultural setting (e.g., Adams and Savran 2002; Brod 1987; Brod and Kaufman 1994; Connell 2000, 2005; Kimmel 1987, 2001). From such a nonessentialist, ever-changing, and fluid understanding of gender, Connell (1987) pioneered the academic establishment of the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” to refer to the articulation of masculinity or pattern of practice that is empowered over other articulations and thus held up to be the ideal for men. Hegemonic masculinity, connected to the Gramscian concept of hegemony, is thus the configuration of gender practice (Connell 2005) that is temporally dominant in a particular society constructed as an “ideal type” in relation to various subordinated masculinities and to femininity (Connell 1987). Multiple articulations of femininity and masculinity are hierarchically organized relative to one another in hegemonic and subordinate positions within gendered institutions (Connell 1987; Kimmel 2004; Lorber 1993). In addition, scholars do not fail to explore the performance of masculinities by female bodies (Halberstam 1998; Messerschmidt 2004). In their summary of the key points of masculinity, Salisbury and Jackson (1996, 7) suggest “There is no such thing as masculinity—only masculinities. Masculinity is never unified or homogeneous. Masculine identities shift across history and different cultures. They are complex and contradictory; […] Masculine identity is always fragmentary and multi-faceted. Every male is made up of multiple masculine identities struggling for dominance. […] There is always an internal conflict between different interests of ruling masculinities and more marginalized masculinities.” Connell explains other forms of masculinities, each one in relation to the other. He terms them complicit, oppositional, and subordinate masculinities, which refer to their relation to hegemonic masculinity. Complicit masculinity refers to a configuration of masculinity that is inherently supportive of hegemonic masculinity and therefore sees it as legitimate. Connell narrates complicit masculinity as “constructed in ways that realize[d] the patriarchal dividend without the tensions of the risks of being on the front line troops of the patriarchy” (2005, 79). Complicit masculinity does not always agree with the dominant type. It can go either way, with the dominant masculinity or with the oppositional masculinity.

Another understanding of postcolonial masculinity is embedded on the reinvented patriarchy of civil society and masculinized subjecthood of the citizens of nation-state (Hunt 1992; Nagel 1998) that connect my experiences with masculinity to be subject to two major ideas—“fraternal patriarchy” and unheimlich/“uncanny”/“unhomely”. Both of them are close to each other and explicable in psychoanalytic terms (e.g., Oedipus complex and castration complex). The postcolonial period sees a shift from hierarchical paternalistic legal colonialism to “more equitable” international community of “brothers” or “brethren” securing solidarity (Berger 2004; “Asia and Africa have been reborn”: President Sukarno, Speech Given at Opening Ceremony, Bandung Conference, 1955). Pateman (1988) and MacKinnon (1989) are leading among many scholars who systematically unfolded that the entire public sphere (or civil society and citizenship) has been a pronounced masculine phenomenon, in practice and on paper (e.g., Phillips 1991, 1993; Voet 1998; Yuval-Davis 1991, 1997). Pateman (1988, 104), for instance, quotes Freud’s (1918, 183) oedipal interpretation that the brothers killed the father “together [who] dared and accomplished what have remained impossible for them singly.” The social contract of civil society among equal brothers along with public laws grew out of premodern feudal relic of paternal rule, which the brothers (read “equal” masculine citizens) hated because the father “stood so powerfully the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him” (Freud 1918, 184). Freud explains that the atonement for the collective murder by the brothers led to the prohibition of the destruction of totem object (later construction of religion or god) which was nothing but the symbol of (murdered and mourned) father and renouncement of the relations of the father’s former females by the prohibition of incest and imposing exogamy (Freud 1918, 143). But, preceding the visible fraternal patriarchic civil contract, the partly hidden original “sexual–social” contract was made in order to secure masculine sex right of all males equally to females outside the fraternal group by an orderly system of exogamous marriage against incest. Pateman (1988, 2) sees civil freedom a masculine and patriarchic attribute, because “the contract establishes men’s political right over women—and also sexual in the sense of establishing orderly access by men to women’s bodies.” However, regarding the rise of ethics and all that coalesce to form the unconscious “defenses” of civil society, Freud did not miss to conclude that “the beginnings of religion, ethics, society and art meet in the Oedipus complex” (1918, 202). In the name of closure of incest and patricide, this sexual politics produced the dichotomies “natural/civil, private/public, women/individual—and sex/gender” (p. 225) in order to subjugate the former by the latter that brings into the surface only the latter. But Bhabha emphasizes in terms of “a performative discourse it enacts the impossibility of drawing an objective line between the two” (1994, 230).

In the present study, the six major instances discussed later cannot escape the ambivalent overlaps of the dichotomies and rendering the ethical practices masculine/patriarchal: (i) the integration of the absent paterfamilias with abstract “personal” ideology of performative “bhakti” (devotion to godhead) of my father that empowered his masculine morality; (ii) performative resistance to and will to replace the “unjust” power in the state turned to pervasive aggression by the radical leftists; (iii) sponsoring the complicit rise of civil terror deployed by the gangs of goons and police that formalizes the ethics of controlling radical extremism against the state and bringing back law and order to state territories; (iv) “acceptable” masculinization of my “working” mother in order to surmount the void of comforting patriarchal authority in her closer kinship domain; (v) my “successful” negotiation of a “conjugated” masculine subjectivity in order to bridge between my mother and father, familial and civil, private and public domains; and (vi) “hegemonic” popularization of a pragmatist “middleness” for negotiating with state and leftist radical political ethics. The above ethical–social generalizations in terms of their coherence can comfortably be understood as culture. For Bhabha, as cultural, as disciplinary narration, it is “homely,” Heimlich, familiar, and pedagogic, but the performative differences place them within Freud’s “analytic distinctions between ‘intellectual uncertainty’ and ‘castration,’ between ‘surmounting’ and ‘repression’” (1994, 136). All postcolonial instances for Bhabha are “unhomely” at home, “unfamiliar” at their familiarity, paradigmatically displacing, and dislocatory. Bhabha expands Freudian rendering of (un)heimlich that might focus on the psychic defenses of the ethical ideals as linked to the indelible and unconscious oedipal anxiety, repression, fear of castration, and all that split human subjectivity—the fostering agency of (post)patriciding fraternal affect and its repressed double, or the “uncanny.” At the root of Freud’s “uncanny,” there is a juxtaposition of the frightening unheimlich (literally, “unhomely” but also “uncanny”) with the safety of the heimlich (literally, “homely”). Freud says that the transformation of every emotional affect, into morbid anxiety, comes from something repressed which recurs and would then be no other than what is uncanny. The secret nature of the uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind (Freud [1917–1919] 1955, 241).

Unbearable “uncanny” unfolded in my city in-between the familiar faces of neighbors and relatives and even the peaceful slum dwellers and the everyday civil terror spread by their armed violence and conflict with the state. The importance of “uncanny” in this article has been epitomized by my recurrent horrible dream of defending my beloved feminine bodies and sort of mitigation between fatherly support and monstrous, murdering soldiers in my known home space, where “I” become; I dissolve to emerge in the in-between space of conjugally negotiated parenthood, the space between hegemonic ideological “middleness,” and aggression and violence of political clout of left extremist, local goons, and imagined military attackers over “East Pakistan.” Such “uncanny” might be further traced out in the following clout:

A study of dreams […] has taught us that [such] a morbid anxiety […] is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration. […] Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that […] was fitted for him. (Freud [1917–1919] 1955, 231)

All the above six different ethical instances despite appearing isolable and aligned either to the public or private order, in fact, could not be disentangled from their civil and private effects that gave way to performative articulation of differences in masculinity. Bhabha finds gender (class as well), thus masculinity as the nonoriginary:

performative […] differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, “opening out,” remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference […] It is […] an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the-past and the needs of the present. (1994, 219)

Revisiting Colonial Bengali Masculinities

As “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope” (Enloe 1989, 44), particular kinds of Indian masculinities were produced in the colonial encounter (Banerjee 2005; Basu and Banerjee 2006; Osella and Osella 2006) of nationalism within the political discourse of the nation and the state (Chatterjee 1986; Nandy 1983). The discourse on Bengali masculinity in the subaltern modes of subordination and resistance (Rogers 2008, 86) was clearly shaped by several historical arguments arising from colonialism, national politics, and historiography (Chatterjee 1997; Sarkar 1998). Let me briefly recapitulate some of the principal narratives of masculinity developed in colonial Bengal.

“‘Individualistic rationalism,’ epitomized by the Brahmo Samaj” of Bengal, coupled with their “critique of all concrete mediations between the individual consciousness and the ‘pure consciousness’ of the abstract Godhead as forms of worldly attachment grounded in illusion” (Sartori 2003, 276) is contrary to the understanding of shakti (power) in Vedantism underpinning “the metaphysics of shakti (power). The ‘mataram’ or ‘Mother’ in the ubiquitous Swadeshi war-cry, ‘bande mataram’ (‘Hail to the Mother’) was the ‘adya shakti bhagabati,’ the goddess who embodied the primordial substance that constitutes, shapes, and moves the phenomenal world. While Shiva represented the masculine principle of the godhead’s transcendent and eternally unchanging aspect, his female consort represented the active quality of the godhead’s powers” (Sartori 2003, 276). Simultaneously, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s reconstruction of Krishna as a sublimation into the love of action and rational self-control accompanied his assertion of ascetic masculinity embodied by the Hindu sanyasi (Kaviraj 1995). Such reconstruction may be coupled with the critique of Bengali babu-ness in the form of self-ridicule and self-irony, embodied in the writing of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Kaliprasanna Sinha, Sukumar Ray, and others (Kaviraj 2000). It follows Vivekananda’s appeal to the men of India to assert their masculinity shaped in the “muscular” spirituality that would produce an India with a Muslim body with an emphasis on physical strength and a Vedantist brain containing the best tenets of a superior Indian spirituality. His formulation of an ideal masculinity also comprises Kshatra-Virya and Brahma-Teja (Vivekananda [1899] 1995). On the contrary, Vivekananda’s guru Ramakrishna Paramhansa said, “I spent many days as the handmaid of God. I dressed myself in women’s clothes, put on ornaments, and covered the upper part of my body with a scarf, just like a woman…” (quoted in Roy 1999, 97). His conscious rejection of both colonial masculinity and the competing masculinity of dominant nationalism (Rosselli 1980) in the form of being both father and mother to his disciples (Sarkar 1992; Chatterjee 1992) foreshadows Gandhi’s profound challenge to the inherent superiority of a “masculinity” equated with rationality, materialism, and the physical strength of British colonialism (Erickson 1969; Kakar 1990; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967), which led to the construction of Gandhi’s persona as both father and mother to his followers. Among the less talked nationalist voices, Bipin Chandra Pal adopted Bengali Vaishnavism’s rationality through the reinforcement of an allegedly monistic substratum in its thought: an immanent monism from the achintyabhedabheda doctrine: “Every object is a thought of God—materialised; every man is the Spirit of God—incarnated. So is every nation the manifestation and revelation of a Divine Ideal” (Pal 1954, 288–89). Pal’s Vaishnavite idiom elaborated “an indigenous idealism capable of articulating a unified but differentiated rational substance of the social” (Sartori 2003, 277) against the order of “competition,” which, “economic or otherwise, was a sin against God and man” (Pal 1951, 212). Another marginalized narrative is found in Rabindranath Tagore’s alternative to chauvinistic nationalism. His propagation of a pan-Asian spiritual platform that conflated the western model of modernity with Eastern ideas of enlightenment proposed a universal humanist allegory of the global moral community. Apart from these views, both Sri Aurobindo’s transformative futurism (beyond his virile revolutionary anti-imperialism) and Subhas Chandra Bose’s authoritarian militarism as masculine resistance to colonialism were marginalized by Nehru’s secularist Fabianism with the success of Indian independence (Paranjape 2012, 202).

However, the dominant narrative explains that, “the Hindu middle-class, upper-caste, educated urban elite became (or at least came to believe that it was) the dominant form of hegemonic masculinity” (Chattopadhyay 2011, 273). With literary reference as early as 1823 (Bhattacharya 2005), the term bhadralok was often used in nineteenth-century Bengal to refer to certain castes and occupational groups with ascriptive status. Such designation resulted in the development of a form of the closed class (Broomfield 1968). Indian Hindu/Bengali males were portrayed predominantly as effeminate and weak by the hypermasculine British colonizers (Sinha 1995). With (in)famous descriptions like “The physical organisation of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy” by Thomas Macaulay (cited in Rosseli 1980, 122), the British kept wondering how the “soft-bodied little people” who could nonetheless compete successfully against the British in the civil service exam and become salaried workers, professionals, and civil servants (Rosseli 1980). Doubly identified with the frailty of women and with the powerlessness of the colonially submissive slave (Chowdhury 2001, 4), the Bengali bhadralok offered the articulation of buddhibal (mental strength) in contrast to bahubal (physical strength), in order to negotiate with the hegemonic national masculine in the form of compensatory masculinity (Chattopadhyay 2011). Chattopadhyay adds that (2011, 273) “Chowdhury (2001) draws attention to the formation of self through a mythichistorical narrative […] that could be positioned alongside the colonisers” and “a discourse centred on urban middle class bhadralok, who came to seek out a more ambivalent masculine self than the mythic-historical manliness” (Chattopadhyay, 266). In fact, Calcutta as the contested space of different narratives became an open society (Broomfield 1968) well before independence when the hegemonic masculinity of the bhadralok prevailed over certain middle-class segments of Calcutta and could be defined by the absence of menial labor and the presence of education and cultural capital (Sinha 1995). The diverse debate on the rise of masculinity in the colonial tropes of bhadralok, babu, and nationalism rarely embraces the hiatus between the nationalist agenda of masculinity and the postpartitioned crisis of masculinity (Pandey 2001; Butalia 1998; Daiya 2008). The masculine overtness with which the mainstream identity of Bengali refugees took the form of militancy (Banerjee 2003b) needs to be revisited at least to reconcile the fusion of the existing narratives of masculinity. In the postcolonial context, an analysis of masculinized nationalism, especially on the rise of Hindutva and its hegemony (Banerjee 2003a; Basu and Banerjee 2006; Hansen 1996; A. Roy 2006; Vijayan 2012), cannot properly address those Indian regions (like West Bengal) where Hindutva has gained marginal access. Rather contributing to the contexts of the slowly blurred “radical masculinity” symbolizing and entailing the postpartition Naxal period (Donner 2009), the powerlessness and power of the urban poor mediated through structures of “marginalized masculinity” (Roy 2003), the masculinity based on domination (George 1998; Khan et al. 1996), the working class “honorable masculinity” (George 2006), and the heterogeneous positions related to bhadralok masculinity within a marginalized urban Bengali community (Ganguly-Scrase 2007) are more relevant to the Calcutta scenario. In the city, a “softer” masculinity accepting women’s autonomy (George 2006) distinct from consumption-based and other competing masculinities (Anandhi, Jeyaranjan, and Krishnan 2002; Osella and Osella 2000) emerges as more viable.

Nevertheless, in the present study (thematically based on personal narrative), the temporal order of the references to the principal historicized “events” in Calcutta invokes how colonial masculinities restricted in certain closed social circles either go offstage or diffuse into the open urban society undergoing unprecedented expansion and changes. The events form an essential background for augmenting this autoethnographic narrative of looking back and forth at city life since “partitioned times” (preferred to the more common “postcolonial times”; Samaddar 2003, 21). With respect to the events across postcolonial times, we can hardly ignore that the absencing of paternal imago as central to society was ushered twice—by the virtual liquidation of paternal patriarchy of precapitalist familial structure and by eviction of paternalist authority of the colonial state. All the masculine pronouncements of civil society in postcolonial India were grounded in ethical arguments and counterarguments, thereby emerging between hiding and surmounting, uncertainties, and fears (of castration/punishment) of oedipal guilt inherent in patriarchy as Bhabha (1994) mentioned. There seems to be all within patriarchy itself, liquidated (e.g., paterfamilias) or repressed (local goons/goondas) or negotiated in between the performative displacements (e.g., radical leftism, pragmatist lefts, “acceptably” masculinized women, and conjugated improvisation) of “unhomely” at home or “an estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world” (1994, 13).

Partition and Displacement: Militancy beyond Domestic

Since childhood, I was very clear about the fact that if the partition had not happened, my parents would not have stopped their education midway to join service for their families and would not have met and married with the clear understanding that they had to share the responsibility of financially supporting their partition-affected families. Apart from my family, many others to which my friends belonged had stories of the impact of partition on their lives as well as speculation about how their lives would have been different if it had not happened. My exploration of “the meaning of Partition in terms of the new social arrangements, new consciousnesses, and new subjectivities to which it gave rise” (Pandey 2001, 50) was something I feared was fading away before I could inscribe it in these reflections on how masculinity emerged as a changing construct in my world, like the worlds of many of my friends and acquaintances.

At the age of three years, I was comfortable to memorize and recite poems, from Tagore’s Katha O Kahini, Nazrul Islam’s Sanchita, and collections of Sukanta Bhattacharya’s poetry. It was usual for me to become engrossed in my mother’s recitation of these poems while I was persuaded to sleep and to remember next morning all I had heard the previous night. My mother was the fourth girl child in a family living in a peri-urban village of the Mymensingh district of East Pakistan. In her childhood, my mother liked to study and to perform physical exercises with her elder cousin brothers. In the mid-1940s, well before the partition of India, my mother, along with her two elder sisters, left her residence in Mymensingh and came to Calcutta for their education. They lived in her mother’s elder brother’s (mama) house in east Calcutta. In my childhood, I learnt of the prestigious mention of their paternal Brahmin lineage in the preface of Maimansingha Gitika, a heritage collection of folk ballads from the region of Mymensingh. The colonial British introduced two kinds of changes into Indian land relations, the zamindari (official rentiers) and the ryotwari (farmers) systems. The zamindari system predominated in East Pakistan till 1950. My mother’s paternal family was zamindars in Mymensingh. My mother’s all the three paternal grandfathers were advocates in the colonial courts of preindependent India. My maternal grandmother was married into this family when she was seven years old. By the early 1940s, she became the mother of six daughters and three sons. Being residents of the peri-urban area of Mymensingh, she and her eldest daughter were well versed in Bengali literature, especially the writing of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, and Rabindranath Tagore. My maternal grandmother (dida, as she is addressed by her grandchildren in Bengali) decided on her own to send her daughters to her brother’s house in Calcutta for education. My mother’s mama (mother’s brother) was the manager of an Indian bank, which collapsed simultaneously with other such banks just after independence in 1947. My mother’s family was displaced to Calcutta during the partition and had to live as a separate unit on their own. My maternal grandfather (dadu, the term of address by grandchildren in Bengali) tried to keep contact with his zamindari in East Pakistan, but before it was legally abolished in 1950, he passed away in a road accident in Calcutta. It marked the complete severance of contact with the property in East Pakistan. The family was almost reduced to the streets but managed their survival and education as best as they could in this utter disarray and destitution. The narratives of that time that I heard from my mother and my mother’s sisters (masi) had no allusions of complaint and loss of self-esteem. This family headed by a widowed mother included her six daughters and three sons struggling with poverty in order to pursue the education of the young and for gaining employment. For some time, the sisters earned money from tutoring school-going children in their neighborhood and had a limited number of formal dresses and shoes that they shared among themselves when they had to step outside the house. Such stories of well-off Hindus displaced from East Pakistan to Calcutta without any assets or even a spare set of clothes are common. In many such families, the men worked as hawkers or petty service holders to earn a living and supporting their own and others’ education. However, there are fewer extant narratives from families headed by women where the women had to work in order to sustain the family. However, any urban Bengali might readily remind me of the pioneering film Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star) directed by Ritwik Ghatak in 1960, which set out to eulogize refugee women for their historical assertion of the role of tireless breadwinning for family at the cost of personal dreams. Coming out of the “domestic,” their role altered the social landscape irrevocably to move far beyond the conventional idea of the feminine victimhood (Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003; Chakravartty 2005; Walsh 1995).

From the end of the nineteenth century, a period over fifty years created a space for women outside the unique Indian “domestic” (Sen 2000) composed of family, home, and women and posed a challenge to the patriarchal system by being a part of the power dynamics which made the gender relation deeply unequal (Chakravarti 1998; Sen 2000; Omvedt 1980). In the 1920s, the second generation of “New Women” could articulate the needs of women, critique their society and foreign rulers, produce and promote associations to the level of institutions, and try to consolidate women’s interests. However, such movements were restricted to urban India. Larger numbers of women started to participate in movements such as the one against the attempt of the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the Swadeshi movement (Ray 1995). If as a consequence of the extended logic of “feminine” modes of protest Mahatma Gandhi drew large numbers of women (especially women in Bengal) to nationalist movement groups and in numbers as never before, by breaching the public domain, female activists in the middle class of Bengal facilitated their daughters’ entry into the world of formal education, professions, employment, and politics by the 1940s. Within the moral framework of the nationalist movement, they were able to redefine gender roles (Sen 2000). After independence, the women uprooted from their country of origin, battling to survive in a new homeland, did not need an activist for participating and accentuating the new gender roles.

At an early stage of her education, my mother dreamt of becoming a doctor, a dream that vanished soon after the death of her father. From 1952, since the age of sixteen, she had three shifts of outdoor engagements everyday: in the morning, it was learning stenography and typing, the daytime was for service, and the evening for college education. She was the first among the sisters to start working as a clerk and advance to the level of officer in her later years. My maternal grandmother accompanied her other daughters to the offices where they applied for training and jobs, because during that period only handful of women, most of them Anglo-Indians, advanced their candidature for employment in merchant and government offices. My mother, the fourth child of my grandmother emerged as the “masculine” axis of livelihood earning and decision-making in her family. My mother joined the Communist party just after the partition when she was a school student and still lived with her mother’s brother. She did not forget the names of Hindu Mahasabha members who were rich, decent, and educated and who gave moral support to their education and planned outings and gatherings on occasions. However, this was very different from what was envisaged by a schoolteacher and his sisters who got close to them and inspired them with the ideology of communism and a dream of the liberation of the destitute. Her memory of the members of the party as essentially educated, middle class, and coming from elitist (banedi/abhijata) backgrounds corroborates the narratives of historical documents. The communist party in Bengal started with a predominantly educated middle class or bhadralok (respectable/well-mannered/decent folk) base (Bandyopadhyay 2006) with elitism at least in terms of its leadership (Franda 1971). Never being openly antagonistic to the Congress (Sen 1972), trying and failing to unite the Congress and the Muslim League before and after the communal riots of 1946 (Mahajan 2000), voting against and failing to resist the partition (Lahiri 2001), the party began to organize the villages by raising demands for abolition of the zamindary system without compensation, redistribution of land, fair wages for agricultural laborers, and of course the demand for tebhaga for the sharecroppers. They also started movements like the Telengana movement to practice politically the shift from community to class and to prevail over middle-class intellectualism (Dasgupta 2005). Since the 1940s, from the women and supporters of the party came statements about intercaste and intercommunity marriage, so far staunchly resisted by the Hindus (Munshi 1997; Bandyopadhyay 1989). My mother narrated that after the influence of the Hindu Mahasabha over the displaced Hindus from East Pakistan waned, the growing popularity of the party among the middle class of Calcutta was much higher than parties like the Indian National Congress. My mother’s marriage was an intercaste one, in days when it was not yet a socially welcomed exception. There were even intercommunity marriages among party workers. Perhaps the socially embracing struggle for livelihood could help them manage certain issues as personally ideological but marginal in contexts of yet orthodox sociality. Up to the start of the Naxalbari movement, the activism was another frontier of her regular engagement. My mother’s four sisters joined service by the early 1970s, while the three minor brothers and one sister had completed their education. Being the first sister to marry (except the eldest sister), she accomplished the “duty” of arranging and executing the marriages of other sisters and brothers. My father was her compatible companion in sharing the responsibility. I asked my mother why she felt attracted to the communists. She replied, “It was more because only these people took care of others, reached the families in troubles to provide assistance with all they had than because of their theories. I found them honestly devoted to the everyday genuine problems of others, rather than pursuing self-interest. The attitude and enthusiasm were conspicuously absent in others around me.”

The story of my father followed a similar narrative shifting to Calcutta before the partition for education and of finally getting displaced from East Pakistan with his family. My paternal grandfather (thakurda, the Bengali term of address for this relation) earned his bachelor’s degree from Rajshahi College in preindependent India. Despite being a freedom fighter, he stopped thinking about the education of his sole son and two daughters due to his strong belief in an astrological prophecy of the early deaths of all his children. However, at the mandate of my great-grandfather, my father moved to Calcutta for further studies, where three brothers of my grandfather were engaged in business and service. My father’s paternal grandfather was a talukdar (a title given to a minor zamindar). Like my maternal grandfather, my great-great grandfather was beloved by both the Muslim and Hindu subjects (praja) of his taluks, because apart from the customary collection of revenues, he was wholeheartedly supportive of the well-being of his subjects. In the year of partition (partitioner bachhor, as named by all people of East Pakistan), my father was at his house at the Noakhali district of East Pakistan. Since 1946, beginning with the great Calcutta killings and the subsequent Noakhali Carnage at the end of that year, the Hindus of East Pakistan either started leaving their land or waited with anticipation for better times. Some also waited as they hoped to escape the carnage. The family spent their nights in the dark hedges on the huge garden of their estate, so that any sudden arrival of “enemies” would not surprise them. These “enemies” were headed by the local leader of the Muslim League, which was opposed by many of the local Muslims. They were not in favor of killing the Hindus. My father can remember that his subadult status could not help his inclusion in their list of targets to kill. The cause of his inclusion was stated, “A poisonous cobra’s offspring is always a cobra, similarly poisonous.” On the day the mass killing of the family was about to happen, the “Sikh regiment” from India (whom the Muslims feared) came to escort the Hindus of that area out of it. Everybody else left the house after the arrival of the Indian Army for the long and exhausting journey to Calcutta, where my father had previously rented an apartment. The trauma of displacement with no perceived future, the pain of departure from a space of one’s own, the endless bloodshed seen and heard, moving with the herds of people by road, water, or crowded train in arduous journeys to Calcutta, with or without the support of the Indian Army—this was the common story of the displacement obtained from my parents and relatives. The route of the displaced was most commonly the Sealdah railway station of Calcutta and from there to government camps or squatter colonies to be readily politicized by the Hindu Mahasabha or Congress party or any other political entity. Their future was a long trial for survival with an undeniable attachment to the land left behind. Partition and its memories of 1947 in West Bengal are thus chronicled with empathy in contemporary historiography and similar texts (Chakrabarti 1999; Chatterji 2001; Chakrabarty 1995; Sengupta 2003). By June 1948, there were about 1.1 million refugees in West Bengal (Bandyopadhyay 2006). Only due to the fact that they had accommodation in Calcutta did the families of my parents not land up in a squatter or refugee colony.

The Liberation of East Bengal: The Decline in the Hegemony of the Feudal Masculinity

After 1947, the subjects of the taluks of my grandfather desperately arrived in our house at Calcutta with earnest requests for his return to East Pakistan, because they badly needed the moral and material support, apt advice about their regular problems, and protection from known and unknown dangers. My grandfather had licensed firearms, which he used secretly since he supported the fight for independence before 1947. He returned to East Pakistan alone and lived there on his own with the support of local peasants, both Hindus and Muslims. Since then, my grandfather visited Calcutta a few times for social service and as a support to his network of friends, fellow villagers, and distant relatives coming to Calcutta for treatment or any other reason. Even though he possessed a large tract of property in East Pakistan, he never contributed to the expenses of the family in Calcutta, which was looked after by his son and was composed of his wife, his two daughters, and his son. I have never seen my grandfather. I asked about his response to the fact that the astrological prophecy lied to him, could shatter his dogma, could make his utter indifference to his children questionable, and whether any shift occurred to his thought about what he could do positively for his children and wife. The responses I received from my family focused on my grandfather’s “legitimate” expectation that his adult son should shoulder the responsibility of the family. He believed that it was made possible due to his early alertness, the assistance of his brothers, and the blessings of god bestowed upon him. The image of my freedom-fighter grandfather is one of an archetypal sign of unquestionable and unanswerable patriarchy to his “feminine” domestic sphere, which nonetheless included his adult son as well. I have never found any disrespect, complaint, or negative reaction on my father’s part regarding his father, though my grandfather was never close to his children.

In 1971, my childhood was being spent in at rented apartment on the second floor of an old building situated beside a road in north Calcutta. Our family included (apart from my parents and myself) my grandmother, my aunt (father’s first younger sister), her husband and their two daughters and one son, and my deaf and mute aunt (father’s second younger sister). There was only a pro-East Pakistan radio channel communicating the everyday commentary on the horrible war of liberation in East Pakistan, where my grandfather was under threat of his life, which caused extreme anxiety, particularly in my grandmother. My response to her anxiety was reflected in my tears whenever she wept silently. On listening to the commentary on the torture of liberation fighters, I reacted primarily to the narratives of cruelty upon women and girls. I was most frightened of the attacks of the khan sena (the Pakistani land army) on female civilians meant to demotivate the liberation fighters.

I had a frightening dream several times over nearly two months. It was about some long-legged demonic military men patrolling the road who reached up to the heights of all the buildings, to the balconies, and windows, where frightened faces were peeping through. Their targets were the children and women who gathered in the balconies without any hope of hiding inside the rooms. The fierce eyes of the military were searching in order to grab anyone visible and prick them on the palms with sharp and poisonous medium-sized needles or bayonets. The pain of the pierced hands was so severe that these victims were falling apart with bodies furrowed by blood vessels all over. Hiding inside the rooms seemed less safe than facing them on balconies. I was on the balcony of my three-storied house and desperate to save my female cousins standing beside me. I could finally save my sisters but not myself. I was pricked on the palm with the deadly sharp instrument, but at the final moment, my uncle came with the antidote to the poison and tried to heal me. The dream ended every time at that point. What I have already mentioned about the dream above was my confrontation with my uncanny double/s, the monstrous, killing stranger/s (inside me?) spreading at every corner of my home and larking in-between my punishment (metaphorical of death or castration), and healing at my wish of protecting my beloved, vulnerable women under stack in my neighborhood, more particularly in my home. As survivor and savior, I appeared like my beloved female siblings under attack at home, but with differences of desperate counterattack and contra-feminine attitudes, maybe like my masculine mother who might need support from “my uncle” (or my father?) in resolving the traumatizing battle.

This dreamwork might unfold much more about my unconscious, but what I understood consciously was my subtle change of attitude to all the females whom I could relate to, even the female neighbors. I cannot discover the other precursors of that unconscious process. However, since then I became conscious of the need to be submissive, inoffensive, and soft to females of all ages. I could never deviate from this attitude; all my later responses to femininity reinforced it. Setting aside the psychoanalytic or symbolic potential of the vignette, I would like to emphasize on my gender sensitivity in my childhood. Later, while recalling the dream, I perceived a juxtaposition of my female cousins with the frail image of my thakurma (paternal grandmother). As I have indicated earlier, since my childhood, I preferred not to be identified with my grandfather, for I had assumed the permanent invisibility of my thakurda as the prime reason of my grandmother’s worried face. This worry was voiced by uttering sadly, “Pasan, pasan!” (hard as rock) directed to my grandfather. It was her implicit mourning of the stubborn detachment of my grandfather from the family despite her repeated insistence that he should shift to Calcutta permanently. Perhaps my grandfather could not risk leaving his large property unattended in East Pakistan and had the courage to live there alone. He could not leave Bangladesh in the end and was murdered with the intention of grabbing his huge property, which he planned to transfer to Calcutta just before his murder in 1973. He only had the choice of identifying himself with the courageous, patriotic, benevolent masculinity of a landlord with his legitimate indifference to the feminized “domestic” sphere. This masculinity, which hegemonized rural Bengali society, suffered sharp decline after the change of land relations since independence.

The Naxalbari Movement and Calcutta: Radical and Coercive Masculinities

At three and a half years of age, my strong resistance to admission in a disciplined convent school (a space quite unintelligible to me, and which to me felt like something was stealing my home away from me for a longtime each day) took its toll on my health. I became seriously sick and fragile enough to discontinue school. The discontinuity was also additionally conditioned by the growing tension and violence of the Naxalbari movement (naxal andalan), a radical (ultra) leftist Maoist movement in postcolonial Bengal (Banerjee 1984, 2006; Dasgupta 1974; Donner 2011; Gupta 2007; Johari 1972; Kujur 2008; Mukhopadhyay 2006; Ram 1971; Ray 2002; Roy 1975; Sinha Roy, Mallarika 2006). Along the trajectory of factionalism within the Communist movement, the Communist Party of India (Marxist; CPI-M) was formed in 1964 after an ideology-based split in the Communist Party of India (CPI). A second split, this time of the Maoist factions, formed the Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) which gave birth to the wider Naxalite movement. It supported the armed uprising in the confrontational politics dominated by the “annihilation line.” It announced that through the killing of “class enemies” (Sreni Sotru in Bengali) including zotdar-zamidar (feudal landlords and owners of large land), people in the teaching profession disseminating bourgeois education and values, the police and military as the agents of the feudal-bourgeois comprador Indian state, the rural revolution would engulf the cities within its fold and state power would be seized in favor of the have-nots, especially the landless peasants and working class (Banerjee 1980, 1984; Basu 2000; Dasgupta 1974; Franda 1971; Gupta 2007; Nossiter 1988; Ray 1988, 2002; Roy 1975). My family, like all my neighbors, were survivors of that movement. The city of Calcutta, north and east of the centrally positioned British residential colony transformed into postindependence administrative and commercial offices, was a conglomerate of narrow lanes holding on two sides poor slums, the unplanned buildings of middle-class people living as tenants (like us) or owners, and individually owned old mansions of the rich elite and professionals. The connectivity of numerous lanes to main roads makes the topography puzzling to an outsider but not to the rebels (naxals) and the goons (goondas), whom the police had to chase through the lanes regularly in those days. Even though I was a child, I was interrogated by the police and had to endure their anticipatory search of my naxalite connection. The threat to Bengali-speaking males was twofold, one from the police and the other from the Naxal–goon nexus. Every house with young adults and subadult males and every non-Naxal man of our locality had to pass through the searchlight of the police and the Naxals. Simultaneously, the men with Naxalite connections were the worst victims of that period. They had fewer options, like escaping abroad or remaining absconding for months or years to fend off indiscriminate torture, imprisonment, and killing by the police.

What a major part of the writing on the Naxal movement marginalizes is the intriguing engagement of the local goons with the Naxalite “terror.” I can remember seeing at least three killings of suspected anti-Naxal and police informers in broad daylight and in the middle of the street. We all knew those killers/goons, called kana (one-eyed) Netai, kata (one hand amputated) Shibe and Bhallu mastan (goon) living in the nearby slums. They had direct links with the earlier antileft regime of hooliganism who had no radical politicization whatsoever and who had never been arrested by the police. As an insider, I can confirm Donner’s description, “Calcutta became the centre of urban Maoist activities and guerrilla warfare. Hundreds of students joined the CPI(ML) under the leadership of Charu Majumdar, who inspired the youth to follow the example of China’s Red Guards” (Donner 2004, 4). The themes of closely knit organizational involvement, sacrifices in the context of education, profession, and kinship and the need of participatory democracy remained the positive contributions of Naxalbari movement without forgetting that: the experience of the Naxal movement did not only affect the youths who were involved in the political parties, many of whom were imprisoned, vanished, or went underground. It also drew their families, neighbors, and friends into politics, who experienced violent party rivalry, police raids, abuse, and violence at the hands of police personnel on a daily basis (Donner 2004, 5).

The Naxalites I met and developed proximity with later were against the values and practices they designated as “feudal” (exemplified by zotdar-zamidar/zamindar) and the “comprador bourgeoisie” (exemplified by the trading class or entrepreneurship allied with foreign or international capital). Their head-on confrontation with the earlier hegemonic masculinity of feudal patriarchy led them on to deliver a radical campaign against the dominant rules for family, marriage, and women (Mitra 2004; Bandyopadhyay 2008) among many, but the way they put their arguments into practice was masculine, sexist, and allegedly gender blind (Roy 2007; Sinha Roy, Mallarika 2006). The intended promises of radical masculinity (Donner 2009) provided more democratic space for the critical voice of middle-class urban individuals to both the public and domestic spheres. What was deemed to be for the benefit of the nation was soon transformed to be an individualistic concern.

However, at the tender age of being a school-going child, I had to experience this violence, as a traveler in any part of the city, as a neighbor, and relative of the young men who were affected along with their families for their personal engagement or affinity with any political party, as a curious onlooker for friends at the locality, which was restricted as far as free movement and free mixing was concerned. My mother’s activism as a partisan to the CPI-M led to threats on her life a number of times. Many friends of my parents and the relatives on the maternal side of my family had to leave their residence to hide for months and years. Several young relatives, both men and women, both brilliant and moderate by education, were secretly and openly associated with the movement and sacrificed their careers or lives. Their voices are undeservedly omitted from articulation, like “the Naxalites mainly came from the ranks of the lower middle class (most of who were refugees from the Bengal Partition) rather than those from sahebi backgrounds who are anglicized and upwardly mobile” (S. Roy 2006, 104). The statement may confuse the denomination of class and the mobility prospects of the activists who risked their future for an ideological reason mediated by their above-average capability for understanding history and patriotism. Their antagonism toward English education (Ray 1988) and Anglicization was not an effect set in contradiction with the “vernacular intelligentsia” of the Naxalites (Roy 2006, 104) who came from all sections of culturally middle-class (madhyabitto), elite (abhijata), and slum-dwelling poorer (gorib) families with the necessary enlightenment for explaining revolution, capitalism, class struggle, state power, and so on. Except the fear of association and political differences, the Naxalite intelligentsia achieved a position of respect in the urban middle class and beyond. It is similarly true that at certain periods of its extreme militancy, a number of people without essential merit and training went out of control of the leadership. Did the vivid spectacle of the three slowly performed murders in the middle of the road terrorize the state or the civilians like us?

At the end of the Naxalbari andolon (movement), the paradoxical return of the local gangsters (goondas) to their original antileft camp from which they shifted to the “extreme-left” Naxalite militancy could take place because of the prevalence of the political clout symbolized by the feudal landlords or the rich aristocracy in the antileft political camp. It was in the public posturing of certain political leaders that like the zamindars they owned a prestigious power base of committed military subjects, obviously masculine and coercive. Most of these political leaders, having less organizational connection to ordinary people, tried to strengthen their hold over the localities by the goondas who had originally started committing crimes to earn money easily. The identity of a goonda could not be achieved by their illegal earning or petty crimes, but by the practice of breaking laws as a resource of power. The only major academic work on the goondas of Calcutta by Das (1994) embraces the issue both with the rich empirical data of police records and theoretical underpinnings to the historical rise, the modus operandi, and the forms of expression of the category of people called goondas. Since the colonial period, under the Bengal government’s Goonda Act of 1926, a goonda was treated as “invisible and peripheral,” as someone not only expendable and undesirable but also outside the worthy citizen community which it was the British police force’s job to protect (Basu 1987). The goonda as convicted or suspected deviant of a broad-spectrum ranging from thief, gambler, pickpocket, smuggler, tough, and drug dealer to political activist refers to a person who indulges in antisocial activity or promotes or abets any illegal activity which is harmful for the maintenance of public order, directly or indirectly. Das (1994, 2882) concludes, “The hitherto untapped police files give us an entry point for understanding the goondas as social entities who not only challenged the established legal structure but often their own class too.” The position of the goondas, both challenging and coercive, could not form an independent frontier of power in Calcutta to wield hegemony over the public sphere but remained subservient to the power of political leadership that (mis)used them or repressed them as situational power brokers. Despite the strict disapproval of my parents, I visited the slums near which I lived in north Calcutta and came in contact with several goondas. They were traditional in personal, social, and religious practices, mostly hierarchically related to gangs across traditional religious boundaries. Other slum-dwelling young boys treated them quite antithetically to what has been envisaged as “invisible and peripheral” and were motivated by the masculinity embodied in their challenging attitudes. During the Naxal period, the infamous gangsters and their original political sponsors had as their objective the public delivery of terror threats on an unprecedented scale in order to recapture the public sphere as the site of hegemonization and performance of their coercive masculinity, which hitherto remained unstable. At the end of the Naxalite period, due to the bold mass rejection of these groups, the coercive masculinity of the goondas went underground. They either shifted tactics to survive or sought occupational rehabilitation.

Bridging the Domestic and the Public: Conjugated Masculinity

By the early 1970s at the decline in the Naxalite disturbance in Calcutta, I was admitted to a local school, which was for the students of both middle-class and low-income families and which my parents thought to be quite off the mark. My mother prepared me for the competitive examinations needed to get admission in the middle division of any of the best government schools of Calcutta. My mother’s effort was successful in that it introduced me to the “standard” Bengali education and society of the city. With an eye to her son’s future, my mother was enthusiastic enough to escort me everyday to the school on her way to office. She never had time to spend with the nonworking mothers who waited everyday from the beginning to the end of school hours. My school was situated in a locality that contained a number of the “best” schools of Calcutta. In every school, it was a daily ritual on the part of the mothers of middle-class and upper-class families to sit on sidewalks, shades, verandas, or corners of the lawns apparently waiting to take their children home once school got over. They talked to each other, and this sharing of views among the parents had a major intention of acquiring more knowledge about how they should further the studies and career of their children. The focus was always on a more successful career for one’s own child, in the form of either better coaching or other assistance. Every evaluation a student had gone through in the school reflected on the parent, every failure occurring to a student was considered a parent’s failure and a challenge to their capability. The standard career options dreamt of were medicine, engineering, technology, law, professions based on the basic sciences, or anything else that was glamorous in the fields of science, commerce, and law. Professions related to the arts and humanities, performing arts, sports, media, performance, or even economics or civil services were kept on the margin of these visions of the future. In those days, the privatization of industries as part of the global liberal economic reforms was underway, and corporate life was not perceived as lucrative, as Donner (2006) explores in a study of motherhood among middle-class people in Calcutta. What Donner finds in the mothering of preschool children as the response to “the increasing impact of consumption patterns associated with global lifestyles […] associated with the development of a global workforce, migration, and white-collar employment in particularly desirable industries” (Donner 2006, 373) is nothing new as an ideal, but a continuity of the past across decades. My mother was among those few who spent ten hours a day in earning for her family and would also feel guilty of not providing minute care for her son’s future. Unlike homemaking mothers, she was financially empowered and brought in her network similar parents for exchanging views and advice about the proper guidance of her son. Besides my curricular coaching, I obtained coaching for painting, singing, swimming, and recitation. Quite unconventionally, my mother took me to the Bengali movies before I reached my teens. Nevertheless, similar to all mothers of the students of an elite school, her sincere striving for optimal performance in making me and my sister well-rounded personalities with a range of skills created an aura of militancy around my mother. This militant woman was also a respectable employee, a worthy relative, a helpful neighbor, an indispensable and strong support to her own and other families, a cordial friend, a dutiful householder, an effective consultant, and above all an empathetic, sensible, and strongly affectionate mother. My response to her benevolence came in the form of assisting her in domestic work and care for my sister who was seven and half years younger than me and regarded me less as an elder brother and more in an empathetic and protective parent. I would cut short the time of my sports and other entertainment for my voluntary support to my mother. I can still remember the comment of the father-in-law of one of my mother’s sisters, “Sabitri [my mother’s name] is like a very sensitive head of a joint family. More so in her case, she acts so judiciously that on the one hand the cohesion among the sisters and brothers is strengthened and on the other everybody remains focused on her/his family.” The autonomy of my mother, understood by others as quite masculine in its nature—simultaneously embodying effective feminine communication of care and supportive emotion to her relatives, children, and their friends and never challenging the families ascribed to her—was never in conflict with the masculine position of my father, almost as if it was a mutual collaboration of “honorable masculine” performances (George 2006) of a husband complemented by his wife or shared between a husband and his wife without any intension of disturbing the masculine hegemony. I have seen the same articulation of militancy, egalitarian sharing of roles, and equivalent autonomy of both parents of several of my friends. In all these families (including mine), the father is comfortably regarded as the “head of the family” with the unquestioning consent of his wife. In certain extreme cases, the autonomy of a wife who was challenging to a postmarital family or not finally submissive to a husband has led to the breakup of the family, if not a divorce, in all cases. This shows the autonomy of women of that social sphere ultimately did need patriarchal endorsement (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The recognized kinship of mine (Ego) spanning between my birth and 1971. (A) My father lost premarital paternalistic support and had no matrilineal economic support when I was born and when his father’s brothers (younger uncle/kaka) were settled in Calcutta. (B) My mother had lost father and uncle, the links between the family in Calcutta and family property in East Pakistan, simultaneously losing long shelter and upbringing in mother’s elder brother. (C) My father had to run a big extended family including his mother, unmarried sister, and married sister and her children. (D) My mother’s responsibility to look after and financially assist both my father’s expenditure for the family and her premarital family of nine more members of whom two elder sisters only started working by then. (E) Both my mother and maternal grandmother had to enter public sphere since their early life in Calcutta (Kolkata) and had manifest masculine traits.

My father was never unfavorable to us but failed in the communication of empathy and affection. It is very common among the Bengalis. Unlike my mother, he would not leave any space in his life that we felt we could participate in. I had to snatch from my father the outdoor duties to my family at a much later age, because he never wanted anybody to share his role. He was always busy procuring more for us, always haunted by an anxiety (which he called “tension”) either for the honest delivery of his financially sensitive executive service or for the security of more financial protection for his family. My mother learned how to take care of us through her intimacy with her parents, the brothers of both her parents, the wife of her mother’s brother (mamima), and our teachers, whereas my father hardly had anybody to turn to except a kaka (father’s younger brother) and the silent collaboration of his mother. My father, sincerely responsible and dutiful to his family, relatives, and friends, with the habit of appropriating the minimum for personal consumption in his extremely simple life, could not help inheriting some “masculine” lack of empathy to his children that bothered my sister and me deeply. The lack was evened out by the intimate support of my mother. I learned every nuance of dealing with various situations from my mother. My mother and not my father proffered the vision of a future persona or profession to me. My father rarely displayed his need to be emotionally close to my sister or me. He has remained personal in his meticulous spiritual beliefs and practices, which comprised his strong commitment to bhakti (devotion) toward his personal god (guru). It fits well with the observation of Sarkar (1998, 337) that “the notion of bhakti provided an easy response for middle-class Bengali males, to pacify the anxieties and drudgery […] with neither any understanding of ritual nor sacrificing the normal ‘bhadralok’ self image.” neither was I attracted to that bhadralok image, nor I bothered about the public reputation of my father. I strongly disliked being “masculine” like my father about whom I never thought I would locate anything significant (until I reached my thirties). Perhaps my father has been in a state of denial of the fact that his lack of empathetic attachment with any parental figure is constantly reproduced in his attitude to his children, which has resulted in the situation that his children reacted to him partly as he did toward his absentee father. He similarly replicated the absence of any sort of paternal interference and dominance over his children. All the dos and don’ts were monitored by my mother; the site of negotiation of my way with her way. When I reached my twenties, I started to feel that I would like to develop my faculties in a direction different to what my mother had envisaged for me…. My conflict with my mother regarding my choice of higher education and my activist practices could not be resolved until I was established in my profession. Since my late twenties, I started to realize that my (“softer”) masculinity was a revised articulation of my mother in the form of a flexible continuum of the domestic and the public. The people around me wondered how I could be so patient, caring, protective, affectionate, flexible, and contrarily decisive about others. It is their recognition of my behavior garnished not always with praise, rather with unsuccessful scrutiny, about whether my articulation has anything feminine or less masculine. My sister and wife, both critical by nature, agree that with reference to our cultural standards, I am a parent, not solely a father; I am a companion, not solely a husband; I am a friend, not only a male friend; and I cannot be only a brother. Quite conversely, with a critical gaze, I perceive myself persuasively commanding myself to promote my masculinity in all relational roles and situations. My attitudes are uncompromising on championing the position of my masculinity and mastering control over situations. Simultaneously, similar to local cultural standards of individual hegemony, I favor persuasive strategy to a coercive one, which is considered less rational and meaningful. The discourse in which my masculinization may be situated is an embodiment of conjugated masculinity.

Recovery of Calcutta: Pragmatic Masculinity

Neither in my earlier school nor at any later point in time did I hear anyone using the term chhotolok or itarlok or itarjan for addressing people doing manual labor or belonging to the lower castes as opposed to the middle class with the privileging of education, access to a modicum of wealth, and a “cultured” and respectable lifestyle confirming the position of “bhadralok” (Banerjee 1989; Ray 1988, 2000) in a colonial hierarchy. The implicit hierarchy of financial capability differentiating among barolok/uchchobitto (rich people), madhyobitto (middle class), and goriblok/nimna bitto (low earning people) has been commonest among the majority of urban Bengalis. The madhyobitto again comprised the uchcho modhyobitto (upper middle class) and the nimno modhyobitto (lower middle class) with an unquestioned omission of a “middle-middle” class. Post-1960s urban parlance would also include banedi (coming of glorious lineage), abhijata (aristocracy), and aeleet (elite) to designate the highest positions of society, though there were numerous instances of families ascribed as abhijata and banedi losing their status due to slow or sudden collapse. The terms chhotolok, bastir lok (slum dweller), and basti culture (the culture of slum dwellers) have been in use for verbal abuse of outrageous and mean behavior unexpected of somebody. The implicit interpolation of sikhsita (educated) beyond the literary limit of formal education made to enhance the hegemony of madhyobitto in the urban spaces previously nominated for the bhadralok. The recognition of a bhadralok is often counterpoised with that of a goonda (gangster), badmas (notorious), antisocial (unconvicted offender), and modomatal (public drunk). In fact, this marginal subculture of goonda/antisocial emblematic of coercive masculinity is socially embedded as they are hired for the purpose of stirring up trouble, whether political, religious, or personal (Hudson and Den Boer 2002). They challenged the genteel masculine space of the bhadralok, which had already been radicalized by the Naxalites and open to massive changes since the late 1970s.

The disillusionment of the Naxalites with a system that had failed to live up to the ideals of liberation was parallel to the yet optimistic narratives of two other communist and associated leftist parties. They were strategically successful in taking control of the situation and making new political spaces and modes of participation and emerge by bringing a large number of middle-class people into party politics (Corbridge and Harriss 2000). Although the activist practices were principally rural, Calcutta was the headquarters of the leadership. Unlike the Naxalite extremism, the CPI had the theory of a peaceful way to revolution, and the CPI-M was centrist with significant ideological differences on “strategic” and “tactical” grounds between them. After the inevitable fall of the second United Front Government in West Bengal, both the parties, along with other leftist associates, converted the resentment of the masses, especially of the peasants against Indian National Congress rule, into the favor of their pro-peasant, pro-laborer, and pro-poor promises and programmes. As is widely known, following the formation of its government in 1977 with a massive electoral victory and the subsequent formation of the Left Front Government (LFG), the small and middle peasants made their decisive stroke for political power and the unequivocal hegemonization of society in rural West Bengal. Operation Barga was implemented to break the concentration of land in a few hands and distribute small plots to rural peasants. The parallel installation of democratic and regularly elected local governments (the Panchayat Raj Institutions) emerged as instrumental to the empowerment of the peasant majority that surmounted their long-standing and humiliating dependence either on local landlords or the lower rung of the bureaucracy (Basu 2001; Bhattacharya 2010). “It was mainly with such ethical capital on the side of its politics that the Left Front managed to turn one of India’s most volatile political sites—rural West Bengal–into a relatively peaceful and governable space amenable to procedural interventions by the local government during a good part of the 1980s and 1990s” (Bhattacharya 2010, 52). However, Calcutta endured the change with impressive success in letting parallel voices coexist and develop peacefully. Since the establishment of the LFG in the province of West Bengal for more than thirty years, Calcutta, quite unlike other cities and rural regions did never flag up its electoral or cultural concern to overpower any party unequivocally. Rather the “traditional” vote bank of the Indian National Congress has been a sustainable, though marginal majority against the official Left.

In the public spheres, the new democratic politics pioneered by the LFG did not fail to accentuate on empowering the subordinated majority of the working class, the mass of peasantry, the urban poor, and middle class but not women directly. In order to establish its hegemony over a broad alliance according to its ideology, it developed the mechanism of vertical politics of allowing rich peasants and the petty bourgeois some role in its political programme (Robinson 2006) and the individuals of the upper castes and classes in its organization (Tawa Lama-Rewal 2009). The internal debate concerning the need to strike a balance in its ideological transition from rigid traditional ideology to the practice of democracy in an inclusive manner led to pragmatism on the part of the leadership (Franda 1971; Nossiter 1988; Lieten 1992). The political transition of the CPI-M in West Bengal has been described as pursuing the “politics of middleness” (Bhattacharya 1999; Basu 2001). The urban status of the colonial bhadralok became commendably open to varied narratives of rural leadership inclusive of rural middle-class bhadraloks among others (Tawa Lama-Rewal 2009). That polemical middleness represented the hegemony of a peasantry based on manual labor. The spread of education and cultural capital to rural West Bengal helped the public sphere surging up against the constraints of religion, caste, and gender, though it remained ambivalent to the benevolent patriarchy, yet alive in the everyday experience of Bengali society. Thus, this masculine discourse of organizational practice, quite in keeping with the hegemony of pro-middle pragmatism, has subsumed in itself the merits of different empowering narratives (even of urban women) and therefore unconsciously held back the potential to acquire exclusive growth within it. This discourse was responsive to the nonconformist voices of women to the extent they would not violate the locally adapted socialist vision of equality. For instance, complaints from women regarding her family are privileged over the complaints of men, but this discourse would not welcome a marital breakup based on individualist (bourgeois) preference only. Either mediated by men or women, this masculine discourse would empower collectivism over individualism. As masculinity is always relational to femininity, I would like to reflect back precisely on the changing tenets of “acceptable femininity” in the urban middle-class Bengali society since the journey of “provisioning women” started.

By virtue of earning money and/ or giving reproductive services for the family, larger kin groups, political fronts, communities, the anti-/postcolonial rise of archetypal other-oriented “provisioning woman,” or seemingly loftier substitute of man were the (in)voluntary response to the gap between falling paternal patriarchy and socially diffused fraternal patriarchy. The postcolonial/partitioned urban middle class at all levels had to accommodate and promote it as ideal for feminine freedom (i.e., modern education, employability, civil and political rationality and actions, varied skills, responsibilities, and all useful for the family) for the sake of historically more defendable patriarchy. The freedom was already tested for patriarchal moral control, yet an agency of countering coercive male domination as well. Since around mid-1980s, a more liberal democratic turn added many state reforms for the women that made the ground for “self-aware” urban womanhood to engage in more “pragmatic” negotiation between pervasive market economy and local forms of patriarchal social life. The “self-aware” practicality on behalf of adult women targeted at maximizing control over the structure and structuring of both domestic/private and civil/public domains that they relate to themselves. Whether as more masculine or more gender aware, as professionals and/or “homemakers,” the women of urban majority middle class acquired a range of efficacious “middleness” between the divides of private and public, individualism and communitarian identity, secularism and religiousness, and so on. Such quasi-definite positions got patriarchal consent despite frequently putting individual men uncertain about their masculine strategy to contain in the feminine freedom. Since the end of the 1980s, my long engagement with organizational activism in student politics, the cultural front, the literacy front, the teachers’ front, and the popular science front has rendered similar rejection of rigidity and similar absorption of democratic pragmatism.

My reflective recall of the experiences in Calcutta can mediate all the different narratives of masculinities developed in colonial and precolonial (I have not discussed those other masculinities in this article) Bengal as either fragmented practice on the margin or proactive in mainstream practice. Like many of my coactivists and nonactivist friends, I have emphasized the proliferation of my empathic sensitivity to varied voices across gender, class, ethnicity, caste, and religion, which urgently need affirmation by an effective audience. However, the hegemony to whatever extent is pragmatic cannot restrict the emergence of putatively counterhegemonic discourse, as it is evident in the most recent shift of power (2011) from the “official” leftism to a populist and yet another pragmatic alternative, the All India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal.

Conclusion

The decline in the hegemony of feudal masculinity and the closed-system bhadralok masculinity marked the rise of other masculinities in the public sphere of Calcutta. It offered space to militancy in the openly expanding urban life in Calcutta, where both radical and coercive masculinities had to undergo the intriguing encounter with aggressive state power and peace-seeking democracy. In familial orientation, the growing autonomy of the woman, instead of independence and individuation, got committed to the relatively benign masculinity of middle-class Bengali men. In this particular historical era in Calcutta, both the earning and nonearning women of the middle-class families were more focused on acquiring honor on behalf of her family than challenging the masculine authority of the family. Their bridging of the domestic and public spheres left it open to their children to value, choose, practice, and internalize the behavior of their (not always gendered) parents. In my case, it underscored the militancy, autonomy, communicative care, and empathy embodied in my mother. This narrative of conjugated masculinity has diverse articulations in different Bengali families that I have not exemplified here. Such sensitive and flexible masculinization assisted the positive responses to the narratives of power in democratizing and pragmatizing public spheres in Calcutta. Beyond the specific fields of professions, individuals participated in varied forms of activism. In the course of thirty years, the hegemony either in the form of masculinity or in the form of empowerment failed to bridge two extreme goals. On one hand, it needed to empower more or give more relief to the marginalized poor of West Bengal; on the other, it needed to provide a more suitable resolution of the crisis in the face of the neoliberal economic force. Despite the shift in the democratic power of governance, the hegemony of pragmatism is going through the test of time. However, the Bengalis have not been able to come out of the masculinist fold in spite of a militant desire for survival, encounters with radical movements, political turbulence, and a pragmatic governance of the populace for a long period. Even the recent past evokes a terrain of possibilities upon which masculinities are, at best, contesting for legitimacy.