Surendra Nath Paul was dumbstruck. Never had anyone before, least
of all his students, in the last thirty-five years questioned the
nature of his being or nationality status. Though calm and
reflective, and known for his witty repartee, Surendra Nath,
baffled by the impetuous blurt, found it impossible to force a
single word escape his mouth. There was that sudden sense of
desolation and emptiness, which of late had, often disturbed his
poise. Suren—as he is dearly called—stood with a stoic silence
very much like the old Banyan tree, which could not protest its
sacrifice last winter to an extension of his institute. It was
increasingly becoming evident to Suren that under a masquerading
modernity all-things associated with the past was expendable
except our exclusionary prejudices and stigmatizing bigotry.
Slowly moving towards his chair, a steadfast and comfortable
companion that always soothed his tired body, Suren slumped into
its warm familiar embrace. He felt exhausted and tired, forlorn
and desolate—suddenly becoming aware of the loneliness, which
usually accompanies one at this fag stage of life’s journey. He
groped for reason and logic that were his tools with which he
empowered innumerable generations to engage evenly with life. He
had always exhorted his students to make uncomfortable questions
because that is the way of change and evolution of new knowledge.
Notwithstanding his blind belief on reason and logic, Surendra
Nath, however, was unable to engage these tools to overcome his
present challenges. Was it possible to reason with unreason?
Born during a historical cusp when freedom was to triumph over
bondage and suppression, Suren was inspired by the charisma and
character of the personalities who held the torch of freedom under
compelling circumstances. Even during his school days Suren ran
through the countryside fluttering a flag that symbolized a
harmony of peace, prosperity, sacrifice and aspirations of an
emerging nation. It was to be a harbinger of the new light and
liberty that sought to redeem the bonded history of the last two
hundred years, and mould a new nation that embodied varied
cultural, religious or ethnic groups with autonomous histories,
often conflicting claims, and different stages of development. The
new nation was to attain a difficult but emancipating bond that
transcended all parochial and exclusionary horizons instilled by
the ‘civilising missionaries’.
Like many
others of the age, Suren also joined the Freedom Struggle, inspired by
the revolutionary ideas and insurgent acts of Surya Sen, Bhagat Singh,
Muzaffar Ahmed and many others who were the usual actors of his elders’
conversations. He had to spend countless days in dark dungeons, made
darker by the inhuman treatment that his fellow humans blinded by a
racial arrogance meted to his countrymen. But it had become evident that
these were merely the last waves of the storm that was beginning to
subside.
Nonetheless, instead of treating his tormentors with hate and
bitterness, the pain that Suren endured slowly strengthened his resolve
to widen the horizons of his claim to the ‘ruling race’. He realized
that his tormentors were also people denied their freedom and
emancipation, since they were also held bondage by their racial
arrogance and conceit. Suren realized that there could be only one true
claim, and that is the claim of humanity. However, Suren’s claim
suffered a serious breach when his dream got balkanized into two,
legitimated by the same claim of arrogance and difference that Suren had
fought hard to surmount, just that, now it was religion.
Suren had suffered his first lesson for being a naïve idealist.
Completing his post-graduation from the university of Calcutta, Surendra
Nath wanted to take up teaching, for he thought that right knowledge
might be helpful in molding a society overcome its parochial and
unreasonable passions. Inspired by Tagore, he assumed that quest for
truth would “help to kill racial, sectarian, caste and other prejudices
and be a real fountain of Universal light.” He believed in Tagore’s
vision that “Education is in a real sense, the breaking of the shackles
of individual narrowness,” and equipping people with the tools of logic
and reason was the best way to achieve it.
Surendra
Nath came back to the place where all his kin had now settled, and
joined a reputed missionary college that had a dynamic and inspiring
bellwether. Despite the limitations imposed upon his dream by a few
individuals who shape history through their ambitions and conflicts,
Surendra Nath with courage fired by his dream dedicated himself again to
its realization.
He would not know the result, until now.
Today, a
teenager—a student of his—head furrowed as if by a plough over barren
rough earth, eyes blood-shot, enthusing an audacity inspired by the pint
of devil’s nectar available very near to the institute, impressed an
epithet upon Surendra Nath’s dream—a dream that sustained and inspired
him through the struggles of life for the last twenty-five years.
History, it seemed, had once again proved the fragility of his dreams.
Surendra Nath seemed to have suddenly woken up to a world that had
become completely bounded by hate, warmed by mammon and sewn together by
malice and vengeance. Reason and logic acquired a warped meaning that
justified darkest orgies and paroxysm of racial arrogance.
“Go to your homeland”, Surendra Nath, reminisced.
The toil of the last twenty-five years that produced two chief-ministers
and unaccountable number of officials, entrepreneurs, professionals and
members of Parliament had never been lymphatic because he was physically
and linguistically different, never was his ability interrogated because
he wore a dhoti.
Surendra Nath had never ever, thought about ‘his homeland’, where is it,
if there is any, beyond this place where he sought to build up his
dream. Where is it, beyond this society he helped to nourish and
sustain, shape and transform. Did he not share the same dream, the same
aspirations and longing for higher ideals? Was it these “narrow domestic
walls of dead habit” that Surendra Nath had thought would be questioned
and challenged by the quest for truth? Was it this cultural
balkanization legitimated by a perceived notion of antiquity the truth?
Was it this racial hate and abuse that was to be a ‘preface to our
deliverance’?
Surendra Nath recollected his constant emphasis upon equality and
compassion, in his thoughts and actions. He recollected moments that had
almost cost his life for his dogged insistence on a standardized norm of
reason and justice. Surendra Nath recollected how a few months back one
of his colleagues was assaulted for being unable to gratify a student’s
[who happened to be an ethnic ‘other’] dishonest claim. He recollected
how he had consistently sought to embrace a self-definition dramatically
inconsistent with the identity stubbornly imputed to him by an
ethnically polarized society; how his ‘self-identity’ was being defined
and determined by the dynamics of an increasingly misanthropic social
interaction. However, despite the changing social context he could not
recollect an incident when he reflected bias based on linguistic or any
other perceived affinity. He had never failed in his obligations of
equipping the society with the necessary ability to build up this
homeland, that today does not embrace him.
As Surendra Nath struggled tenaciously to brace his disintegrating
dream, he could not help conciliate to the thought that maybe we can
never eliminate prejudices and discriminations from human psyche, but
only replace them upon new hosts with new meaning and justification.
It must have been quite late in the evening, when Surendra Nath came out
of his subliminal cerebration, for the lovely bright daylight was
snuffed out by the pall of ominous darkness that had crowded all else
aside. Surendra Nath radiated an emptiness and desolation that seemed to
stifle his drive to defend his dream.
Just than a group of youths stood near the ornate doors to his room
exchanging an expression of silent horror and anguish. Surendra Nath
regained his composure, enough to enquire, what had brought them. After
a moment’s silence one of them gathered the courage to mention the
incident and that they had all come to seek pardon on behalf of their
erring friend.
Surendra Nath, almost forgetting the grievous episode, was stirred by
the thought that probably life was offering him another chance to dream
his dream.
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