For too long, Calcutta has been characterised as the city of adda - idle conversation on arcane and often irrelevant topics, usually conducted convivially over cups of tea on neighbourhood street corners. But that is only partly true.
The middle-class houses that sit back from the hubbub of the street actually resonate with priceless stories, family tales inextricably intertwined with national sagas. Any student of history is familiar with the grand events of kings and conquerors recorded in great tomes. More recent research and teaching of the subject, however, has focused on the 'little people' or 'subaltern' stories of peasant movements and the like.
The middle-class student or aficionado of history - such as your's truly - is thus left wondering where her story fits in, if at all. The only repositories of such middleclass (hi)stories are those sequestered houses and their greying denizens. Most of the latter are raconteurs not scholars, but all of them provide a crucial link to the bigger national and world story that the marginalised and increasingly deracinated middle class (sought only for their spending power now) would do well to know.
Historians, particularly contemporary left-leaning ones, paint the middle class of yore as opportunists, duplicitously (or perhaps, amorally) siding with colonial forces as well as anti-colonial movements depending on convenience. That categorisation , unfortunately, only bolsters the current, much-criticised ambivalence of this class when it comes to today's issues too.
The sight of thousands of 'People Like Us' (PLUs) coming out to support Nirbhaya's cause all over India would not seem so surprising if we listen to our non-scholarly historians (read, aged relatives and friends) - as I realised on yet another recent visit to Calcutta. Their tales do not point to middle-class inertia; rather, they speak of a very human desire to balance reason and emotion.
The predicament of the average, prosperous middle-class families in Bengal - as in the rest of India - during the freedom struggle was nothing short of epic. The breadwinners did a tightrope walk as their livelihoods were connected to the British Raj. Yet they could not steel their hearts against the appeal of a certain bald, bespectacled man in a loincloth either.
Their school and college-going children, like youth all over India at the time, were convulsed by the freedom movement, which their fathers admired but could not openly approve. The women were worst off, caught on the trishul of that great middle-class dilemma: protecting their husbands' careers, furthering their childrens' prospects and yet doing their bit for a greater cause.
This dilemma comes out tellingly now in the verbally recounted stories and rare diaries of those middle-class men and women - grandparents, parents and relatives - who lived through those tumultuous times. The middle-class' position was truly unenviable: neither rich enough nor poor enough to throw caution to the winds, yet acutely aware of national currents and eager to participate.
But compromise or complicity was not their chosen route as their detractors may presume today. Instead, they sought to reconcile conflicting loyalties and responsibilities with remarkable pragmatism and forbearance. And they ended up contributing their mite to historic events, whether in a relatively miniscule way or even at great personal cost.
I learnt this time, for instance, that a great grandfather-in-law (a lawyer with a bustling practice) brought Gandhiji to the sprawling north Calcutta ancestral home of the extended family. There, though they were not party to the private discussions of the menfolk, the women instantly took off the dozens of heavy gold bangles on their wrists and donated them to him...
At the same time, elsewhere in Calcutta, my maternal grandmother and her mother-in-law surreptitiously fed the scruffy revolutionary friends of a son of the house in the dead of night for months, not telling the men lest they were compelled by service rules to turn them in. There are so many stories that a column cannot chronicle even a single middle-class family's tryst with destiny.
But these (hi) stories need to be heard, told and recounted even more now as the middle class wonders once again about its role and place in the current national saga...
