A Requiem for Solidarity

The Travels and Writings of Chittaranjan Das

Sailen Routray

Chittaranjan Das as a Young Man

When Chittaranjan Das passed the Suez Canal, on his way to Europe from Bombay, on board ‘SS Sydney’ (an Italian passenger ship weighing around 15, 000 tons, returning from Australia to Genoa) on the 15^th of October 1962, he was quite surprised at the changes on the banks of the water course. The bank towards the left was lined with trees. Beyond the trees lay superb, newly constructed roads and rail-tracks, and just across these swayed fields of wheat, potatoes, bananas and millet. It was quite a change since he had passed by almost twelve years back as a twenty seven year old student, to join University of Copenhagen in Denmark in its doctoral programme in humanities. Then his only impressions were of vast horizons filled with sand, with most Egyptian faces weighed down with toil and sadness.

The slow-pace of travel on the Suez Canal had reminded him of traveling to Cuttack in the 1930s and 1940s from his village Bagalpur (in Jagatsighpur district), where the boats on the Taladanda canal were pulled by hand by people walking on its banks. Both the canals were colonial enterprises, the one in Odisha dug after a man-made famine in 1866 that had killed off a third of its population; both were opened in 1869, Mahatma Gandhi’s year of birth. 

When Chittaranjan traveled to Europe for the first time in the December of 1950, Egypt was still a British protectorate; by 1962, it was independent. The administration led by the country’s second President, Gamal Abdel Nasser had finally nationalised the canal, that was earlier managed by an Anglo-French company; the profits were now being used to improve the land, and the people’s living conditions. For Chittaranjan, the greenery in the landscape and the hope in people’s faces was linked not only with political freedom, but also with the first steps being taken for a long-overdue social transformation.

He saw his sojourn to Europe in 1950-53 as a doctoral student (financed by industrialist and politician Biju Patnaik), as being part of such a process - where he could learn from the remarkable experiments in popular education in Denmark, and then undertake similar work in India. By then he had had a longish stint in Shantiniketan: first as a post-graduate student between 1945-48 studying western philosophy with Binoy Gopal Roy and Prabas Jiban Choudhury, and Vedanta, Navya Nyaya and Sanskrit with Sukhamaya Bhattacharya, graduating with a dissertation on Spinoza (a resultant paper, leading to a lasting friendship with the celebrated psychiatrist Viktor Frankl); and, then, as a research associate assisting the Pali scholar Prahlad Pradhan to set up one of oldest university departments of Odia, during 1948-50.

Chittaranjan went on to become one of the foremost writers of Odia prose in the 20^th century. By the time he died in 2011, at the ripe age of 88, he had grown in stature as one of the most important public intellectual in Odisha. In a writing career spanning six decades, he produced more than two hundred books – both original works and translations.  Quite a significant number of the latter were translations of educational classics into Odia. Despite having excellent command of one and half a dozen languages, including many European tongues such as German, Danish and Finnish, and Indian ones like Sanskrit, Pali, Urdu and Bangla, he did almost all of his writing work in his mother tongue, Odia. 

Cover of 'Nepal Pathe'

He is perhaps the most prolific writer of Odia non-fiction ever, with his forays including diaries, essays, reviews, volumes of autobiographies and memoirs, columns, belles lettres, textbooks, and research monographs. Perhaps the most significant body of his work consist of the large number of travelogues that he produced. These include wanderings in Odisha (like ‘Ganjam Mala re Sata Dina’ - ‘Seven days in the Ganjam Highlands’); accounts of tours in various other states of India (such as the volume describing treks in Western Himalayas, titled ‘Silatirtha’ - ‘Mountain Pilgrimages’); and, stories of travels in the West (like the volume called ‘America ru Asili’ - ‘Back from America’ - filled with sociological insights about American society).

He also wrote five travel books set in Asia. Of these ‘Sagar Jatri’ (‘Seafarer’) and ‘Sagar Pathe’ (‘On Marine Paths’) describe his journeys on ships to Europe via the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, in the years 1950 and 1962, respectively. ‘Aertej Israel’ is about his experiences in 1991-92 in Israel, when he was a visiting faculty there at a university for three months; these are then juxtaposed with memories from his first visit to that country in 1953, when he spent three months on his way back to India from Denmark. We have additional details of his first visit to Israel in the autobiography,’Mitrasya Chakshyusha’ (‘With the Eyes of a Friend’). 

‘Bharata ru Chin’ (‘From India to China’) is an account of his travels in the mid 1980s, as a part of an Indian delegation to China, under invitation from ‘Chinese People’s Association with Foreign Countries’. But the earliest of these Asian travelogues is ‘Nepal Pathe’ (‘Onward to Nepal’); the text was accompanied by woodcuts by Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, who had accompanied Chitta babu on the trip. Sinha went on to become a celebrated artist, illustrating the original manuscript of the Constitution of India.

‘Nepal Pathe’ narrates experiences of the author as a traveler in Nepal in the months of April and May in the year 1947. When Chittaranjan embarked on this short trip, as part of a group of five students, across the Himalayas in the summer of the year of India’s independence, he was a 24-year old postgraduate student in Shantiniketan. In this book, he describes his observations of the first stirrings of the national movement in Nepal and the development of the initial strands of consciousness against oppression by the Rana regime. In the volume’s introduction the author says, “A reawakening has started in Nepal. Till now the Nepali Gurkha used to obey his masters’ orders as a loyal soldier. Now a new consciousness has taken birth there, where all the various communities call themselves ‘Nepali’, as one nation.”  

His first impression of Nepal was the poverty of the coolies; in this destitution of the masses he saw the unity of all suffering and toiling Asians. After crossing over from India, his group’s first major halt was at Taulihawa, where a friend’s father was posted as a government servant. This small town used to be a claimant for the location of Kapilavastu, the capital of the Shakya clan to which  the Buddha belonged and where he grew up. After exploring this ancient Buddhist site, they pushed ahead to Kathmandu via Lumbini, Gorakhpur and Birganj. 

Chittaranjan Das

Nepal had only one college then, and only half a dozen high schools; the travel of outsiders was strictly regulated; the food in the wayside rest-houses was restricted to rice, arhar dal, boiled vegetables and a basic chutney, at most. The extensive Buddhist built heritage of the country alerted Chittaranjan to the key role traditions related to this faith played in pre-colonial times in forging relationships between Nepal and India.

In his travels in China, he encountered the same profound influence of Buddhist traditions originating in India, on the largest country of the continent. But what intrigued him the most, was that this cultural relationship was one-sided. Despite claims of openness and liberalism as a country, India does not seem to have actively sought out knowledge from other lands. Who is India’s Xuanzang, he seems to ask. What struck Chittaranjan the most in the new China, were the transformations underway in the material living conditions and the political consciousness of the ordinary Chinese, as a result of the communist revolution.

Although he had briefly flirted with communism in his teens, in his approach to life and politics, Chitta babu can only be termed as a Gandhian. He participated in the ‘Quit India’ movement when he was a college student and was jailed for one and half years. In the latter half of the 1950s, he was instrumental in setting up and running what was, arguably, the most important educational experiment in post-Independent Odisha in Champatimunda in the central parts of the state. 

This was a school called Jibana Bidyalaya (‘The School of Life’) run for post-basic education students, whose parents had worked in the freedom movement. In its pedagogic practices, it combined ideas drawn from the educational philosophies and experiments of Gandhi and Tagore. In the period when he made the trip to China, Chitta babu was leading a movement for operationalising the educational ideas of Aurobindo Ghosh and Mirra Alfassa in Odisha; soon it was to run more than 200 schools across the state.

Therefore, by no stretch of imagination could Chittaranjan be called a partisan communist. But he was enamoured by the education system that was being woven into being in post-revolution China. Manual labour and book learning provided the two legs on which the education system of the new China ran; this had a strong resonance with Gandhi’s ideas of basic education. 

Chitta babu was also fascinated by communes that were the central organising institution of socio-economic life in new China. These were being operated with the ideas of ‘Democratic Centralism’ (where the central  leadership provided ideas, guidance and support, and local communes carried out experiments in communal agricultural production, political education and shared living), and filled him with hope for a new Asia. 

Revolutionary land reforms had removed the intermediary classes; now a model of economic development that put communes of peasants at the centre, made agriculture and a new egalitarian political consciousness the basis on which democratic social life and a prosperous nation could be built.

It is this drive towards social transformation by creating humane, egalitarian, collectives that fascinated Chitta babu about kibbutzs as well, when he saw these in Israel. Kibbutzs are experiments in communal living combining ideas of Zionism and socialism, where a group of men and women live and work together; all resources are owned communally, and decisions are taken democratically. 

Cover of 'Aeretj Israel'

Starting in the early years of 20^th century (the first one, ‘Degania’, was established in 1909), Kibbutzs have become central to the taming of the deserts of Israel, providing a disproportionately large part of its agricultural and industrial production. In both his stints of travel in Israel, Chittaranjan spent considerable time in the kibbutzs, focusing specifically on its schools. 

By the time he went there for the second time, a few religious kibbutzs had started as well, that placed Judaism at the centre of communal life. But for Chittaranjan, the distinction between secular and religious kibbutz movements was not that significant, as what mattered to him was the constant human search for transcendence.

For him this was exemplified in the life and works of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), whose philosophy of dialogue creates the conceptual scaffolding for building bridges between warring Jews and Arabs. Chitta babu met Buber in his first visit to Israel, spent long hours with him, soaking in his wisdom and presence. 

Apart from Buber, these travelogues introduce many other remarkable people to the reader: Danilo Dolci (1924-1997), the Italian Gandhi who fought non-violently and democratically against poverty and social exclusion in Italy; Moshe Harif (1933-1982), Israeli architect and politician, who played a crucial role in the movement surrounding kibbutzs; and, amongst others, the Chinese thinker Hu Shih (1891-1962) who made significant contributions towards the development of Chinese liberalism and language reforms, and advocated for written vernacular Chinese rather than using the classical version of the language. Do we have any space for the ideas and ideals of these people in our Brave New Asian Century? 

Note: A much shorter version of this article was published in the Sunday magazine of The Hindu newspaper on 31st March, 2019.