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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 especially in the novels of Indian Diaspora written in English. Kunal Basu’s The Opium Clerk, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome and Anita Desai’s Voices in the City are a few among the others where this image has appeared very prominently. Differences between the two generations, however, can also be found in their common life style. When the aged Bhola, who puts great faith on everything that is old and traditional, turns the knobs of their old radio to catch an audible radio station to hear the news of the day, his two children, Bhaskar and Piyu watch an English movie on the television: . . . while Bhasker and Piyu watched the English film on television downstairs Bhasker’s father turned the knobs for the medium and short wave on the radio –– to listen who knows what –– . . . (Chaudhuri, 323). The act of watching a film by the young when compared to an old man’s inquisitiveness about the news of the day, indicates an essential difference between the two generations. A Mirage and A Nightmare: The image of newness of Calcutta has had a fine reflection in Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song. But the icon of newness of Calcutta also leads the novelist to describe the city as a “mirage” (Chaudhuri, 336) and a nightmare. While giving the minutiae of a nursing home at Dhakuria in South Calcutta, where Khuku and Mini, the two childhood friends go twice a week for their routine physical checkup in their old age, Chaudhuri comments: Because the building itself was new, with a flat white façade that had red borders, it looked like a mirage, as all new things do in Calcutta. (Chaudhuri, 336) He repeats this when he describes how Khuku and Mini reach the building after passing through the glaring streets and lanes of the city in Khuku’s family car: “The nursing home rose before them like a mirage” (Chaudhuri, 337). ‘A mirage,’ according to the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, is an “optical illusion caused by atmospheric conditions . . .” (Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, 476). A mirage appears to have an existence particularly when it is observed from a certain distance. And so when Chaudhuri says that whatever is new in Calcutta is like “a mirage,” he implies that all the new things in the city, are without any real substance, solidity or permanence that may lead one to nothingness. Elsewhere in the novel, Chaudhuri, while speaking about Puti, the only daughter of Khuku’s dead elder sister and her only son, Mohit, has described Calcutta as a city of “bad dream[s]” and an enticing city: Yet this city that Mohit had been born into seemed sometimes like a bad dream to Puti, with posters, and endless peeling political messages on the walls (360). Vol. II. Issue. III 200 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Communal Riots: Distinct episodes of communal riots have often troubled the urban life in Calcutta. Like Amitav Ghosh in his The Shadow Lines, Amit Chaudhuri in his Freedom Song also represents Calcutta as a city of riots, curfews, and communal feuds and turmoil. But there is a difference in this regard between the two novels, for while Ghosh’s novel highlights the riots of the 1970s in the city of Calcutta, Chaudhuri’s novel represents the riots in the city in the last decade of the 20 th century. In fact, Riots in the history of the city of Calcutta are nothing new. Between 1911 and 1992 the city witnessed at least six major riots most of which erupted due to communal issues. There was a riot between the Hindus and the Muslims in 1911 in Calcutta, and again another one on 19 th February, 1921 between the Hindus and the Anglo-Indians of the then Calcutta. The city also witnessed a large-scale of Hindu-Muslim riot in the month of September 1918 which was caused by, to quote Suranjan Das, “the economic marginalization of Muslims [by the Marwaris] in Calcutta . . .” (Das, 75). Then there occurred another communal riot in 1926 caused similarly by “. . . a significant increase in the general Muslim antagonism towards the Marwaris, an anger intensified by the economic boycott of Muslims by the Marwais” (Das, 75). Das also records that “Between 1911 and 1921 alone, nearly 90,000 people were displaced from their slums, most of whom were Muslims” (Das, 75). Then, there was the Great Calcutta Action Day or the Direct Action Day of 16 August 1946 (just one year before the Independence) that continued in the city for a whole week. Suranjan Das in his essay “The 1992 Calcutta Riot in Historical Continuum: A Relapse into ‘Communal Fury’?” (Das, 283) puts the number of casualties within the first three days of the riot as exceeding 4,000, with more than 10,000 residents left homeless in the city. The communal riot again relapsed in the city when Bangladesh got its independence in 1971. This heinous communal violence between the Hindus and the Muslims in Calcutta recurred once again towards the end of 1992 and in the beginning of 1993 after the historical demolition of Babri masjid in Uttar Pradesh on December 6, 1992, and serial bomb blasts in Bombay (Mumbai) in March 1993. A huge communal turmoil appeared in Mumbai and whole of the nation immediately after the serial blasts which resulted in immeasurable bloodshed nationwide. The city of Calcutta too could not able to appease its people in such a disturbing circumstance. As N. L. Gupta has indicated in his book Communal Riots in India (2000), in Calcutta the death toll was at least 9 (Gupta, 307). Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, however, has recorded the latter two major communal riots of Calcutta and not all the historical riots that erupted in the city. There are some episodes in the novel that refer to the communal violence of Calcutta in 1992 and 1993. In some of the conversations between Khuku and Mini in the novel, Chaudhuri tries to represent the riot stricken city of Calcutta during the last decade of the 20 th century. In one such conversation, Mini while traveling with Khuku in a car down Southern Avenue and upon Vol. II. Issue. III 201 September 2011
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