On the night of May 28, Amarnath Jee had returned my call for the last time. Our conversations used to continue for hours but on that day it lasted only for six minutes. I had no idea it was going to be our last conversation.
For several months, he was looking for Annals of Rural Bengal (1867), the first book by William Wilson Hunter, an ICS officer who had arrived in India in 1862. He reminded me about Hunter's nine-volume Imperial Gazetteer of India. I had called him to inform him about the 1867 book. I had promised him that I will be able to procure the book for him from friends in Calcutta Research Group (CRG). He kept pursuing me for the book for several months. I kept pursuing CRG for the book. Finally, the book reached me and I sent it to him on May 28. We intended to read it and meet to discuss it. Now the discussion and meeting with him will never happen.
Amarnath Jee was intellectually alive till the last moment. When Bihar-Bengal dialogue was initiated, I always wanted him to join the dialogue because he used to share anecdotes from literature which underlined a shared heritage. I know that before breathing for the last time, he was reading either Hunter's book or this was one of the books which on his reading list. Several weeks back, I was with him in the pustak mela in Patna when he bought his last books. Few weeks back I had met him briefly at a cremation ground.
I knew him for quite a long time. We were quite close to each other. I live in his neighborhood. I used go to his residence. But we managed to meet each other mostly at seminars, conferences, protest sites, book fairs, tea shops, cremation grounds and condolence meetings. When my mother was killed due to medical negligence by Paras Hospital, he visited me in my village with Pushpraj Bhai during the last rites. It is he who informed me about his permanent absence, and the dwindling number of our tribe. His presence was meaningful beyond words.
Amarnath Jee was an old school journalist who used to get outraged by injustice of any socio-political colour and injustice by every socio-political colour. It was journalists like him who made what Jansatta used to be, through their spade work. In the absence of journalists like him Jansatta is no more what it used to be. He wrote with a sensitivity of an environmentalist with keen sense of politics of historical injustice and responsibility for that injustice. One of the last books he bought was about rivers of Bihar. He had realized that all colonial, political and corporate entities and ideologies were unjust towards rivers. His presence was a landmark in the Patna landscape. If he was present in a meeting, it used to seem that the meeting must be meaningful. Had it not been so, he would not have been there. He always spoke in a soft, measured and calibrated demeanor. He was a public intellectual who kept a very low profile and always seemed to be eager to learn more. He was always in search for insight from the state of affairs and meaning of life.
We all are in the queue but I just feel that before his passing away, I should have met him for the last time and exchanged few words and gestures and to assure him without words that he used to be situated in consciousness, now he is the primordial consciousness because न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचि नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूय: | अजो नित्य: शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे ||
Gopal Krishna
No comments:
Post a Comment