Scent of a Story: A Newspaperman's Journey

By Shankar Ghosh

Combining biography and memoir, Shankar Ghosh writes of his father's life as a journalist in his father's own voice. As the longest-serving and the first Indian editor of the second-oldest English newspaper in India, the Pioneer, his father Dr S.N. Ghosh's career matched step with the most profound changes in modern history, including India's coming of age as an independent nation.As a cub reporter for the Pioneer, Dr Ghosh saw the 'whites only' clubs of the British Raj. During the Bengal Famine he was one of the few journalists who wrote about the disaster, and even helped his wife smuggle grain to Calcutta, then a punishable offence. On the eve of Independence, he wrote the Pioneer's editorial to mark the historic day. In the 1950s he witnessed the beginning of the Ram Janma Bhoomi movement -- after an idol of Ram Lalla appeared surreptitiously in the Babari Masjid. He also chronicled the India--China war and the politicking in an incipient Uttar Pradesh, and had experienced first-hand the Jim Crow years in the US when he travelled in the country.As a journalist Dr Ghosh's personal accounts were many. He loved to tell them and Shankar to listen. Shankar's prose condenses, as a perfumer bottles a fragrance, his father's remembrances, his father's life in romance of a newspaper, and the spirit of an early Lucknow, all for us to get a whiff of those times. As memoirs go, Scent of a Story is a charmer of a book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jul 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789352779444

Shankar Ghosh

Shankar Ghosh was born in Lucknow in 1943. He majored in geology from the University of Lucknow and studied forestry in the Indian Forest College, Dehradun. After a brief stint in the Indian Forest Service, he worked in wood-based industries in India and East Africa. He headed a major agro-forestry poplar intercropping programme in the farmlands of north India, and helped initiate livelihood enhancement programmes in Africa through the introduction of rural poultry. He has worked with Arizona State University and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He lives in New Delhi with his wife, Dr Manju Ghosh.

Book preview

Kumudini

Her school, a brick-and-thatch affair in a church compound, had two classes: choto class (small class) and boro class (big class). Very fair, tall and all of twelve years, Kumudini had finished choto class. She considered herself fortunate that her parents allowed her to attend school, unlike most of her friends who were already assisting full-time with household chores. She was a bright student and the missionaries had promised her that they would speak to her parents: After boro class, God willing, they would send her to Bilate (England), for formal education.

On that day, beside herself with excitement, she didn’t stop to listen to the nun play the piano after class, and ran home, with the anchal of her blue-bordered sari fluttering behind her as she ran. It was a Saturday, and she didn’t have to avoid the puddles and save her sari from being soiled – the sari could be washed the next day.

She was panting heavily by the time she reached home and splashed the metal-tasting water on her face from the hand pump. It wouldn’t do to appear dishevelled, her father was home, and hadn’t she heard her age being discussed so many times? She had to behave with decorum and remember not to look him in the eye when telling him about what the memsahib nun had told her. Oh it was all so very complicated, it would be better to talk to her mother.

Late afternoon, on hearing her father snore after his midday meal, she joined her mother in the kitchen. Her mother had kept some rice and vegetables for their meal and was about to clean the cooking pots. Kumudini joined in with scraps of coconut coir and ash. She was hungry, but the sense of camaraderie she felt while helping her mother was to make the dam burst. ‘Ma, the memsahib nun has told me that, after boro class, the church would try and send me to Bilate for higher studies. What fun, no?’

‘O Ma! You will lose your caste,’ her mother Nalinibala replied, her voice filled with anguish. ‘They will convert you to Christianity.’

Lunch was forgotten, and Nalinibala now rubbed ashes on her forehead, and rocked back and forth on her haunches reciting gayatri mantra.

Kumudini’s father, Babu Gopal Chandra Dey, worked in the main post office in Allahabad and was a first-generation settler in north India. He would have never left home in Calcutta if it had not been for an act of God, an act which wiped his slate clean of friends, relatives and all material possessions.

His father had asked him to go to Berhampore, a small township about a hundred miles from Calcutta, to find out the status of paddy dispatches from their suppliers for the family business. And so, on the morning of 3 October 1864, a fourteen-year-old Gopal had reached Berhampore accompanied by Bishwanath kaka, the family servant.

It was raining, though not very hard, and by afternoon it blew a bit, and he was forced to remain indoors. Next morning it was still blustery when he went looking for his suppliers, and was told by the very first one that a railway engine driver had brought news of a cyclone that had destroyed most of Calcutta town, and caused mortalities on a large scale. Gopal hitched a ride on whatever conveyance he could find and reached Calcutta late afternoon on 6 October.

There was nothing where his ancestral house stood. It was all a sheet of water: mounds of rubble where once houses stood and a vast emptiness where the thatched bamboo homes stood in clusters. And the stench! The cloying stench of death and decay was all-pervading. He looked around for bodies and survivors of his family for many days, but the story was always the same. It had rained hard, the wind had howled, and a wall of water over forty feet in height had barrelled in through the Hooghly river, and that too at high tide. There was no hope as everything was swept away in its path. Brutalized by this calamity, Gopal found himself in a train and setting off with a vague idea of finding some distant relatives he had heard about in Allahabad. Dame Luck smiled on him for once, as he went on to find them, be employed by the post office, and later marry and start a family.

In Allahabad, he had found the Bengali community very different from what he had left behind in Calcutta. The ‘rock addas’ (front-porch discussions), an important and integral part of life, where people would get together and talk, argue and gossip, were missing because the houses were not cheek by jowl as they were in Calcutta, with steps leading to plinth level, and themselves serving as seats or the ‘rock’. The evening sessions there would follow the time-honoured procedure of two persons who would ‘happen’ to meet at the ‘para’s rock’ (designated neighbourhood porch) and start a discussion, and were very soon joined by friends and acquaintances to begin a lively chat. The blowing of conchshells by the ladies of the house and the scent of dhuna (incense) would announce sandhya puja, and the menfolk would wait for the smoking dhuna holders (dhunochis) to be brought out to ward off mosquitoes and permit the discussions to go on after sunset.

In his predominantly Bengali neighbourhood in Allahabad, efforts had been made to find a common place to gather, for the want of ‘rocks’, but these were makeshift arrangements. Someone would haul a toktaposh (wooden bedstead) out and hope that neighbours and friends would pass by and see him waiting. They spoke a different Bengali too, with lots of ‘Hindustani’ (Hindi) words, and pronounced a very sibilant s. For instance, ‘Sarkar’ would be pronounced as ‘Sorkar’, instead of the correct ‘bhodro’ way of saying ‘Shorkar’. And what was more – most of them did not know a thing about being a ‘Ghoti’ or a ‘Bangal’ (West or East Bengali). There was a lot of chess-playing, though, and Gopal had found a partner and played almost every evening.

He would have a good laugh with his wife about these traits of their neighbours and refer to them as ‘khottas’ (derogatory for up-country Hindustanis). But all said and done, he felt quite at home and was satisfied that he had been able to carve out a life for himself and his family in this alien land.

That night, as Kumudini lay with her brother and sisters near the foot of her parents’ bed, she heard the whispered complaints of her mother that her father was going about without a care for the family. To a sharp ‘And now what?’ from her husband, her mother, Kumudini could hear, said, ‘Your daughter has had her third period; are you looking for a husband for her? Or are you wasting your time with your cronies playing chess?’

Kumudini thought of crying as she saw her dreams of travel to Bilate crumble, but then the prospect of new saris and bangles was not unpleasant. On Sunday Kumudini’s only schoolbook, printed on coarse unbleached paper, was examined for the first time by her mother. The smudged picture of Christ on the Cross on the flyleaf was quickly turned over with high-pitched chanting of the gayatri mantra. In the next two pages she saw the firangi alphabet with phonetics in Bengali – which was all there was to the book – and then consigned it to kindling.

School was over. Kumudini was now taught how to cook. Cooking didn’t just mean recipes of various dishes. A good cook had to be an excellent planner. Potato peels were not to be thrown away; it made an excellent khosha chorchori. Similarly, the stalks of cauliflower mixed with pumpkin and potatoes could be made into ghaint, which could be had with either roti or rice. Cooking fish was an art: The fish head was always served to the ‘babu’ or head of the family, unless the fish was very large and the head could be prepared as muri ghonto. Importantly, one had to learn what could be served to the ‘babu’ and how to make do with odds and ends for the rest.

When Kumudini was almost fourteen years old, Gopal Chandra found a suitable husband for her. Harish Chandra, a bachelor of arts, working as a clerk in the Pioneer, one of the oldest English newspapers in India, had recently lost his wife in childbirth. He had been married for less than a year and was known as a good provider. He could recite Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’, most of Michael Madhusudan’s Meghnad Badh Kavya and the whole of Nabin Chandra Sen’s ‘Palashir Juddha’. A man of many parts, indeed, and Babu Gopal Chandra was pleased with the find. He married Kumudini off to Harish Chandra Ghosh in the winter of 1896.

It was happy times for Kumudini but men do have their foibles. It was a closed chapter now, but sometimes it still rankled. Hadn’t she heard her husband’s reply to their neighbour, when asked how he liked the ‘notun bou’ (the new wife) – ‘The earlier one was prettier’ – on her very first day in her in-laws’ house? Her mother-in-law was a frail woman who widowed early, and who with her two sons had been taken in by her husband’s elder brother in Benares. Her younger son had settled near Patna in Bihar, where he was a schoolteacher, and she had moved to Allahabad with Harish when he got a job there.

Kumudini gave no cause for the neighbours’ tongues to wag. Even before the year was over, she was with child, and Tanki pishi (father’s cousin), the well-meaning busybody of the neighbourhood, as usual always had the last word. ‘Doesn’t that chit of a girl have any patience?’ But she soon busied herself in looking after Kumudini, and saw her through the discomforts of early pregnancy with burnt lemons and white clay to keep the nausea away. In due time Tanki pishi came out of the labour room, shooed away the midwife and then with a smile announced that Kumudini had delivered a male child.

The happy occasion was celebrated by the Ghosh household with distribution of sweets among the neighbours. Kumudini stayed in the darkened ‘antur ghar’ (delivery room) for the regulation three weeks while the neighbours orchestrated by Tanki pishi looked after the material needs of the household.

After this period of rest and recovery, Kumudini went back to splitting firewood, cooking and doing the rest of her household chores. She envied the Basus, who had a coal fire in their kitchen, but then not everyone had a job in the railways and had access to the grate residues of the locomotives. Harish was a diligent worker with no vices and, together with his total devotion to the white sahibs, ensured his gradual progress in the advertisement department; life went on.

On 20 May 1904, Kumudini had her third child, her second son – me, Surendra Nath Ghosh, nicknamed Suren or Habul. We would go on to become what in those days was a family of average size: eight siblings – two sisters and six brothers.

‘Mahari’ Rupna Kaharin

Two strapping sons and a daughter was a wonderful way to start a family. Kumudini, my mother, had lost a few in between shortly after childbirth, all natural deaths and perhaps all females. But Chhutki, the girl next door, was a huge embarrassment. She worshipped the ground my mother walked on and any newcomer would get an earful about how strong a woman Ma was to have got rid of the females at birth.

Ma’s family had provided her with a new status. She could now join in conversations with the older women of the neighbourhood, referred to as mashis (mother’s sisters) or pishis, and aspire to be included in their tirth yatras. It wasn’t long before such an opportunity came about. Tanki pishi’s blinding headaches and episodes when she became possessed were becoming increasingly frequent.

The ‘baidya’ (vaid) had said that it was a benign spirit that possessed her and that it was not a cause for worry, but the blackouts and speaking in an unrecognizable language, often ending in a seizure, were not something very pleasant. A tirth yatra to Kedarnath and Badrinath had been suggested by many, and since her nephew Nil Ratan had taken ‘diksha’(religious initiation) and was willing to accompany her, the yatra suddenly became possible with the presence of an important male member to take charge of the pilgrim team.

Ma, having lost her mother-in-law, broached the subject to her husband, who, to her surprise, did not object to her joining the yatra. The only consideration was that there should be someone to look after the household while she would be away.

In this situation came Rupna Kaharin as a godsend. Mr Basu the goods clerk had heard a commotion on the railway station platform and had seen that a ticket collector was trying to detain a youngish girl, obviously ticketless. Though young, she was putting up a spirited defence and shrieking colourful expletives describing the ticket collector’s grandfather, cracking her fingers and giving him the evil eye. Mr Basu dispersed the knot of people that had formed, pacified the ticket collector and asked the girl to sit in front of his office. He then waited for an opportune time to explain the situation to the Anglo-Indian station master and offer to pay for her ticket. This little charade was required of him as a loyal servant of the Railways, but he also knew that the offer would not be availed of. Did he not keep the station master supplied with fresh vegetables whenever the wholesale merchants came to load the produce in outbound trains?

She went home with Mr Basu, and he presented her to his wife, Supriya, as a prospective maidservant. Rupna Kaharin may have become a part of the Basu household, but she took things literally when asked about what had happened in the railway station. Rupna described the cruel ticket collector