Crime Today News
There is a curious tendency among Kolkatans – or maybe it’s more universal – to adopt teachers. “So-and-so was my teacher,” you might catch someone saying. The uninitiated will not know that a follow-up question is warranted. “Direct teacher?” “No, not direct, but she was like my teacher.” This distinction between “direct” teachers and a teacher in a less technical capacity – someone who has been adopted as an intellectual role-model, usually unbeknownst to them – can cause the occasional territory battle among “direct students” and “indirect students.” But in my experience, teachers who are prone to being adopted by a large number of “indirect students” often indulge both factions equally outside (sometimes even inside) the classroom.
An effortlessly indulgent teacher
Sajni Mukherji was one such. I say this with confidence because I wasn’t a “direct student” but ended up forming a close friendship with her nonetheless. Sajni-di had retired before I joined the Department of English at Jadavpur University as an undergrad in 2008 but she was one of the teachers whom seniors would mention frequently to inspire “golden age” envy in the younger lot. She had been at JU since 1976, following brief stints at Lady Brabourne College and the School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She had done her BA at Presidency College, her MA in English from the University of Oxford, and her PhD (which she was fond of describing as a “trade union card” for academics) at Jadavpur University, under Prof Jashodhara Bagchi’s supervision.
When I was in my second year, I had read a piece by her in The Telegraph, titled “Estupido Cupido,” where she had written about singing Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon” with all the children in her family. “Some students recently broke my heart,” she had added, “when they told me the song was not about forgetting a much-loved toy but about flower power and addiction to marijuana.”
Unused to grown-ups expressing emotional vulnerability, I felt a rare tingling of the chivalric spirit within me. I wrote to her promptly, dismissing the alternative interpretation as being unmoored from the lyrics and, therefore, invalid. To my surprise, she wrote back, thanking me for my reassuring email and promising that she would not stop singing the song with children. Later, I realised the naivety of my missive – I must have sounded a tad patronising too – but the only reason I don’t blush at the memory is that Sajni-di was effortlessly “indulgent” (a word used in this context recently by fellow JU alumnus Sreyashi Dastidar). She would never let earnestness feel stupid.
Sajni-di’s relatives, students (direct and indirect), and colleagues have written a number of moving tributes in the last couple of weeks, so I shall not recount in detail what has been said already. Her political commitment, starting from her student days, never ceased to amaze me. She had that rare ability to respond to the bigger picture, as it were, through gestures that were within reach and, in doing so, suggest ways in which people could participate even while operating within limitations. A classic instance (which she wrote about in her column “Autumn Flush”) was her role as rabble-rouser in the creation of “Kolahol” (lit. “clamour”), a campus-made substitute for Coca Cola, as a means of protesting the United States’ declaration of war on Iraq.
I wasn’t remotely surprised to learn from Rohit Kumar’s piece in The Wire that Sajni-di would send him small sums of money during the 2020 farmers’ protests as her contribution to the cause, knowing that Kumar was “visiting Tikri, Singhu, Ghazipur and Shahajanpur borders regularly.” Her long-term commitment to making the university campus a more inclusive space by identifying and addressing the needs of people with special needs, resulting in the creation of the Higher Education For Persons With Special Needs (HEPSN) cell at JU, has also been remembered with affection and gratitude.
Over the course of our friendship, I had a chance to work on a few projects with her. It is on the basis of those interactions that I will try to add a little to the ongoing conversation in terms of her politically informed scholarly work. Sidenote: for one of these projects, she translated a story from Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha-kahini into English, making us happily forget that she was a Sindhi and not a “native” Bangali. This wouldn’t come as a surprise to those who knew her because her language of humour was very much that of a polyglot, in addition to being peppered with cricket metaphors.
Sometime in 2014, Prof Supriya Chaudhuri, who was supervising a project (“Envisioning the Indian City”) that I was working on, told me that Sajni-di had made an intriguing request. Upon learning that I was traveling to England on a research trip, she had asked if I could pop over to Cambridge and digitise a set of documents in the possession of one Rachel Thurley. This was the “India Box” of Humphrey House, renowned Charles Dickens and GM Hopkins scholar and, more importantly for us, the author of a pamphlet titled I Spy with My Little Eye (1937), where he had called out the “spyarchy” insidiously installed by the British in colonial Calcutta to identify threats to the tottering Raj. As I poured over the letters and manuscripts in the House’s “India Box”, a new world opened up in front of me.
The many forms of bravery
Every evening, I’d call Sajni-di after finishing my work at the Thurley residence (she was such a warm host!) with the day’s highlights, as pieces of the jigsaw that would help us situate House’s enigmatic pamphlet in late-1930s Calcutta fell in place one by one. What I didn’t see coming was her suggestion that I co-edit the volume with her. After initial hesitation – I had no experience in this kind of work before, nor was I prepared to see myself as a responsible contributor to public knowledge – I came around to it.
Running back and forth between archives looking for clues, meeting people passing through the city, re-establishing contact with acquaintances Sajni-di had made in some dim and distant past – I hadn’t realised till that time that literary research could feel this invigorating. It was profoundly humbling to see someone who had no use for API points, conducting research with this much passion and rigour, bearing her erudition with such lightness, and being generous enough to share credit with a complete newbie. No Research Ethics class can teach so well.
Over the many jolly afternoons we spent discussing the project – some at her home, over her signature Bloody Marys, some at Jadavpur University Press, over coffee – I gradually began to understand why this project was so close to Sajni-di’s heart, and why it had brought us closer.
She would recount her early days at JU, when one faction of the faculty would lament the slipping away of “literary studies” as an aesthetic calling, while another would actively participate in shifting the sand from under the discipline’s feet, welcoming Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial critique. A great way to understand Sajni-di’s response to these debates is to read her piece on Charles Dickens, where she, on one hand, calls him out for being a “Male Chauvinist Pig” and an apologist of Empire, and, on the other, confesses to feeling a great deal about the human condition through his writing.
Thinking and writing politically was an imperative; the uncomfortable bits and pieces that we stow away in our hearts were still allowed – within ethical limits. Not everything was reconcilable. It was not usual then, nor is it now, to write a piece on Dickens (relevance through opposition?) and colonialism in, of all things, the Economic and Political Weekly.
Even before the I Spy project came to fruition in 2018, Sajni-di had started plotting our next adventure as “partners in crime,” emboldened further by Supriya-di’s research on the theme. Humphry House, who taught English first at Presidency and then at Ripon College, had been incorrectly suspected of being a Communist spy and hounded by the colonial police. The real spy, Michael Carritt, had infiltrated the ranks of colonial bureaucracy in the meantime and found himself a politically useful perch inside Writers’ Building. (Hounding academics has always been a thing.) She had managed to get her hands on a photocopy of Carritt’s self-published memoirs, which was wonderfully racy and humorous in parts. Even after she was diagnosed with cancer, we would meet occasionally to discuss the project, but sadly, we were unable to get our act together in time.
The day she passed – March 10 – I found myself humming “Puff the Magic Dragon” over and over. More than before, I was struck by the word “brave” (“Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave”) and by how difficult it is increasingly becoming to be brave in this world. Bravery, I had begun to understand through my association with Sajni-di, could take on many forms. To be generous, to be vulnerable, to love unreasonably, to make seemingly un-sexy systemic interventions, to bring one’s politics to bear upon one’s work – she was someone you could turn to for counsel and, rather than feeling self-righteous or angry, come away laughing and stronger at heart.
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