In memoriam

Kishen Patnaik:

protoganist of India’s alternate tradition

THE death of Kishen Patnaik (1930-2004), will be a severe blow to the scores of social groups and organisations working at the micro-level in different parts of the country for the legitimate welfare of the deprived segments of the Indian population whom our rather inept and avaricious administrative machinery tends to simultaneously exploit and ignore. For these idealistic young men and women, and some who are not so young any more, Kishen Patnaik had been a flag-bearer, a friend, a philosopher and constant support for a cause that can only be underestimated to the nation’s own detriment.

Working in a quiet, unpublicised manner he had during the last four decades become an extremely active and a critically vital link between innumerable groups of social activists and non-governmental organisations in different parts of the country, committed to bringing about change and social justice and to ensure that the little people of India are not deprived of legitimate rights and opportunities, believing that the battle for development and nation-building cannot honestly exclude large sections of the Indian population.

On the couple of occasions that I had the privilege to share an hour or two with Kishen Patnaik during some of his rather infrequent visits to New Delhi, his unassuming manner and modesty successfully camouflaged the depth and range of his work and his intellectual sagacity. Unlike the conventional activist or leader he seemed to be an avid listener, remarkably patient with the unconventional as well as the divergent point of view. He did not seem to care for the vicarious thrill of coffee house debates, being always reflective during discussions, never imposing the weight of his first-hand experience or his sharp insights and observations to score a point or to even define his unchallengeable credentials.

Kishen Patnaik quite instantly conveyed the impression that he was a gatherer of views and opinions, someone who never tired of travelling ceaselessly to the different groups and organizations located across the length and breadth of the land. This was an intellectual attribute that would make him an influential thinker and social activist for those not easily taken in by the plaudits and clichés of political parties and administrative bigwigs. Patnaik continued to believe in the core democratic ideals of the socialist movement – ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ – long after these had been desecrated by the movement’s more dominant politicians and ideologues. Kishenji’s sincerity of purpose and commitment to India’s poor gave a new sense of hope to many of the young who felt disillusioned, if not betrayed, by erstwhile heroes who had given up the fight.

The relevance of the life and work of Kishen Patnaik can only be gauged in the context of the ‘alternate tradition’ of creative activism that has sustained the intellectual integrity and the core of Indian thought through the centuries that have been scarred by continuous and violent power struggles.

Mainstream political activity in the subcontinent has been, for more centuries than anyone can accurately remember, focused on seizing the throne, with its own history of empire building and, at the regional level, of ruling elites intensely seeking to extend the sphere of their influence and domain. This constrictive though primeval obsession with seizing power seems to have castrated the Indian ruling elite of society’s innate proclivity to resolve, or at least mitigate, the dilemmas of social conflict and social injustice that otherwise obstruct society’s civilizational processes and its forces of economic enlargement.

In India it has been its unrecognized and little-known alternate tradition, safely and steadfastly removed from the gory discords of the raj durbar, that has managed somehow to conserve and sustain the essential concepts of social rule (in the abstract at the very least) so that society is not wholly devoid of a belief in the possibility that the bodypolitik can at some stage transcend its incumbent state of confusion, incompetence and, as we now realize, of self-destruction as well. The origins of the alternate tradition go back to the emergence of the philosopher-poets and reformers of Tamil Nadu in the sixth century, and the extension of this intellectual stimulus to Karnataka, Maharashtra and further north, where it converged with a similar world-view articulated by the bhakti thinkers of Bengal and North Indian reformer-poets such as Kabir, all of whom spoke against social injustice.

It has been only the rare Indian ruler – Harshvardhan, Shivaji and Akbar are three names that quickly come to mind – who took cognizance of the alternate tradition and the need for social peace as a prerequisite for stable governance. No surprise that these rulers were considerably influenced by the philosophers and reformer-poets of their time.

In the more recent era the political philosophy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi seems to have sustained the relevance of the alternate tradition because without accepting its world view it is impossible to visualize Indian society in its entirety, something which, of the leaders of the freedom movement, Gandhi seems to have believed in most. Gandhi related his emphasis on self-sustaining village economies, social trusteeship and on the existentialist responsibility of decision-making on behalf of society as a whole with the processes of nation-building and political governance.

Kishen Patnaik’s evident renunciation of mainstream politics, i.e. power politics, after having been elected to Parliament in 1962 at the age of 32, suggests that four years at New Delhi convinced him that the Indian capital had become exaggeratedly demented with notions of empire-building and power-wielding in a nation that still needed to be built itself, if it was to achieve its distant dream of inhabiting the international comity of modern nations; forgetting that in a democracy the social patterns of ancient slave-economies at the village level, feudal hierarchies, unregulated capitalism and the deliberate exploitation of ‘internal colonies’ (ref. Sachchidanand Sinha, Bihar: An Internal Colony) can only obstruct the construction of a modern nation with its intrinsic forces of economic and social growth.

For Kishen Patnaik, moving away from mainstream politics denoted a withdrawal from an arena where increasingly political leaders were willing to accept their own transmutation into pawns and jugglers, cut off from the common people. It was a world in which he felt temperamentally out of sorts. He decided to go back to his intellectual and political roots. Some 30 years after the freedom movement had reached its apogee, it was clear to him that a new beginning had to be made. Like Gandhi on his arrival from South Africa more than 100 years earlier, Kishen Patnaik went back to the grassroots of Indian reality, dedicating himself to the smallest of causes in the remote recesses of landscapes. The spotlight may not illuminate the terrain, but at least he would be at peace with himself, with the ideas and values that had inspired him as a young man.

In doing so, Kishen Patnaik probably had no illusions about the success his efforts might achieve and he went about his new crusade quietly, patiently, painstakingly, without high expectations. It was a crusade to serve whomsoever he could. As it turned out, he found himself increasingly in tune with a new social mood that was becoming visible in different pockets through small but idealistic groups of young activists, some of whom had been turned-off by their bitter first taste of mainstream politics in the post-1977 phase. A new beginning had taken root and Kishen Patnaik was very much at the centre of the churning that was taking place. There may be little to trumpet about to the outside world, but there has also been much to satisfy the earnest and the dedicated. There were still some good causes to fight for. All did not seem lost any more.

Kishen Patnaik occupied the role of an elder statesman in this new devolution – a source of inspiration and intellectual support. The integrity of his personal life and an absence of falsehoods in his intellectual commitment helped the younger generations to see in him the elderly activist they no longer found in mainstream politics. As Yogendra Yadav wrote in The Indian Express (7 October 2004) Kishen Patnaik accumulated no wealth or property of his own, refused the ex-MPs pension till he turned 60 years of age, and the family lived on his wife’s salary as a schoolteacher.

He also played a pivotal role in establishing interactive links between various groups that had been working in segregated pockets, giving the small independent groups a new sense of unity and identity. Realizing the communications requirements of the emerging movement he started two magazines on his own, Samayik Varta in Hindi in 1977 and Bikalp Bichar in Oriya. These also provided him with a personal forum, his analytical essays and discursive reports establishing him as an original thinker of the socialist movement. His book Vikalpheen Nahin Hai Duniya (The World is Not Without Alternatives) is now considered to be of seminal significance.

Kishen Patnaik may have died in September 2004 without the sound of trumpets and obituaries in the world of mainstream politics, but the significance of his work shall become more publicly appreciated once the building of ‘new India’ begins to manifest itself – hopefully in the near future.

Anil Saari Arora