BackPatna bites: Portrait of a city in decay
Patna is not a metropolis. But it was once an imperial capital—of Ashoka, of Chandragupta Maurya, of the Gupta dynasty
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I have never been to Patna. Or the state whose capital it is. Patna (and Bihar) for me has been a symbolic shorthand for a uniquely Indian dystopia that requires little explanation for anyone who has lived all his life in this country.
Even as a journalist—I am only moderately ashamed to say—I’ve never felt the urge to experience this part of the Indian reality for myself, firsthand. I lived with a succession of Bihari roommates at the university hostel, and nothing they said about their home state filled me with a yearning to travel there. Left to myself, and my treasury of stereotypes about Bihar and Patna, I would not have picked up a book on Patna.
But I am a fan of Amitava Kumar’s work. I became one after reading his courageous book on the so-called war on terror, Evidence of Suspicion. When I came to know that he was in Delhi to release his latest book, I took the opportunity to meet him. At his book launch, it seemed only polite that I buy a copy of his book. And since I had bought it, I thought I might as well read it, even if it’s about Patna. Besides, it had an intriguing title, A Matter of Rats, which seemed to resonate with the subject matter—striking the appropriate emotive registers of disgust and dread that Patna/Bihar evoked in me.
I finished the book in one sitting. If it’s possible to experience something akin to a sorrowful nostalgia for a city you’ve never cared for—let alone lived in—I imagine that’s what I felt for Patna on closing the book. To achieve such an effect—in less than 150 pages—takes a great deal of skill, and is no mean achievement.
Kumar grew up in Patna and went to school there. He left the city as a youth and does not live there anymore. He lives in New York. His ageing parents live in Bihar. He bumps into Patna every time he visits them. Plus he has many friends in Patna from his past life in the city. All of this finds expression in his book some way or the other.
A strange thing happens when you’re no longer a resident of the city you’re writing about: the city that is no longer outside your window, materializes in your blood stream, in your liver, heart, lymphocytes. The writer’s task is to find the city lights in the lymphocytes (and vice versa) without spilling narrative blood, as it were. This would call for a confessional approach to the subject. Kumar does not shy away from embracing it.
Early on in the book, he talks about his childhood ambition to become an artist. This gives him the narrative opening to delve into Patna’s past, mingled with his own. He dredges up a powerful childhood memory that becomes a metaphor for his intense but ambiguous relationship with the city.
He is 10 years old, and has received a pet parrot as a present. He goes to sleep at night leaving the parrot in a small bamboo cage on the window ledge. He is woken up in the middle of the night by a screeching sound. He turns on the light, looks around, and finding nothing amiss, goes back to sleep. But in the darkness, the screeching resumes again. Suddenly he remembers his pet parrot, and he’s wide awake. He gets up to investigate. “The small bamboo cage is no longer on the window ledge where I had placed it before going to sleep. I first spot the green feathers on the floor and then find the bird under my bed. Rats have gnawed through the thin wooden cage and bitten off the parrot’s wing. The bird dies the next morning."
In the next paragraph, Kumar notes that as a fully grown, plausibly mature adult, he wrote a novel about Patna where he has the “protagonist’s cousin killing rats with a hockey stick. Such dreams of revenge!" The next sentence is unexpected: “I think I’ve been unfair to rats." In one line, he traverses the vast emotional territory from anger to betrayal to guilt. It’s not just Kumar who’s been unfair to rats, it’s everyone who’s been unfair to Patna, who have betrayed it, abandoned it like rats fleeing a sinking ship, and yet cannot sever the bonds of affection and guilt that bind them to the city they left behind—“Leftover Patna", as Kumar calls it, has a chapter to itself.
Unlike Delhi or Bombay, Patna is not a metropolis. But it was once an imperial capital—of Ashoka, of Chandragupta Maurya, of the Gupta dynasty. It is described in glowing terms by such travel writers as Fa-Hien, and Hiuen Tsang, who also made the most of India’s first ‘international university’, Nalanda, spending six years there. But it has been a city in decline for a long time now (though another Kumar who occupies the chief minister’s chambers in Patna may not agree). As far back as 1811, a British botanist named Francis Buchanan had written of Patna that it was “difficult to imagine a more disgusting place than the nine-mile-long city".
Rats, excreta, the stench of urine, power cuts, bad roads, lawlessness bordering on anarchy—the stereotype of Bihar as India’s badlands is very much alive in Kumar’s portrait of Patna. It’s because the stereotypes are largely true that there is a “left-over Patna". But there are other Patnas, too—the Patna of those who are stuck there, and the Patna of those who come to the city with hopes and dreams from other places.
Kumar writes about the inhabitants of these other Patnas as well—Anand Kumar, a tutor who helps poor kids crack the IIT entrance exams by training them for free in his coaching centre; Jagdish Narayan Chaubey, a professor of Hindi literature, for whom the mushrooming coaching classes signify the triumph of mercantile rote-learning over the disinterested pursuit of knowledge; Raghav, a poet who appears to have been left behind even by the left-behind Patna.
One of the more surreal passages—in a book where rats consume alcohol, a cheating student scolds the invigilator for lacking compassion, and a man wakes up from heart surgery with a bandaged head—is Kumar’s expedition to Patna’s “first and only mall" in the company of the ageing revolutionary poet and Left intellectual, Raghav.
At the mall, Raghav wants to visit a book shop but is told there isn’t any. He misses Patna’s India Coffee House where poets recited their new poems and “reviews were dissected, gossip exchanged and, in the course of a long night, literary reputations went up in the smoke of Charminar and Wills Navy Cut. Places like that no longer existed in Patna." Instead, there was Café Coffee Day. “Writers and would-be writers stayed at home and watched TV" because they could not afford the cappuccinos and macchiatos.
The plight of the revolutionary poet trapped in a Patna mall where “all his references, his talk of Satyajit Ray and Kurosawa, were dated and irrelevant" is somehow more haunting in its pathos, offering as it does a far more frightening vignette of urban decay—not just physical decay exemplified by the rats, but a cultural, social, and transcendental decay of the spirit against which even art is impotent.
“The mall represented the partnership of art and capital in a way that condemned people like Raghav to the absolute margins. He and I were passive witnesses, or, at best, sour commentators," writes Kumar. The world outside might be the dark badlands but what if the alternative, the very best that the ‘goodlands’ had to offer, was the glittering world inside the mall, whose glass-fronted monuments invoked international deities such as Van Heusen, Louis Philippe, Belmonte, Reid and Taylor? Would a decaying Patna be necessarily worse than one remade in the image of Gurgaon—which seems to be the definitive template of development for the Indian city today?
Wisely, Kumar doesn’t waste his word count on such questions. But he is brutal when he pauses to consider them, which he does, for about five seconds: “…I see in Patna’s decline, in its pretensions to development, in its plain dullness, the stark story of middle age and death. It’s all hopeless, really—that is what Patna and I are saying to each other." You get the feeling they’ve said enough already.
So he focuses instead on the lives of people who have had—and still do—a relationship with the city. Their stories are refracted through his own emotional filter, and his memories, his research, his reading, and ultimately, his distance from the city—for he does not live there anymore. This book is not a love letter to Patna. Nor is it exactly a memo. But this must be said: it is more personal than a love letter, and less sentimental than the average memo.
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