For greater good

In search of a better world: Memoirs By Jolly Mohan Kaul, Samya, Rs 550

Perhaps no one has been more aptly named than Jolly Kaul. Despite a life of hardship and vicissitude, he hasn’t lost his sense of fun and enjoyment of life even at the age of 90. This makes his memoirs a delight to read. There is no rancour or regret. Yet, there could have been since he spent a large part of his adult life in the pursuit of a chimera. Jolly Kaul’s inner calm may be rooted in his spirituality that he discovered in old age. Or it could be located in the fact that he has always remained true to himself. His life has been anchored in his own sense of responsibility towards himself.

All this might be read as an attempt to turn Kaul into a great and extraordinary man. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jolly Kaul is an ordinary, good human being. His ordinariness and his goodness make him an unsung hero of our times.

He was, as his surname suggests, born into a Kashmiri Pandit family. But he grew up in Calcutta and went to St Xavier’s School and College. He was a good, but not an outstanding, student. While a post-graduate student, he was drawn to the communist party and he joined it as an underground worker. He thus left a life of middle-class comforts to live in a party den where he had no work save washing utensils. He decided that he would perform this menial task to the best of his abilities. This incident is revealing of Kaul’s attitude, especially to work.

Kaul takes his readers through his days in the party — his years in prison, his rise in the party hierarchy, his life among the workers and his resignation from the party. Familiar and famous names flit in and out of his narrative — Muzaffar Ahmed (Kakababu), Jyoti Basu, Somnath Lahiri, Indrajit Gupta, Hiren Mukerji, Nikhil Chakravorty and so on. It was during his days as a party worker that he met and married a remarkable woman — Manikuntala Sen, who was a communist member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly for many years. Even though it was a marriage of comrades, it was actually made in heaven. Not only were they happy together in spite of terrible financial deprivation, but they also complemented each other in various ways. It was Manikuntala Sen who did not allow Kaul to be seduced by the perks of the corporate world when he joined it.

Kaul’s exit from the CPI was, surprisingly, not acrimonious. Somnath Lahiri wanted to denounce him in true Stalinist fashion but was stopped by Bhowani Sen. After his resignation, Kaul eked out a living through freelance journalism. His break came with the help of a former comrade, Prasanta Sanyal, who recommended him for a job in Indian Oxygen where Sanyal then worked. Initially, there was some resistance because of Kaul’s communist and trade union background, but this was broken in a telling way. The CPI leader, Bhupesh Gupta, who occasionally stayed with Kaul even after the latter had left the party, heard of the resistance and spoke to N. Dandekar who sat with Gupta in the Rajya Sabha. Dandekar was a member of the Swatantra Party, and was the chairman of the Indian Oxygen board. He spoke to the managing director and the path was cleared for Kaul’s appointment. Thus, one former comrade, one full-time communist MP and one Swatantra Party member helped to get employment for an out-of-work former member of the CPI. The power of the network!

From being a PR of Indian Oxygen for a few years, Kaul came back to journalism as the editor of the journal called Capital. The story of his career should not take away from the loss he suffered when his wife died after a prolonged illness. There is a moving chapter in this book entitled “Manikuntala and I”.

There is also a chapter on Muzaffar Ahmed which this reviewer found a bit jarring because it is written in the spirit of blind loyalty — the kind of blindness that at one time made bright men and women worship Lenin and Stalin. Surely, Kaul doesn’t expect anyone to believe that Ahmed’s vision of “communism” embodied a better world, at least the better world that continues to be Kaul’s quest.