This is an excerpt from Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary, published by HarperCollins, from the chapter Host Country/Lost Country. The book is a compilation of the author’s journal entries and paintings.
December, 2022
The last time I was in Delhi it was hot. So hot that there were reports of overheated birds falling from the sky. But now it was winter. It was foggy outside, the air smelling acrid. I had brought masks; they were no use. Very quickly I developed a sore throat and then a cough. When I complained about this to my publisher, he showed me a news item on his phone. ‘Weather trends show capital no longer gets benign fog.’ Delhi’s air was described as carrying ‘a large share of chlorides, sulphates and nitrates, and ions of calcium and ammonium’. I asked a friend of mine about the phrase ‘particulate matter’—I had heard the term used to describe what gave the atmosphere its dark colour. My friend said it would be a good title for a Delhi painting.
The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary
Amitava Kumar
HarperCollins India (2023)
When I had travelled to India last, I had been unable to get a visa for my son, because my wife was born in Pakistan. This time I had applied well in advance, and also appealed to a senior official in the foreign service who had been in high school with me. This time our luck held.
My father, eighty-seven now, was interested in showing my son our ancestral homestead. When we entered Jadopur, the placidity of the place reminded me of how much I missed it. When I visited the village as a schoolboy, I had always wanted to draw or photograph what I saw. My son got out of the car. Corn had been planted in one of our fields; the young plants were only ankle high. Several months ago, my father was told that someone else had ploughed the field. Another family in the village claimed that they had papers from the beginning of the last century showing ownership. This news had come as a blow to my father. My sister said that it left him disoriented. But then my father found the documents of sale that showed that the land had indeed been bought, back when he was a boy, from the family that was now claiming it.
My Son with Neo, Delhi, 2023.
I took my son on a walk to the village school that my father had built in my grandmother’s memory. My father had been the first person in the entire district to be selected for the Indian Administrative Service; education had been his ticket out of the village. Most of his other relatives worked the land; a cousin became a doctor but others, if they left Jadopur, managed only to find low-paying jobs. When I was a child, my grandfather had been the village headman, but by the time I was in my teens power had shifted. My grandfather lost the panchayat election to a man from a lower caste. The family has little land remaining, but my father, perhaps because he feels he must give back what he owes to the land, has cultivated a philanthropic side.
At the school, boys were playing cricket. A middle- aged woman approached me. In a show of outdated modesty she had covered the lower part of her face, but I could see that she was smiling. She said that it was good I had come back, and then, pointing to a field close by, she said that a distant cousin of mine was now claiming that the land was his. I was taken aback. My relationship to the village was already tenuous, uncomfortably distant. Now it felt under threat. For decades, this land had been in the possession of my family. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t really back. I wasn’t in a position to do anything. I was just visiting.
The thought came to me again. When my father was gone, a large part of my past would disappear, like one of those videos you see of landslides, an entire cliff with a winding road and cars disappearing into the swirling river. It wasn’t land or property that I was thinking about; I was thinking about my parents, my mother who had come to this village as a young bride, and my father, who had brought me today to the place where he had been born. It was the people who had made my past who would soon be gone.
The next day found me in quiet retreat, making a drawing of two adjacent mustard fields I had seen in the village. Is art a retreat from life and its contradictions? The answer would be yes. At least for me, that day. My eye had been attracted by the two intersecting lines of dense green topped by the bright yellow of the mustard, and now I felt compelled to render it all in a sombre monochrome.
My Father with My Son Patna, Bihar, December 2022.
I remembered both sides of that dirt road from my childhood, and the endless fields that stretched beyond. It was all very peaceful. Difficult to imagine, while looking at the small parcels of land with their neat rows of crops, all the battles over property waged within families and communities. As generations change, the plots are divided among siblings and grow smaller. There is less and less left to share. People leave for the cities. New buyers take over. This, at least, is what has happened in my village. My grandfather’s land was divided between my father and his two brothers, but none of them live in the village. One of my uncles sold nearly all his land and moved to Bengaluru. I cannot imagine my own family’s link to this rural place lasting beyond me. What I would like is for my father to sell his land during his lifetime, so that the new owners of the land will be from the village. Poorer families who couldn’t simply up and move away. But why was it so hard to tell him this? To bring up the question of land, of inheritance?
Perhaps my father, too, in a far more real way than me, experienced the loss of his past. And he wasn’t going to let it all disappear. He told me how he was a boy of eight or ten when he first saw an electric bulb. The world, and even his village, had changed so much during his long lifetime. He wasn’t going to let me talk him out of the bit of land that had been the one stable corner of his life since his childhood.
When we were on our way back to Patna from the village, our car entered Motihari. This was the town where Gandhi had launched the satyagraha movement against the British. My son asked my father if he had memories of a childhood visit to Motihari. ‘Yes,’ my father said, ‘I came here in 1944 to get my coat stitched.’
My father began to tell my son that in the year 1892, his great-grandfather Bhikhari Kuer had come to Champaran from Saran. As my father talked, I began to take notes. Bhikhari Kuer had five sons. His youngest son, Shrikrishna Kuer, had three sons, the youngest of whom, Amar Kuer, was my grandfather. I hadn’t heard all the names of my ancestors that my father was reciting before now. Even as I was writing the names down, I realized that when my father was gone, no one would remember the details of our rural past. For my son’s children, or his grandchildren, my father’s name and, in time, my own name, might well be as remote to their lives as the name of my great- grandfather had become to mine. This wasn’t a good or a bad thing; it was the way time worked. It also meant that the face I had seen on all the billboards in Delhi and in other cities—at the petrol station, on billboards at each street corner, in offices, in ads and in reports in every newspaper—wouldn’t be around forever. And that, at least, gave me some comfort.
