Rumelika Kumar 
On August 9, 2024, a trainee doctor was found raped and murdered at the state-run R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. What followed was an outpouring of anger. Protests erupted and sustained across Bengal. People demanded an overhaul of a system of corruption in medical education and justice for the young victim. After fiery parleys with chief minister Mamata Banerjee, a group of doctors participated in a 17-day hunger strike to press for multiple demands. The strike ended on October 21 after the doctors sat in a meeting with Banerjee.
This author was among those who participated in the fast.
I had written something after officially becoming a doctor. January 28, 2019 – the day of our convocation…that was the day I had become a doctor, officially. While critics now question the doctor’s ethos in me, what I wrote then is now alive again.
Months and years have passed since that date. I have not written anything of value in the meantime. Most of what I wrote was private, never published online. These days I don’t even write for myself. But today is an exception, an exception I have made for myself, because sometimes the personal is social too.
Memory returns in waves. Sometimes, I think, we need to measure ourselves against ourselves. The spirit, emotion and faith I had in 2019 is like a debt I need to repay to society. Today I am moved by the same emotion and faith. It is because of that that I walked in the rally on August 12. It is because of that that I tried to participate in this protest, like so many others. It is because of that faith that I raised slogans and gave voice to a collective demand. I stepped onto the streets with my faith in the lessons that the medical college taught us – on becoming a good human and remaining responsible towards society. I had faith also in the lessons that everyday humans leading their everyday lives taught us.
Worship of a person is a problematic concept – for the person and for the society. It is a source of discomfort.
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The fact that my likeness and my words have permeated news media has not just given me strength, the love of people and reminded me of my responsibilities, it has also given me discomfort. This is a discomfort born from the focus on me as a person. I am not the face of the protests. The protests saw many participate with their all – I was one of them. I was one in a rally. One in a protest. When everyone spoke, I spoke too.
I behaved the way people in the movement behaved. When tiny kids would come with flowers, cards and the small notes they had salvaged from their piggy banks, I would listen intently to their voices. They would come and say, “We want justice.” People from Kalyani, Birbhum, Purulia and Siliguri came everyday and joined in with a symbolic fast. There was a grandmother from Memari who sat at our fasting dais. The 1951 graduate from Bethune College. The lemon tea-seller, our dada, who would clear the way when we had to use the bathroom. The senior citizen who would man the barricades every day. The dada who would clean the Sulabh public toilets a little better out of concern for us. The person from Belgium who spent nights at the fasting dais. The volunteer team who also did the same. Absolutely everyone who was with us for so long, from R.G. Kar to Swasthya Bhavan to Dharmatala – our sites of protest. Those who raised their voices, who embraced us, who blessed us. All of them are the faces of the protest. Not Rumelika, not the person, not the personality, not me, these people. It is because they were with us that the agitation remains alive and will remain alive.
Aniket Mahato, a doctor on hunger strike, is taken for treatment. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.
The person I am is not simply the person I am. Behind my becoming of me have been and will be the roles of many. Parents, teachers and many others. My patient from Baruipur has a role. Her husband lives in a mazhar. Her son is HIV positive and has taken to drugs. Her brother has coerced her into signing away her property to him and driven her from from. She works as a caregiver and gives away all the money that she makes to her son and husbands. She has two days off in a month. One day, she spends at the mazhar, the next to repay her husband’s debts at the tea shop and give the rest of her money to her son. She has no time to stand in a line to get tests done. She has no time to stand in a line to be seen as an outpatient. She has no time to stand in line to buy subsidised medicines from a shop where after two hours in a queue, she will be told to buy medicines from outside.
Her story, her life makes me who I am.
The 15-year-old girl who left home to escape child marriage makes me who I am. She is living – and studying – at a friend’s house now.
Those kids at College Street who embraced us and began saying, “Didi, please eat something, please” – they make me who I am.
The family that lives on the footpath outside my college and asks everyday when I enter if I am well, they make me who I am.
The patients who tell us of their lives everyday makes me who I am.
The junior doctors’ protest site in central Kolkata. The doctors are protesting against the Mamata Banerjee government’s refusal to engage with them on a host of issues stemming from the R.G. Kar rape and murder. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar
People influence us – sometimes a great deal, sometimes in simple ways. These influences shape our thinking and our faith. We can count on this faith during our fights. Thanks to them, we can say that we will see a struggle to the end.
Today is 75 days since August 9, 2024. The life I have lived in the last 73 days is not anything like the life I had in the last 29 years. I think this is a line many others will say too. My insides were churned by August 9. That anger still lives in me. That Pandora’s box, preserved shut for so long, has opened in waves of protest. This has scared rulers. This has surrounded rulers. The rulers, unnerved, have shown their true colours and descended on us.
But this will not dent the struggle. It will spread. Our experiences and the weight of our stories will increase. I cannot say into the ether, “I have done so much, look.” I cannot arrange lies neatly at a livestream. All of you have not made me that person.
I will complete my MD in a few days. In our academic lives, the thesis is a milestone and a source of pain too. When I was getting my thesis printed, I was thinking of just one thing – I was able to submit my thesis. I was able to print it, give it to my guide, co-guide and everyone else. I would have possibly smiled through the process in any other circumstance.
Tilottama could not. Tilottama would not be able to. She wasn’t allowed to. Some creatures stopped her from becoming a doctor. They stopped her from staying alive. I want to remember this. This is a small effort on my part to make my MD thesis her’s, too.
Rumelika Kumar’s thesis, in which she has referred to the R.G. Kar victim.
Don’t forget. Don’t let others forget.
Rumelika Kumar is a junior resident at the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health. This account was published on her Facebook page and has been republished with her permission.
Translated from the Bengali original by Soumashree Sarkar.