The Place You Keep Going Back To

Sankarshan Thakur’s biography of Nitish Kumar is also an intimate portrait of Bihar, a state you may be forced out of but cannot really ever leave

‘Patna is not a nice place to be.’

It is not easy to write about a place you don’t want to live in anymore, yet return to. You describe its ugliness with fondness. You sought, forever, to escape it. Yet Sankarshan Thakur, roving editor with The Telegraph and author of Subaltern Saheb: Bihar and the Making of Laloo Yadav, returned to Bihar to profile Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in Single Man and the change that everyone is talking about. And this is a richer book for the author’s decision to join that narrative and position himself within it.

In this nonlinear narrative, much like the state it is about—disjointed and disrupted—he starts by describing Patna, the capital. Though he seems to dismiss it in the opening line, Thakur says it is home. This city, he writes, is ‘… an obliging showcase to a dire state, rowdy and irredeemably ramshackle’.

Even Subodh Gupta’s 2012 memorial couldn’t escape Patna’s signature. ‘At the very bottom … lies almost, always, a careless arrangement of empty plastic bottles, crumpled beer and beverage cans, the odd paper plate, like an abandoned attempt at origami …’

With this, he then introduces Nitish Kumar, a loner, who took charge of a state that is ‘so punched and blown it is not even meant to feel pain … a state so inured to wretchedness it refuses now to convey it or complain …’

We had stopped telling its story. Bihar is a misunderstood place. It continues to be interesting. Elections are here. The book, then, is timely. It is important to know the man in charge.

The book should be read for many reasons. It is about difficult conversations, and long silences. It is about a reporter, and a writer, trying to understand the change. But the man speaks few words. The writer is a wordsmith.

There is meticulous research. There is history, and geography, and tales of rivers and roads and bridges and mafia dons and stalwart politicians, of the state’s fractured social engineering. As a story of homecoming, it is personal in tone. In that, lies its appeal. There is nostalgia, and love, and hope.

And there is language. A language lost to the anarchy, and other things. It is the language that has so much of the state in it.

In Bihar, the future is always tense. And the past hangs over it. It is there in everything you see, or don’t see.

Nitish Kumar took charge of a state that had been written off as a ‘rogue country’ by scribes, and others. William Dalrymple visited the city for his travelogue The Age of Kali (1988); he wrote it is madness to be on the roads in Patna after dark. Thakur says this is patronising, perhaps even scaremongering. But he agrees that this was Bihar’s reputation in Lalu Prasad’s time. It wasn’t true, he says. But perceptions overrode the reality.

In Thakur’s case, there are two memories of Bihar. One, of a young boy who interrupted a teacher in Delhi ‘expounding on the inalienability of the citizenry’s fundamental rights’ saying they were not inalienable during the Emergency, and the ‘unromantic one’ of a journalist who chose to return to his state to chronicle it. Objectivity is a matter of perception.

Lalu Prasad is a character. Nitish Kumar is reticent. When Thakur visited his elder brother Satish Kumar in Bakhtiyarpur, he was greeted with “Eat, please eat, let them come.”

In this ‘fractured kaleidoscope’ he would have missed Nitish’s home. ‘It is so nondescript. Imagine a vertical slice of a ramshackle Bombay chawl transplanted betwixt a scrawl of more nondescript masonry,’ he writes.

The writer goes looking for anecdote, and observation, a snippet or two, and fails. It is a book of effort, and of silences. The hesitant rebel, as Thakur describes Nitish Kumar, is a solitary man. Now, even more so. He has suffered for what he is. In politics, ideology is nobody’s virtue. Understanding Nitish Kumar’s silences are key to understanding the trajectory that Bihar will take.

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are politically destructive states, the author argues. Where Lalu Prasad represented a huge ideological shift in Bihar, Nitish Kumar is more about waiting it out. Sometimes, this could be a problem, as the book reveals.

He had the advantage of being compared to Lalu. That’s ebbing away now. There are unkept promises and broken alliances.

How much bad would you attribute to Nitish? That is the question. Things were psychologically bad. There was resignation. That changed. But the change needs to be understood in the context of the man, too. The turnaround story of Bihar is not a straight narrative. The author isn’t a soothsayer. But he has a story to tell. It’s worth listening to and looking at.

Life slaps you in the face in Bihar. But there is hope. That’s what the book does so well: it gives us hope. In politics and in writing about it.

About The Author

Chinki Sinha