Mellow month

With the Durga Puja festival season comes the hope of a spell of relative mellowness and cordiality among people.

Many decades ago, when I was serving the government of West Bengal, I had to try, often continuously, to bring some order and peace to the large number of jute mills that sprawled like a vast many-headed abscess across the subdivision I had been asked to administer. The unions were formidable but barely managed to keep the violence-prone workers under some kind of control, so dealing with the unions had its limitations; they would be reasonable up to a point and then suddenly take an aggressive, confrontationist stand. I knew their compulsions, but it made my work very difficult indeed.

Matters always became worse just before the annual Durga Puja and Dasara; the issue was invariably the `Puja bonus', and there would be work stoppages, demonstrations, violence, hartals and sometimes destruction and arson. The managements of the mills made their offers, which were usually rejected with much ferocity, and then they either locked themselves in or made frantic calls to me and to the police for help. I mention this because often a peace package that I thought the management could accept was turned down by them for a variety of reasons, and I had to turn to the Labour Secretary, as the District Magistrate I served under did not want to be involved and invariably pointed me towards that worthy gentleman.

The Labour Secretary would always stop me in the middle of my excited recounting of the situation, by raising his hand and saying, with his eyes closed, "Let us consider this after Durga Puja." My pleadings that there would be much violence and mayhem were firmly rejected. That, he said, was a law and order problem that I should handle; the demands would be discussed "after the Puja". I returned to take police action - teargas, lathis and, on one occasion, firing. Some kind of tension and anger-ridden order would be kept until the Puja festivities overtook everyone.

He explained later why he had this formula for all labour trouble. It was to do with the season, he said. Tempers were frayed till the Puja festivities, and then, according to him, there was a mellowness that affected the most militant of workers and leaders, and managers too became a little more expansive. "It happens every year," he assured me.

Oddly enough, it seemed to work. There was a lessening of violence and agitations once the festive season was well and truly on us. Disputes were settled after a fashion, and the beleaguered subdivision had a spell of quiet. The nights became cooler; in the evenings there would be a mist - mainly smoke from household kitchens hanging in the cool, heavier air - and the sunlight gradually lost its harsh glare and became a little more golden and softer. The great river that ran through the subdivision was wreathed in and often obscured by the mist through which one could sometimes see a boat drift by like a wraith.

So many decades later it does not seem to be too different. True, the Puja season has come early this year, and many of us who visited the pandals where the splendid images of the goddess were being worshipped found it to be an ordeal during the day - the humidity was high and the sun unforgiving. But as the days passed, the season did change, and on the final day of the Puja, there was a perceptible mellowness in the hot sunlight, not so as to make a great difference but enough to let one know that mellowness was round the corner.

And with the first hints of good weather, the plethora of arts events that mark the season, more particularly the winter, begin: dance, music, theatre and shows of different kinds, art exhibitions and, in November, the International Film Festival in Goa. For a while, at least, the tensions of the workplace will appear to lessen, only appear to lessen because they do not, in reality. Nonetheless, the appearance of a lessening of tension does seem to stem from the onset of the gentle season.

As the Labour Secretary in West Bengal said many decades ago, there is a sense of mellowness, if nothing else. It is, of course, only the appearance but that is what counts. I have spent a dreadful time after one Durga Puja, after the exchange of goodwill on Bijoyadashami, or Vijayadashami as it is called in the South, coping with the worst floods I have seen in the district of which I was in charge. And in the midst of the kindest time, in December, the South was savaged by the terrible tsunami.

It is not that there is a real letting up of anything; it is just the feeling that it is doing so that comes with the season. As with most of our festivals and special days, the origins are lost in ritual, ritual that has grown perhaps because of the season, or the harvesting of the crop and the sense of well-being that it brings, something that has to do with fertility rites and the milder sun, the cooler breeze and even cooler evenings and nights.

In the United States with its much more recent history, Thanksgiving is clearly understood to mark the joy of having had a good harvest; or perhaps the settlers picked it up from some earlier observance by the original inhabitants of the land, much as Easter was adopted, so to speak, into the Christian ethos.

Sadly, somewhere in the darkness of the past years, we seem to have begun to lose the awareness of the rhythm of the passing of time and have moved towards making the observances a part of the money-making process that has consumed us all.

The Navratri observance was, for instance, a time of family, and sometimes of community, happiness; it certainly was not the psychedelic, loud and brassily commercial event that it has now become. And Durga Puja itself is a good example of where it can all begin to head - to a crass commercial process, where gaiety begins to give way to coarse and strident `disco' evenings.

But even if that is what happens to our festivals, the change in the season will still be heralded by a perceived, if not real, change in social behaviour that has to do with the onset of the milder sunlight and the cool evenings. It is of immense comfort that this change, shorn of any observance through festivals that can be vulgarised, is never going to be co-opted by commercial interests, even though there will always be the shrill greeting of winter by the loud advertising of warm clothes, heaters and all the rest. The change cannot be captured for exploitation - the cool morning that makes one greet neighbours with a little more cordiality, the perception of the slight fading away of the fierceness of the sun, which makes it possible to spend a little more time out and about looking around at the trees as they begin to get the darker hues of winter; listening to and recognising the birdsong that changes as the visitors of the gentler season begin to arrive.

Sitting in his cramped room in Writers' Buildings, the Labour Secretary had clearly recognised the signs and had used them to good effect in his otherwise thankless task. In all likelihood even now, as the festive season soothes ragged nerves, the turbulence in the industrial units of that faraway subdivision will have begun to die down, as the weather brings in a much needed, if temporary, reprieve.