 From India with love
By Ashis Chakrabart (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-11 07:53 On a cloudy afternoon an old man walks around on the campus of Peking University. At 81, he isn't sure if he will have another opportunity to come and visit the university he joined as a young man over half a century ago. He came back and lived long enough in China to witness momentous changes in the country over five decades. For Narayan Sen, though, the afternoon walk is not just a trip down memory lane. He is in Beijing to collect some last bits of research material for his next book on China. He has authored five books so far, and translated seven more from Chinese. One of them - Rural Economy and Development in China (1986) - was only the second book by a foreigner published by the official Foreign Languages Press until then - the first being one by Israel Epstein. Yet another book on China at this advanced age is Sen's idea of continuing a love affair with a country that began in his hometown of Kolkata in India in the early 1950s. But, when Sen began to learn Chinese in Kolkata, he did so for a very different reason. Born into a lawyers' family, the law seemed to be his obvious choice as a career. The city, which was called Calcutta until the name changed to Kolkata in 2000, had the largest Chinese community in India, but few Chinese lawyers. Learning Chinese was Sen's idea of having successful Chinese businessmen among his clients. Things changed dramatically for him as, after a short course in Chinese at Kolkata University, Sen joined the "Cheena Bhavan" (Chinese School) at Visva Bharati, the unorthodox university founded by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore with the money he got from the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913. He learned Chinese and Tibetan there. But, more important, this was the time he realized there was far more for him in China and Chinese studies than Chinese clients for a lawyer in his hometown. This was also the time when Chinese and Indian premiers - Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru - visited each other's country for the first time. The visits resulted in the first cultural exchange agreement between the two countries since the founding of New China. Three students from each country would go to study in the other country. Three Chinese students went to India. But Sen was the only Indian who came to China on that first program. Sailing on a Kolkata-Osaka liner on Jan 4,1955, that stopped at Rangoon (present-day Yangon), Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong, Sen arrived in Beijing by train from Shenzen on the cold morning of Feb 8, 1955. For a young man used to the heat of Kolkata, it was a really cold journey. "Not only was it bitterly cold, China then was more backward than India," Sen recalls. But it was a beginning that would change his life. Two years of studies in Chinese language and literature ended with a dissertation on Lu Xun and his short stories. When it was time to go back, little did Sen know that he would be back in China - again and again. But the first two years were crucial to his knowledge of China, as they also were for the country. It was the time when China had just begun its socialist industrialization. It was also the time of the first of the social-political movements that would rock Chinese society. Sen can barely stifle a laugh as he recalls two bizarre incidents at Peking University in 1956. "One morning, I found students everywhere on the campus searching for and collecting nails and anything else made of iron," he says. "That was a response to the leadership's call to make China equal to Great Britain in steel-making in 15 years. "The students collecting nails were part of the national drive to build up a huge store of iron. It all fizzled out after a few days." The other incident would look simply hilarious today, but it was serious business when it happened. It was the time of the "anti-rightist" movement in 1957. It had its comic as well as tragic side. Sen recalls the comic side in events of a particular day. "Suddenly one day, students started chasing and trying to catch sparrows all over the campus. But the strangest sight to me was the well-known professor of philosophy, Feng Yulan, holding a bamboo pole aloft and going around chasing sparrows so that students could catch them." It was part of the other national drive to rid the country of "Four Pests" that harmed crops. Sparrows and rats topped the list. The campaign came alongside the setting up of the people's communes and the Great Leap Forward that spelt disaster for China's agriculture and caused famine and starvation deaths on an unprecedented scale. He did not just witness it all; at least on one occasion, he took part in that strange campaign of nation-building by joining the volunteer labor used to build the water reservoir near the Ming Tombs. But the tragedies of the period still make him sad, especially an incident involving him. As he prepared to leave for India after submitting his dissertation, he wanted to say good-bye to his supervisor, Pei Jialin. But Pei was nowhere to be found. Many years later in 1982, when he returned to live in China, he came to know of Pei's story from him. The anti-rightist campaign forced Pei out of the university and made him a laborer. He was around the university as Sen was leaving it in 1958, but did not have the courage to come up to him and bid him farewell. "It must have been hard for him," Sen says. All that had changed by the time he came back in 1982, this time to work with the Foreign Languages Press. In the intervening years, he carried on with his Chinese studies in India, returning to Cheena Bhavan, working as the head of the Chinese section in India's official All India Radio and also becoming the first teacher of the newly-started Chinese school at New Delhi's elite Jawaharlal Nehru University. Between 1982 and 1992, when he worked with the Foreign Languages Press, Sen had his opportunity to watch the brave new China coming into being, thanks to Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. He has been following their course ever since. No coincidence that his forthcoming book is on China's economic reforms and the theories of Deng. "I've tried to see China's reforms from the Chinese perspective and using original Chinese-language sources," he says. But where is China headed? Sen has faced the question many times and his answer is straight and uncomplicated. He makes two broad points. "I'm happy to see so many Chinese people becoming affluent because I saw the poverty in which most people lived when I first came," he says. And he is happy to see something of an intellectual renaissance now. "In 1956, there was the slogan, 'Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend'. "But then it was an empty slogan. It's really happening now. You have Chinese translations of almost all kinds of books here. Even the ones by the Indian religious guru J Krishnamurthy. It was unthinkable for a long time." For all his love of China, Sen got something precious in return. His only son Tansen, who teaches ancient Chinese and Indian history at a New York university, is married to Liang Fan, a Beijing native, who is currently working on her PhD at the same university. (China Daily 07/11/2008 page19) |
