The Scholar Gypsy

I had heard about Sanjoy Ghose long before I met him. Sometime in the late '80s therebegan to appear in the Indian Express a column titled Village Voice. The voice in thatcolumn, datelined Lunkaransar, a small zone of life in the sandy wastes of Bikaner, wasnot that of an observer of Indian village life, but of a participant. Yet, it was not thetiresome holier-than-thou voice of activist ngos. Ghose had the born storyteller's ear forrepeating conversations exactly, and the journalist's ironic detachment. Above all he hadmade common cause with the people of that barren soil-his crusade was theirs, and theirlife his own. Month by month, I read those brilliant dispatches with deep _admiration.

I met him shortly afterwards. The World Bank asked me to report on some developmentprojects in rural areas. I leapt at the opportunity, thinking first of Lunkaransar and"Joy" Ghose. A pencil scratch in an old notebook informs me that I took thenight train to Bikaner on January 2, 1992, and landed at the Uttar Rajasthan Milk Union(Urmul) campus the following afternoon. I was profoundly impressed by what I saw. Joy hadsuccessfully replicated the Anand Milk Union Ltd (Amul) experiment in one of the poorestdistricts of the country but in seven years had progressed far beyond; setting up weavingcooperatives, introducing primary education and healthcare schemes. He was engaged, thenas always, in pointing out the infernal paradoxes of development: fighting the ill-effectsof waterlogging caused by the Indira Gandhi Canal in one of the most drought-prone regionsof the country. An entry in my notebook after this trip reads: "In every village thatthis small, bearded figure with laughing eyes and a lucid command of the local dialecttook me to... there were stories of how political pillage and rank bureaucratic orcommercial interests conspire to keep 'backwardness' alive."

Joy Ghose and I would've gone our separate ways, but coincidences conspired to bind ourlives together: his parents were our neighbours in Delhi and our daughters, who were ofthe same age and belonged to the same class, became inseparable.

In the spring of 1996 Joy decided to move to Assam, to Majuli, the largest riverineisland in the world in the Brahmaputra. He felt that his work at Urmul was done. He hadestablished the systems; now the villagers were in command. "Lunkaransar and Urmulare in my blood," he wrote in a letter to friends, "and have given me a sense ofroots (and rootedness), the lack of which has always disturbed me: backpacking developmentworker, transient between two cultures... But now it's time to move on again, before theroots become anchors."

Some of his family and friends felt queasy about his move to Jorhat. But behind thatapparently shy, smiling exterior was a man of unshakeable resolve: Joy would not be partedfrom his family nor be deflected from his chosen path. On preparatory trips, he hadfocused on Majuli island, flooded for six month of the year, its transcendental beautyattended by the horrors of soil erosion, malaria and acute lack of drinking water. For aman with a mind as fine as Joy's-he'd read development economics at Oxford, followed by adegree in agriculture at Anand, then put his learning into practice in years ofgroundwork-the paradox was particularly challenging. Nor was he in any way innocent ofAssam's pervasive politics of terror. The militants' guns had only exacerbated, not eased,the miseries of the people of Majuli. ulfa was both parallel government and voluntaryagency.

June 1997: the children are back from Jorhat for the summer holidays and overagain-like old times. Joy breezes in one afternoon to collect them. We fix a date to meet.The scribble in my daybook for July 18, 1997, is as fresh as yesterday's. It reads:"Take Joy & kids to dinner".

I never saw him again. On July 4, 1997, Joy rode his bicycle to a meeting in MekheliGaon, apparently with the ulfa, and never returned. He was 37. Till date, there is noconclusive evidence of what happened. This book, edited by his wife Sumita Ghose, ispartly an account of her search for Joy, partly about their work together and alsocontains some of his best writings.

Joy was my friend, my neighbour and a surrogate father to my daughter. But it's not forthose reasons alone that I think this is an important book. It is a contemporary record ofrural India on par with P. Sainath's award-winning Everybody Loves A Good Drought. Forthose of us who believe that the wounds of conflict that tire India and exhaust theNortheast cannot be healed without people like