‘The Red Lion of the Hills’: A Tale of Darjeeling Woes

Manprasad Subba

Soaring hills and hurriedly sliding slopes with narrow valleys and gorges down below are, of course, not the habitat of lions. They generally prefer to live in grassy flat land or savannah where they can roam or run freely stalking and chasing their prey. But Preeti Brahmin, hitherto unheard of name as a writer, tells us a very exciting story about the ‘Red Lion’ of the Hills. The Hills here refers to the hills of Darjeeling where the Red Lion grew up, roamed and ran up and downhill fearlessly and growling and roaring that echoed and reverberated in the hills and the valleys. In fact, the Red Lion, the protagonist of the story, as narrated by Preeti, was quite at ease both in the Hills and the plains.

Unlike the quadruped king of the jungle, our young author’s lion stood tall on his two formidable legs, head held high, chest broad and ever throbbing with indomitable zeal and fervor, like a super sapiens who, in his youthful days itself, earned the popular epithet ‘Maaila Baaje’—Maaila meaning the second son in the family and ‘baaje’ a typical respectful address to a Brahmin or Baahun in Nepali community. However, the author, in Glossary appended at the end of the book, gives us only one simple and straight meaning of ‘baaje’ as grandfather. Ratanlal Brahmin, even when he was only in his thirties or early forties, was better known as Maaila Baaje. It was, and still is, the custom in Nepali community to address a male person belonging to the caste Baahun (Brahmin), irrespective of his age, as Baaje.

Ratanlal Brahmin: The Red Lion of the Hills is the title of the book, a biography, authored by the protagonist’s very own granddaughter Preeti Brahmin. I, as a reader, would opine that the second part of the title, ‘The Red Lion of the Hills’, would suffice for an appropriate title of the book and that would evoke more curiosity in the reader.

This is the first ever biography of Ratanlal Brahmin in English. Two earlier biographical works are in Nepali by two well-known writers, R. B. Rai and Mohan P. Dahal respectively and published a couple of decades ago or a few years after a sudden demise of Brahmin in 1989. This work in English, for its being authored by none other than the daughter of the second son of Ratanlal Brahmin, obviously has an especial significance. Many aspects of Ratanlal Brahmin concerning directly with the family like he as a husband, as a father and grandfather and his demeanor at home as a grand patriarchal figure etcetera are least expected to have found space in the other two biographies published earlier. Preeti has deftly woven in her writing not only the glimpses from the daily family chores and some intimate moments in the family but also a few anecdotes as well as the episodes relating to some chilling circumstances that family had to face or endure for her grandfather’s being an imperturbably daring leftist political figure in the Hills.

In the very first page of the book the reader is drawn to a night scene of arson of the Red Lion’s den, his imposingly spacious house at Singhamari, Darjeeling. And it is not a re-telling of someone’s narration but the writer’s first-hand account from her own experience – the experience that she had had as a tender kid. We can only imagine the trauma the little children in the house had to undergo for God knows how long. That scene of wild procession brandishing terrifying torches and faggots heading straight to Maaila Baaje’s house is also a horrific glimpse of a political narrative constructed then with the admixture of high emotions and nationalistic dreams — a recurring dream that sells like anything in the Hills, a narrative blared through the loud speakers in fiery diction which but later turned out to be merely an astute ploy.

Thus irresistibly drawn by a bang of night riot scene, which is not less than a superb artistic technic of an accomplished movie director, in the very beginning of the first chapter of the Part I, the reader is captivatingly led to all the rest of the pages that follow and s/he is already charmed to keep following the footprints of the Lion till the end. The book is divided into five parts, each part focusing on some particular aspect of the protagonist’s life and activities and the time he lived in. Each Part of the book consists of various stories culled from the vast treasure of Baaje’s life. It must have been quite an arduous task to make selection from the heap of the stories and anecdotes and stack of journals, newspaper clippings while gently taking forward the main thread of the biography, and the writer, indeed, has accomplished the work so adroitly and artistically that only the one endowed with subtle aesthetic sense can create such a work out of the conglomeration of facts and factual, hearsays and reported materials, actualities and myths. We can only imagine how many times she might have been in dilemma as to which story to pick up and which to leave out. She, being one of the direct grand-daughter of the legendary Maaila Baaje, had to take one extra challenge or risk of being too subjective, even unknowingly somewhat biased, while writing about her grandfather. But she has steered the story of her grandfather so skillfully that there is no such line or passage which has such tone or color. Even while showing some familial scenes Preeti appears innocently sincere. From her writing the reader is also acquainted with her intellectuality, her considerable erudition that has made her work even more worthwhile. It is amply evident that the author, in course of writing this book, had visited a number of books concerning history, politics, economics, and socio-culture of the Darjeeling region. And here we have this biography which is more than mere a biography.          

A well-researched, well-designed and made lively with fascinating narrative style, this book stands out as a remarkable literary work in the genre of biography that resurrects Maaila Baaje to life all over again and we can see him in flesh and blood and feel his warm breath. From the story of his youthful days we see him as a champion of social cause, intolerable to any sort of domination and intimidation; bold and outspoken to resist bullying and exploitative force in the society. We see him ever ready to do something useful for the cause of weak, timid and downtrodden. It is this nature of his that he was readily attracted to and deeply influenced by the Marxist ideology or the Communist manifesto that gave clarion call to all the workers of the world to unite and march toward the utopian goal of the rule of proletariat. Become literate only in his late adolescence stage, he of course had his intellectual limitation to delve deep into the theory of Marxism-Leninism. Yet his dream was high, his enthusiasm indomitable. And his initiation into Communism made his dream soar higher. It was obviously his indomitable spirit for the social causes in general, the cause of the then Gorkha community in particular, that drove him to be a die-hard member of Communist Party which he believed to be the panacea of all the social miseries.

He dared to be an enthusiastic worker as a communist at that time when the whole of the nation was under the sway of sweeping current of wind of Indian National Congress, and in the Darjeeling Hills and Terai a Gorkha nationalistic party, the Gorkha League, had emerged under the leadership of Dambersingh Gurung. It was the time when communists were generally despised, even ostracized.

How dear the Nepali culture and language were to him could be seen in two accounts, in one of which we see him as a Member of Legislative Assembly entering the West Bengal Assembly hall perfectly attired in traditional Nepali dress daura-suruwal with khukuri tucked in patuka, a typical waist-band cloth. And in another occasion, he, as a Member of Parliament, makes an historical attempt to take oath of office in mother tongue, Nepali. However, Nepali language then being not yet included in the \Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, he was not granted permission to utter the oath of office in Nepali. Later, back in Darjeeling, he related his sore experience in the Parliament to some of the intellectuals in Darjeeling and inspired them to begin the work for the attainment of constitutional recognition of Nepali language. And came into existence the organization, Nepali Bhasha Samity, later renamed as All India Nepali Bhasha Samity that vigorously worked to unite and educate the pan-Indian Nepali community about the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. When Nepali language was finally enshrined in the Indian Constitution in August 1992, just three years had elapsed since Ratanlal Brahmin had left his earthly abode, and the overjoyed people hardly knew anything about what he did and how he pricked the conscience of the local intellectuals exerting them to immediately start working toward according a respectful place to our language in the national arena. Even today, when Nepali Language Recognition Day is celebrated every year, Maaila Baaje’s historic gesture and the step he took is rarely talked about. We can only imagine how he would be elated if he had lived a little longer to see that very day of a desperately awaited constitutional achievement of our language.  

There are some other anecdotes in the book that present the protagonist in different shades of light. As we go between the lines we detect no sound of exaggeration of his daring acts or lessening of something about his real self. 

This biography is not only the story of Ratanlal Brahmin’s life but it is also a story of the inception and beginning of the Gorkha Dukha Niwarak Sammelan (GDNS), a pioneer social organization in Darjeeling; it is also the story of tea gardens and tea-garden workers and their endless struggles in the Hills of Darjeeling; it is also the story of beginning and rise of the Communist Party in the Hills and of politics of Darjeeling District in pre- / post-independence India. And for all these important aspects, it is a must-read book for the scholars and those taking interest in the socio-political history of the Darjeeling Hills.

With this first ever book of hers, Preeti Brahmin has sufficiently proved her potential as a talented writer. On the flap of the back cover there is a short bio-note about the author, in the middle of which a sentence reads: ‘She has written a few short-stories and poems.’ After going through this book, any reader with literary aesthetic taste would like to look forward to other literary works by Preeti.