Amitava Kumar’s short biography of Patna, A Matter of Rats, starts with, well, rats. “In my mind’s eye, I watch a train approaching Patna Junction in the early morning.
The traveller sees the men sitting beside the tracks with their bottoms exposed, plastic bottles of water on the ground in front of them, often a mobile phone pressed to the ear. But at night, the first inhabitants of Patna that the visitor passes are the invisible ones: warm, humble, highly sociable, clever, fiercely diligent rats”.
There are soon tales of rats that stole the author’s mother’s dentures, that — so a policeman said — drank the alcohol they seized, that bit babies, rats as large as rabbits, very many of them. In this Hamlinesque world without a Pied Piper, the only man with a solution is a bureaucrat in the department of rural development. He thinks rats would make for good meals, if only more people ate them. At present only members of
a community called the Musahars do.
Kumar, therefore, embarks upon a journey to watch some Musahar men catch a rat. He describes it in the book, but the description he offers during an interview in Mumbai is both shorter and simpler: “Such expert catching, boss, like Virat Kohli in the covers”.
I ask him a question that he asked the bureaucrat who favoured eating rats. “Have you eaten a rat?”
“I had gone to eat a rat,” he says. “They were not interested in cooking it.” The season was not quite perfect for that kind of barbeque, apparently.
Kumar, a professor of English at Vassar College in New York and the author of several books, seems from his biography and pictures to be a rather unlikely consumer of rodents. I had looked at his bespectacled
image on the book jacket and imagined a man with a posh New York accent who would write terribly erudite chapters about Patna, the city where he was born.
The man in person, however, is a more earthy character. He speaks English with a neutral accent and often lapses into Hindi, which he speaks with a Bihari accent. He cracks jokes easily; his favoured style of humour seems to be of darkish hue, and deadpan delivery.
And so the book recounts the glories and decline of Patna, from imperial capital of the Mauryas to capital of today’s Bihar (a place where senior bureaucrats of the state’s department of art, culture and youth brazenly plagiarised a text about Bihar’s past glories). Mostly, the stories are told straight. Only the selection of tales, and the understatement with which often bizarre situations are recounted, bring laughter into a book that could so easily have been filled with regret.
There is a lot of Kumar in the book. It is almost as much an autobiography of the author as it is a biography of Patna. The author explains that this had to be so: “My relationship to Patna was a personal one… I’m opposed to textbook writing. My entry into history could be a personal one.”
Within his personal biography of the city, there are many little biographies of people in and from the city.
Kumar says he wrote in this manner deliberately. “Writing about place is always writing about people,” he says. In the book, he quotes V.S. Naipaul on this. “It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among”.
Patna has no dearth of interesting people. Kumar has picked out a few, mostly known, examples. There’s the artist Subodh Gupta, who explains why he makes sculptures from stainless steel utensils. It is because they remind him of a childhood experience; it has nothing to do with what many a sophisticated art critic has read into it. There’s the journalist Ravish Kumar, who the author picks as “Patna’s best representative” for his use of language. There’s the unknown Leftist poet who Kumar knew from his days in Patna, whose marriage came unstuck; it had seemed a matter of a wayward wife, but turns out to be more complex. There’s Anand Kumar, the man who runs the Super 30 institute that trains underprivileged youngsters for the IIT entrance exams, with remarkable success.
“In Anand’s lesson plans, Bholu is the Hindi-speaking mofussil boy who presents creative solutions to mathematical problems. Also, he laughs a lot. He is Anand’s hero. His anti-thesis is a character called Ricky who is arrogant, rides a motorcycle, and, as Anand put it to me, is suited-booted and speaks meow-meow English.”
Kumar, who straddles the world of both those characters, is guarded in his own reaction to the stereotypes. He praises the initiative lavishly, but simultaneously recalls the promise of Lalu Prasad Yadav’s arrival. It was a false promise, and led Bihar into some of its darkest days.
His view of Patna is the view of someone who is simultaneously an insider and outsider. It is a view perhaps inspired by former Granta editor Ian Jack’s. Kumar writes about Jack’s stories of Patna, “For the most part, he observed without sentiment or pity. He avoided broad generalisations and humbug. I have not kept count of the number of times I have asked myself, even while writing these words, whether I have successfully followed his example”.
It would be fair to say that he has succeeded in considerable measure. His claim to the city will perhaps be contested; he has been a visitor for some decades now. And yet, it is only by someone who has the distance of the faraway observer and the knowledge of the intimate that something of the truth about a place can be revealed.