|
On the Passing of a Great Man,
True Friend, Inspired Soul
Cynthia Keppley Mahmood
| |
Three days after news of his death shocked the civil society,
Indian media is yet to even publish a preliminary report about
Human Rights activist par excellence, Ram Narayan Kumar. Only a
couple of newspapers in Punjab cared to carry the news as late
as on July 2. Only Kumar himself would not have been shocked. It
just proved the point he held all through. India’s polity,
media, civil society have to do much more to cross over to the
other side called civilization.
The WSN
presents, humbly and proudly, both at the same time, this
tribute and personal remembrance by Cynthia Keppley Mahmood,
celebrated scholar on Sikh issues and one of Kumar’s
co-travellers on the path to seek an egalitarian world. Mahmood
is the celebrated author of many a book on the Sikh struggle and
is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Senior Fellow, Joan
B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of
Notre Dame,
United
States.
This piece about a “great man, true friend, inspired soul” is
exclusive to the World Sikh News |
|
 Amidst
the hullaballoo over pop star Michael Jackson, a sudden,
lightening-bolt of a news flash. Can it be that Ram Narayan Kumar’s
flame has been extinguished, that from white to black, from day to
night, he so shockingly suddenly no longer walks among us? We who
were privileged to know his non-stop passion for justice, his
persistent love for all humans, and his full-throated zeal for
equality and civil rights can barely imagine a world without him.
Even those with whom he argued would acknowledge: in a world in
which so many are content to float as mere observers, mere
consumers, as merely pedestrian in their aims and impacts, Ram was a
presence. If one were in an arena in which he worked or
lived, he was un-ignorable. He was always fully there, fully
committed, and he prompted others to step into that rushing, living
stream as well.
I won’t recount,
here, Kumar’s history of human rights work and publications, done
ably by many others. Let me write, rather more personally, of how I
knew him (oh! the strangeness of that past tense!) and of some of
the things I knew about him that have left an indelible print in my
own life story.
I met Ram during
the course of the work on disappearances and cremations in Punjab.
By then he’d already worked passionately on other issues around
social justice in
India:
the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster, miner’s rights, the abrogation of
democracy during the Emergency. Ram Narayan Kumar had been born
into a Brahminic family; not only that but into a lineage that would
slate him for religious leadership. He grew up studying the Vedas,
living a spare and clean life in his father’s spiritual community.
But at a given point in his adolescence, he publicly rejected the
janeu and the caste system it supports, turning then to secular
education to complement his Sanskritic youth.
 Though
Kumar’s education and wide-ranging reading led him eventually to a
Marxist orientation, I’ve often thought that his childhood
discipline must have been critical to shaping the man he became –
the man he was able to become. As everyone around him knew, he was
indefatigable. He worked through glaring heat, pulsating monsoon
rains, dark electricity-free nights, on public buses, in humble
village dwellings – as well as in the more comfortable halls of
Oxford (where he was a Reuters Human Rights Fellow) and Columbia
(where we spoke together at one of the first public announcements of
the Punjab disappearances and cremations findings.
Working with the
Sikhs to investigate the disappearance of Jaswant Singh Khalra and,
it turned out, thousands more young women and men of
Amritsar
district, Punjab, sometimes drove Kumar crazy. A humble man, he
was careful not to claim individual credit for what was the work of
an entire committee, the CCDP (Coordinating Committee for
Disappearances in Punjab). But it was he who, most aware of
international human rights reporting standards, designed the form
that was used to acquire, record and store case data; it was he who
trained the loyal and hard-working field investigators who slogged
through the door-to-door, village-to-village collection of
information.
|
Far away on another continent, I take heart in knowing with all
certainty that the baton dropped by my friend Namu will be
picked up by others – I’m sure has already been picked up and is
being carried along speedily. The momentum of this movement for
human rights, swelling up even as any single individual gives up
this earthly existence, challenges those who would humiliate,
beat down and destroy the lives of others for the sake of power
or wealth to do the right thing, the most simple thing in the
world – treat another as you would like to be treated |
|
As things go in
Punjab, there was lots of in-fighting, lots of haggling back and
forth, which I as an outsider watched lamely from afar. What I
could do was be a sounding-board, a friend to whom Namu could vent
his frustrations and an international face for the CCDP.
Eventually, Namu and I retreated to the Maine woods, where we
together wrote the first [electronic] report on the investigations,
“Disappearances and Impunity in Punjab” that became the basis for
the later book Reduced to Ashes.
Those were
special days of relative quiet and lack of hurry that I now
especially cherish, working on the report into the night then
sipping drinks by candlelight on our back deck, all the stars of the
Milky Way unfurled above. I don’t imagine Ram had very many times
like this, in his driving, impassioned life. He had to leave his
beloved wife Gertie, a neurologist, back in Austria for months on
end as he pursued his work, which she unfailingly supported
financially and morally. That can’t have been easy, to live like
that for a lifetime. That too when, at times, the more ardently
Khalistani of the Sikhs started accusing him of being a RAW agent –
why else would a Hindu (Brahmin at that) be so deeply involved in
Sikh rights, at risk of his own freedom and indeed, his life? (Had
they forgotten Guru Tegh Bahadur?).
| |
As everyone around him knew, he was indefatigable. He worked
through glaring heat, pulsating monsoon rains, dark
electricity-free nights, on public buses, in humble village
dwellings – as well as in the more comfortable halls of Oxford
(where he was a Reuters Human Rights Fellow) and Columbia (where
we spoke together at one of the first public announcements of
the Punjab disappearances and cremations findings |
He used to tell
me, at these moments, that he fought for all those tens of thousands
of Sikhs who had been “disappeared,” who had already gone from this
earth as ashes up in smoke, those who had and have no voices in the
history being written about this time and this place. Sometimes the
currently living Sikhs drove him crazy and he’d say, “I’m doing this
for those already dead, not for these ignorant _________.” But in
fact he loved them all, the simpler, the poorer, the more
disadvantaged, these were the ones he lived to serve, even as some
of them accused him of the worst crimes and tried to push him out of
the defense of their own rights! Paradoxically, these events pushed
Kumar even further to complete the work, to be certain that the
powerful would be held accountable for the fractal chaos they had
wrought in Punjab, for the pathology emerging in which every man
suspected his brother and no one could effectively raise the clarion
call for revolutionary unity.
Ram Narayan
Kumar, the Hindu who gave up a privileged Brahminic position to
serve besieged Sikhs who at times reviled him, was punished also by
the Indian state, serving a total of what must have come to several
years in India’s prisons. I asked him how he got through some of
the hard times in these prisons, when even the minimal necessities
for life were not provided. He told one very sweet story about
nine cats he befriended at one location, and how he made it his
mission to keep them alive. He would hoard the bits of food
allocated to him and, starving himself, give them to the cats that
came to his cell each day. In this self-sacrificing service to
creatures more frail than he, Ram found more nourishment than in the
meager rations doled out by the guards.
Of course, other
causes lured Kumar as well: Kashmir, and as we all know the latest
was indigenous rights in the northeast. “Nothing human is alien to
me,” said Marx (following classical Greek philosophy), and surely
Kumar was the embodiment of this ideal as he sought to better the
land of his birth no matter which community or locale needed
attention. Though I’m sure Delhi viewed him as more than faintly
treasonous in his constant social and political critique, Kumar,
like all the most passionate revolutionaries, actually yearned for
the promise of India, yet unfulfilled in the vast inequalities with
their toll of human suffering. He wanted India to be very much
better than that. With others, comrades all, he demanded
India
be much better than it is, that it provide every one of its citizens
air to breathe freely, enough food to eat, shelter, and dignity.
Kumar never stopped for a moment of rest in his demand that India
live up to its promise.
Far away on
another continent, I take heart in knowing with all certainty that
the baton dropped by my friend Namu will be picked up by others –
I’m sure has already been picked up and is being carried along
speedily. The momentum of this movement for human rights, swelling
up even as any single individual gives up this earthly existence,
challenges those who would humiliate, beat down and destroy the
lives of others for the sake of power or wealth to do the right
thing, the most simple thing in the world – treat another as you
would like to be treated.
 The
divinity in me recognizes the divinity in you, Kumar learned from
the tenderest age, perhaps the signal contribution of Hindu social
teaching. The human being in me embraces the human being in you.
Oh, I will miss
your warmth! And I celebrate your life-well-lived!
Let us pause,
remember, then continue.
2
July 2009
|
Read Also