Intoxicated by Azad’s fiery speech and the heady possibilities of Swaraj, Jayaprakash cut his teeth in student politics by quitting college twenty days before his exams. He was convinced that non-cooperation was more worthy of his attention than the relentless pursuit of education. Several students of Patna College and BN College joined him. That was, indeed, the turning point in Jayaprakash’s life. He felt ‘lifted up to the skies’ by a strong sense of exhilaration. ‘That brief experience of soaring up with the winds of a great idea,’ he observed later, ‘left imprints on the inner being that time and much familiarity with the ugliness of reality have not removed.’ He added, ‘It was then that freedom became one of the beacon lights of my life, and it has remained so ever since. Freedom, with the passing of the years, transcended the mere freedom of my country and embraced freedom of man everywhere and from every sort of trammel—above all, it meant freedom of the human personality, freedom of the mind, freedom of the spirit.’
Jayaprakash’s decision was a jolt for his family. His father-in-law cautioned him against tempestuousness and pointed out that the Congress party’s directive was only to boycott British-run educational institutions. He was persuaded to join Bihar Vidyapeeth, an institution founded by Mahatma Gandhi on land donated by the eminent lawyer and Congress leader Maulana Mazharul Haque. Jayaprakash obtained an ISC degree from the Vidyapeeth, securing a first division. Following the Chauri Chaura incident, the non-cooperation movement petered out. Many students who had walked out of government-controlled educational institutions returned to them, but not Jayaprakash. The Vidyapeeth could only provide education up to the intermediate level. Given his hardwired sense of what was right, he was conflicted about studying at a place that received grants from the government. For a few months, he lived and studied science at the residence of a family friend, Phuldeva Sahay, a professor of chemistry at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). But he refused to join the university since it received grants from the government. It was around this time that he met Bhola Pant, a young Garhwali student seeking to study in America. Their friendship deepened, and eventually Jayaprakash was also attracted to the idea of studying there. A lecture delivered by Swami Satyadev Parivrajak on his experience of working his way through college in America was an added inspiration.
Jayaprakash’s decision was, however, a severely discomfiting one for his parents. His mother was especially distraught and he had to work hard to convince her. He received strong support from an unexpected quarter. His wife, Prabhavati, then only sixteen, recognized the potentially transformative aspect of her husband’s decision. She wrote to him saying that she was happy with his decision and hoped that on his return he would devote himself to the national cause. If there were any heartaches, questions and doubts, she kept them to herself. Lively and exuberant, she accepted his decision with impressive calmness. She and Jayaprakash were slowly getting to know each other.
She had visited his home for what was known as the ‘gauna ceremony’ very briefly but met him frequently at her parents’ place. She treasured her time with him, mirrored many of his commitments and shared his nationalistic fervour. Even so, she declined his proposal to accompany him, knowing instinctively that it would stretch him no end!
At this point, Jayaprakash’s father was posted as ziladar in a place called Nasriganj in the Shahabad district. It is from there that Jayaprakash set out for Calcutta to begin his sea voyage to the United States aboard a small cargo liner, Janus, which began its journey to Kobe on 16 May 1922. From its second-class deck in the ambient daylight, attired in Western clothes hurriedly bought in Calcutta, Jayaprakash watched India’s vanishing coastline with some trepidation and hope. The expenses of travel up to Kobe were met partly by a grant from an educational foundation in Calcutta. His father paid the rest of the travel cost, in addition to giving him $600 to take care of contingent expenses.
A viscerally intense experience, it was long-haul travel in a no-frills option. He had four travelling companions: one from Telangana, one from Hyderabad and two from Bengal. The sea was rough and at one point in the South China Sea, Janus found itself in the tail of a typhoon. Despite severe seasickness, Jayaprakash survived the ordeal and tried to make the most of brief halts at Rangoon, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong. From Kobe, he went to Osaka, and then to the glistening seafront of Yokohama, from where he set sail for the United States after an interlude of several weeks spent travelling and proofreading for the Japanese national daily, the Mainichi. His German liner, Taiyo Maru, entered the San Francisco Bay on 8 October, three days before his twentieth birthday, after an eighteen-day voyage through vivid blue seas.
The campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a haven of calm with lush lawns and beautiful buildings, worked its serendipitous magic on Jayaprakash. He found temporary shelter in the attic of the Nalanda Club, a den of Indian students. The academic term had however already begun. Since he needed to wait until the following January, he thought it prudent to earn some money. While hunting for a job in Marysville, a neighbourhood town, he met Sikh activists from the Ghadar Party, headquartered in San Francisco. They persuaded him to stay back for a few days, eager to get details of the non-cooperation movement. On his third day in Marysville, he ran into Sher Khan, a Pathan overseer, externed from India. Khan directed him to a large orchard near Yuba City. A little off the beaten track, but somewhat idyllic, his job involved sun-drying large quantities of grapes to turn them into raisins. He worked there for about a month, at 40 cents an hour. Working nine hours per day—with half an hour’s break for lunch and Sundays off—Jayaprakash earned $21.60 per week. Jayaprakash’s living space was scruffy and basic. It consisted of a long wooden shed without furniture but with a raised platform along the walls, covered with straw. The entire team of workers slept there, sharing an intimate space. It was old-fashioned community living with three dozen workers, mostly Pathans from the North-West Frontier Province. They liked the young man from India and crowded around him in the evenings for thought-provoking conversations about the freedom struggle. Out of regard for him, they stopped bringing beef into their common kitchenette. As no agricultural work was available near Marysville in winter, Jayaprakash returned to Berkeley to wash dishes and wait tables at restaurants. On Sundays, he moved around town, taking up whatever odd jobs were available.
In January, he was directly admitted into the second year, getting a year’s credit for his intermediate science degree. After completing his first term as a student of mathematics, chemical engineering and biology at Berkeley, Jayaprakash moved out again at the end of May, to work first as a grape picker at a scenic vineyard in the Sacramento Valley, and then as a packer and carton mender in a fruit and jam canning factory at San Jose. He enjoyed his time at Berkeley but had to leave when non-Californian citizens were forced to pay nearly double the fees, amounting to $300 a year. He was persuaded by his friend Bhola Pant, studying at the State University of Iowa, to migrate there. Iowa’s tuition fee of about $80 was far more affordable. So, after studying in California for two terms, Jayaprakash moved to the 1700-acre university campus at Iowa, a Midwestern US state positioned between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. He shared Bhola’s room. The adjoining rooms too had Indian inmates. Jyoti Basu’s brother Kiran was one of them. They cooked their meals together and bonded over cups of coffee. In addition to his science curriculum, Jayaprakash studied French and German.
During the winter and summer breaks, the search for employment took Jayaprakash to Chicago, a city witnessing explosive growth. Several Indian students formed themselves into groups and rented shacks in the gritty slums of Chicago. They paid $10 per month, usually two persons to a room, sharing a weathered double bed. Rooms were not easy to get due to the colour prejudice and xenophobia. During weeks that hinged on uncertainty, Jayaprakash worked in a terracotta factory, a steel foundry with walls of jagged iron sheets, a butcher house (looking after refrigeration plants), in restaurants and departmental stores, once even as a vendor of a whitening cream in the narrow alleys inhabited by African Americans. By and large, coloured people were an anathema and had to strictly play by the rules. Very few people knew about India. He was once asked if he was from Honduras.
At Iowa, Jayaprakash did exceptionally well academically, getting straight A’s in all subjects except in drawing, which was a part of the course of chemical engineering that he was registered for, his only failure as a student. After spending about a year at Iowa, he felt the need for a more stimulating environment. At that time, the University of Wisconsin at Madison had in its faculty scholars known for their iconoclastic, progressive outlook. Wisconsin was also considered one of the most liberal states in the US—deriving its reputation from senators like Robert Follette, who pushed through a historic resolution demanding investigation into the most infamous scandal involving a presidential administration. Jayaprakash moved to Madison in the summer of 1924. He studied there for the next couple of years, while continuing to earn a living doing odd jobs like spring cleaning, clearing snow and washing dishes.
Jayaprakash drew a richly textured portrait of his time at Madison for my father. The campus, vibrant and infused with radical politics, opened its arms to him. He suddenly had a lot to look forward to. It was here that he was exposed to Marxism. One of his closest friends was Abram Landy, a Polish Jew, who was a member of the student wing of the American Communist Party. He loaned Jayaprakash Marxist literature, which the latter read with great relish. Books that unmasked fissures along economic and class lines provided him with rare intimate insights into the dominant political processes. These books radicalized Jayaprakash. He went through almost all the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov available in English. He was addicted to the Daily Worker, a newsletter that carried articles of Marxist scholars like John Spivak, Davis Karr, Peter Fryer, and the politically charged songs of Woody Guthrie.
Jayaprakash became a member of the communist cell at the university and participated in protests and public meetings. He also came in contact with young American students of northern and central European origin who regarded the Soviet Union as a powerful citadel and testing ground of Marxism. Even though America’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, the racial and economic inequality in contemporary American society made the Soviet experiment in socialism the focal point of their hopes for a future based on social justice. Looking back at that period several years later, Jayaprakash wrote, ‘Strangely enough, it was in the land of resilient and successful capitalism . . . that I became a convert to Marxism, or more precisely, to Soviet communism as it was then.’
With the arrival of sound in 1927, cinema was coming of age. Jayaprakash enjoyed the melodrama and romance of Hollywood films. Actresses like Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo set his heart aflutter. American theatre, too, was coming of age. Jayaprakash enjoyed the social realism of Eugene O’ Neill’s plays and took his American friends to see Sudraka’s Mrichchakatika, staged by a group of Bengali students. Fitzgerald had dubbed the American post-war years as ‘the Jazz Age’, and Jayaprakash too made the most of it by listening to jazz bands and going to the dance floor to learn the Charleston and the flea hop. Tennis was trendy and he learnt to play it. Known for his radical views and laconic charm, he was a beau idéal. Many young girls were drawn to him.
The following year, Jayaprakash completed the requirements for his degree. His thesis, with ‘cultural variation’ as its theme, was discussed, analysed and adjudged the best essay of the year by the faculty of the university. Jayaprakash’s idealism and vision for mankind’s future, as well as his deep interest in the roots of social processes and social change, were clearly noticeable in his essay. He wrote with the certitude of an op-ed polemicist, concluding that ‘the primary function of the sociologist is the study of social or cultural change’. Without it, one may be predisposed to become a ‘social quack’ but never a social scientist.Following his excellent performance, Jayaprakash planned to work for a doctoral degree in sociology. His destiny, however, willed otherwise. His mother fell seriously ill and sent word that she wished to see him. Now, nothing was more important for him than returning home to her. Cash-strapped as usual, he hitch-hiked from Chicago to New York, reaching London with the help of a friend in September 1929. With the Wall Street crash of October 1929 barely a month away, there was heavy unemployment in the city, foreclosing any chances of finding a job that would fund his trip back home. The money that his father eventually sent took a few weeks to arrive. Jayaprakash lived with Indian acquaintances at Gower Street in Bloomsbury, surviving on bread and margarine.
Jayaprakash’s time in London helped him look beyond the city’s clichés. He observed everyday life walking along the Thames embankment, Trafalgar Square, the London Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Soho and other places. He went to Oxford to meet Dr S. Radhakrishnan, who held the coveted position of Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics. He also tried to seek out Rajani Palme Dutt, one of the founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, at the party office. Dutt was in Brussels, but he managed to meet Dutt’s elder brother Clemens who introduced him to several young communists. When Clemens asked him about his plan, he answered with consummate clarity: ‘I will join the Congress and try to radicalize it.
This is what Lenin too advocated in the Second Congress of the Communist International when he said that communist parties should not isolate themselves from revolutionary liberation movements in colonies, even if the movements were being run by bourgeois leaders.’ When the money from India finally arrived, Jayaprakash boarded the Orient Lines, sailing to Australia. He disembarked at Colombo, took a train to Trincomalee Port from where he boarded a ship to Dhanushkodi. From Dhanushkodi, a train brought him to Madras and then to Calcutta. He reached Patna only by the end of November 1929 and from there went to his village Sitabdiara, dressed in a dhoti-kurta borrowed from a friend.
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