To write the obituary of someone younger than yourself, that too when you consider yourself to be quite young, is a painful and arduous task. Satyam Jha had turned nineteen in January this year, when things were looking brighter and somewhat hopeful. Little did we know then, that this pandemic would steal Satyam from us on the 25th of May. He never saw the red-brick buildings or the welcoming green lawns of the college that he had become a part of some six months ago. He never got the chance to meet his friends, classmates, seniors, or professors in person. He rarely turned his camera on during his online interactions with people. Many remember his warm and gentle smile when he did. I remember his voice, sombre and reassuring. He seemed to be quite ahead of his years—kind and thoughtful. I admired him for who he was, though I never felt the need of letting him know this explicitly. When he joined the Study Circle, I thought that it was merely the beginning of a long association, and we would get enough opportunities to pat each other’s backs in the years that lay ahead. Now, in the blink of an eye, he has taken his leave—humbly as always—in silence, without informing.
Satyam was deeply interested in History, yet he harboured no illusions about the discipline. Questions he had many, and he never shied away from asking those. He was inquisitive in a very political way. He was not a person who denied taking a firm stance when the need arose. Unapologetically opinionated and candid in conversations, Satyam was popular among his batchmates, even though he did not seek popularity. I got to know him closely through our Whatsapp conversations, ranging from the online sessions of the Indian History Congress to the acute need for a functioning students’ union in college. Our views matched and it soon became evident that politically, we were fellow-travellers. That is when he became Comrade Satyam to me—a ‘ranting anarcho-communist’ was how he used to describe himself—one of the earliest people from the batch of 2021 to join the Students’ Federation of India. He was a gifted organizer and had a keen interest in socialist thought. He read widely and could argue with coherence and clarity. When the time came to form a new Organizing Committee of the SFI in college, his inclusion was a foregone conclusion.
Impatient with how the things are around us, Satyam wanted to grapple with injustice and dreamt of a fairer world: without nations and without borders, without gods and without masters. He was a voracious reader. He had read B.T. Ranadive, Perry Anderson, and Audre Lorde and had written a strident article called ‘Refuting the Idea of India’ for the journal of the Gandhi Ambedkar Study Circle in February. Having read this piece, Rajmohan Gandhi had advised him to read his book Understanding the Founding Fathers, which, I am sure he had finished by April—the same month when he joined the Study Circle and started taking an active part in our reading sessions. We read bits of Marx and Sankrityayan together and touched upon the work of James C. Scott. He had promised to take up something by Scott in one of our forthcoming sessions but that was not to be. The last time I had checked in on him was in late April. He was busy with organizing COVID-19 relief work and had forgotten to fill the application form for an executive council position in the History Society. The deadline was extended and he could fill the form.
Eventually, he was chosen to be a part of both the GASC and the History Society’s incoming executive councils. I am told that he was involved in several other societies in college as well. Diligent in his work and caring to his friends, Satyam was this large-hearted person, in whom people found much promise and love for everyone around him. It was in May that he was diagnosed to be COVID-19 positive, having experienced shortness of breath and fever for a few days, and had to be hospitalized. As news from his side became erratic, he seemingly got better for a few days only to be put on a ventilator, where he passed away on the eighth day. He and his family were in Kota, Rajasthan and not in his other home at Bally in Bengal. His untimely death, like that of many others was totally avoidable. Satyam succumbed not just to COVID-19 but to the criminal negligence of an apathetic state that has relinquished its duty of protecting its citizens. Not that Satyam ever had any faith in the state or any of its rotten apparatuses, but he certainly did not deserve this.
We never got the chance to discuss death, even though we knew each other to be declared agnostics. I can only imagine him telling me that it is futile to write obituaries of individuals when it is our failed society that is dying a slow and painful death. All around us, we see sorrow and anguish, and yet we choose to remain comfortably numb. Nothing seems to be able to shake our nonchalance, our misplaced hopes, or our ridiculous capacity to compromise with a broken system that compels us to keep leading Sisyphean lives even amidst the debris of a dying civilization. This pandemic stopped Satyam from attending university physically—the only meaningful way to do so—yet, it could not stop Israel from bombing Palestine, Myanmar from killing its own citizens, or India from building the Central Vista as a grotesque reminder that the ruling dispensation can do anything with impunity even when people are dying like flies in the middle of a severely mismanaged public health emergency. Satyam would have voiced his opposition to all these and more, if only he were not taken away from us, so soon.
If we could ever have had this conversation, I would have told him that obituaries are never about death. They are meant to remind people about the lives of those who can no longer speak to them, save for in their memories. These requiems are what make us human: to be able to reflect about the lives of others, to be able to keep them in our thoughts, to be able to preserve their values and experiences in some way—cherishing the time we had together and perhaps also regretting the time that we did not get. Obituaries heighten our sense of loss, yet, they help us cope with the weight of grief as well. My heart breaks to think that Satyam is no longer with us, but when I read his fabulous translation of Rahul Sankrityayan’s iconoclastic essay ‘Mental Slavery’, I am led to believe that he continues to live within us. He stood for his ideals with honesty and dedication and inspired people in the short span of time in which he came in their lives. He will be sorely missed and fondly remembered. He will never be a number in this deluge of mortality statistics. Satyam Jha was a dreamer, and he would have been delighted to know that his dream was a shared one.
Written by Suchintan Das (on behalf of the Sankrityayan Kosambi Study Circle)
Lokayata 