I have just returned from a trip to Kolkata. It was just a week long, but it opened by eyes once again to the diversity of West Bengal, the state in which I had been born and grown up. Amidst all the change that has occurred there, all the "development" and all the "progress", Jadavpur remains a citadel true to itself. The area houses West Bengal's best university, which naturally is also one of the elite centres of learning in India. Yet, elitism is about the worst word you can utter on the grounds of the university and its precincts. You would be beaten to an early ideological death, given the viscerally Left-wing character of the place. So, I would like to designate the environs as constituting the People's Republic of Jadavpur, or PRJ - just as the University of California in Berkeley is sometimes called the People's Republic of Berkeley.

It reminds me of my alma mater, Presidency College, the academic icon of the insurrectionary 1960s and early-1970s. That was when all roads from College Street led to Beijing via Moscow; Washington was the refuge of runaway rascals. I never bought into that absolutist narrative, but it appealed to many. Presidency and Jadavpur were the twin capitals of a (non-existent) socialist republic of West Bengal.

Those times have passed. Today, Jadavpur University and its immediate reach constitute a single habitus of radicalised space in remembered time. India's insurgent decades have gone, but only to leave the People's Republic of Jadavpur behind. It is a face-to-face society where everyone knows everyone else ideologically. It is a political epiphany in uncharted motion. No one threatens anyone here because there is nothing to be gained. Everything will come to a nasty end, so why conquer at all? Yet, there is no reason to despair. There is still time in which to interrogate all that has happened in history. Fate is communal, not personal. Hence, in the PRJ, no space is really private. The public sphere resides within each individual.

While I sit with a friend whom everyone knows, a man comes up and renews a conversation with her, not ignoring me but assuming that I am complicit in all his dealings with her. I know her, she knows him, and therefore I cannot but know him. I do not, but this is a relational collective. Leave your insecurities outside. He is a Jadavpur alumnus who lives nearby. His son is abroad; he shares his loneliness with his wife and the young of Jadavpur. I meet some others like him, all products of Jadavpur, the sanctuary of restless minds. The sanctuary's inner sanctum is the Coffee House, where you can get a cup of coffee for ₹20 and overhear two agnostics discuss eternity. I fall in love with the world again, then and there.

Roberto Rossellini famously describes Charlie Chaplin's 1957 masterpiece, "A King in New York", as "the film of a free man". Made during Chaplin's exile from America because of his suspected political sympathies, the film is an "uncompromised critique of American paranoia", a critic argues. In that spirit, the people of the PRJ are works of freedom in progress. They live on their terms as far as they can. They have made dialectical peace with the world, all of them being elderly or young disciples of Walter Benjamin. In his later work, in one assessment, Benjamin argues on behalf of "a form of mimesis that finds connection with the world not through domination, but through bringing things 'closer' and recognising their fleeting existence". Lasting intimacy amidst looming mortality - that is the People's Republic of Jadavpur's claim to the jealous indulgence of history.

I meet another man across the street from the Coffee House. He was a leftist activist once, which means that he remains an activist today: Only the definition of the Left has shifted. He sells progressive books in a tiny wayside stall which shares space with organic products. He is a worker in the alternative economy, one that answers to human needs and not wants. My friend, her husband and he know one another by ideological sight. There is no need for explanation. My friend's ancestors were Lahiris from Khulna, a part of the fabled Brahmin gentry. Partition destroyed that geographical lineage, and her father settled in Purulia, but no Partition could break Tapan babu's love for the unity of Bengal, manifested in the ability of Hindus and Muslims to live and die together. He was a lifelong believer uncontaminated by the Left Front's economic accumulation from 1977 to 2011. When he passed away during Covid, some of my friend's family members refused to let her and her husband, who lived outside Kolkata, stay with them even briefly. Their friend from across the Jadavpur street invited them into his home. Just like that. Sickness and death were like consciousness and revolution: They occurred. People had to learn to live with them. Day passes into night before it turns into day again.

My Jadavpur evening is fading away. Dusk fell some time ago over everyone's head like an unfolding blanket calling people to rest. Night is that blanket complete. It has arrived. But no one wants to go to sleep because sleep is the rest of the defeated. To be awake is to be alive. Jadavpur's testamentary 8B bus stand is abuzz with people on the move. An old woman blocks the passage of a bus that has picked up passengers already. The driver honks briefly, respectfully. The woman throws him a sideway glance and gives him what could be a curse or a benediction. I cannot hear amidst the honking of other buses.

My friend sees me off.

I shall miss her, her husband, their two friends and the old woman. Most of all, I shall miss myself because my Jadavpur evening shall never arrive again.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com