On Monday, Nata Mullick, a thorough professional who was proud of his job, went to the Great Retirement Home in the Sky. Not only was he proud of his job — hanging people — but he was also good at it. I say ‘good’ simply because the 25 hangings he conducted in his 89-year life, were carried out
without any hitches, and with his employer, the Government of West Bengal, never complaining.
Mullick was a professional whose job was made harder by the fact that unlike other people who kill people with official sanction — like soldiers — Mullick was never feted by the people of India for a service that most of them approved of. Perhaps because he didn’t risk his own life while killing people, he never received a gallantry award. But a gallant gent he was.
Mullick briefly came into the limelight in 2004 when he was called in to hang Dhananjoy Chatterjee, the man sentenced to death for raping and murdering a schoolgirl in Calcutta. While some reports mentioned that Mullick had “began to convulse” after pulling the lever that opened the trapdoor under Chatterjee’s bound feet, I’m not totally sure that a veteran like him would have reacted in that manner. “The job of hanging people runs in my blood. My father Shiblal Mullick was a hangman in the British days when they used to hang our freedom fighters,” he said three years after pulling the floor under Chatterjee. “It’s an art. Your skills need to be honed,” he added in the 2007 interview.
With 25 hangings under his belt, since he followed in his father’s footsteps when he was 15 or 16, Mullick had enough time in these lean times for executions to devote his energies to his other passion: acting. Travelling across Bengal to perform in jatras — outdoor stage melodramas — provided him with two things that being an executioner didn’t: good money and some amount of fame. One of his last roles was that of a music teacher with a drug-addict son, in the play, Desher shatru neta, Baper shatru beta (Enemy-of-the-Country Leader, Enemy-of-the-Father Son). He also acted as a hangman in Mrinal Sen’s 1976 Mithun Chakraborty-starring and National Award-winning film Mrigaya.
For me, the toughest part of Mullick’s real job was that no one encouraged him in his work. A hangman doesn’t get any thanks from any one for doing a good job. In fact, in the profession, there’s not even any peer review or pats on the back from fellow hangmen.
Novelist Shashi Warrier, in his remarkable novella Hangman’s Journal, writes about an executioner, loosely based on the real-life Travancore hangman, Janardhanan Pillai. We learn about the professional loneliness of a hangman. “I don’t know what to feel about the job... Everyone else knows some other person who does the same job, so they can share, and exchange experiences. I can’t do that. I can’t discuss knots and ropes and trapdoors and masks with anyone else, so I don’t really know,” says the narrator in Warrier’s book.
Mullick may not have ever exchanged notes with either Pillai or the unknown hangman who conducted the most widely reported hanging in recent memory — that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in December 2006. But he did share professional tips with his grandson Prabhat, who may now fill his shoes.
Being a hangman, like being a chartered accountant, a cricketer, a lawyer or even a journalist, has its professional rules — and I’m not talking about the ‘suspension of guilt in killing a man’ much romanticised by folks who don’t like the sound of a hanging. A man weighing under 44 kgs needs to drop the height of 1.98 m; if he’s over 70 kgs, he needs to drop only 1.52 m so that the neck breaks cleanly and death by painful strangulation is avoided. Dummy runs with weights are conducted before a hanging. It’s as serious a job as sending satellites into space.
So for me, Nata Mullick was what we all aspire to be: a professional who doesn’t whine and takes enough pleasure and pride in his job to do it well.