THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED

By RANJANI RAMESH

With many immigrants admitting to being a little shaky on their knowledge of the Indigenous communities in Canada, it is a rare immigrant indeed who eschews a lucrative practice in bustling city centres to devote years of his life to working in the Cree territories.

Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is a family doctor in Eeyou Istchee (the Cree territories of James Bay in northern Québec) and is co-coordinator of the Canadian chapter of the People’s Health Movement, a global network of grassroots health activists, civil society organizations and academic institutions. He is also, among other things, clinical faculty and site coordinator, Department of Family Medicine, McGill University, and a member of the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion Committee of Médecins Sans Frontières Canada.

He has worked in community organizations and social movements dealing with migrant rights, HIV/AIDS and poverty in Canada and overseas.

Becoming a doctor was the first step to what he really wanted to do: serve people in remote areas which do not have equal access to medical facilities that many cities in Canada do. Working in Eeyou Istchee for the past six years is a personal choice for Mukhopadhyay who has, over  the years, developed a close connection with the Indigenous people, their history of displacement from their land and way of life. He became interested in researching “how people’s social conditions shape their experience of health”.

As someone who has embraced Canada as his home, he felt the essential need to understand and reflect on the effects of colonization on the Indigenous communities in Canada as this is central to his functioning as a doctor to this community which prices its connection to the land above everything else. Hunting, trapping and fishing are central to this culture, and it’s through an appreciation of this that he has got closer to his patients. “I felt a responsibility as someone who has made Canada his home that I bear witness to the dispossession that my life here is a part of, and that I had a responsibility to Indigenous struggles in the country. Canada exists for me to make a home only because others have been robbed of theirs, and as immigrants, we need to recognize that and work to redress it.”

The bond between the Indigenous people and him them grew out of Mukhopadhyay’s own identity as a person whose family was involved in India’s anti colonial struggle in the 1940s.

His grandparents were born in Bengal during the British colonial period and were hereditarily Brahmins, which carried a certain privilege even with the financial hardship they confronted. Despite their entitled birth, they got heavily involved with the Communist struggle during the Indian independence movement. As a person who has extrapolated his grandparents’ experience of colonization in India, Mukhopadhyay could relate to a similar context that the Indigenous people faced in Canada.

When he first came to Canada as a teenager from the Middle East to  visit his sister in Montreal in 1996, the city must have looked like a snow globe, throwing up images of timeless charm everywhere he turned.

This is also familiar to many who have set foot in Canada and made it their home – that first impression which grabbed them can be so powerful. So was the case with the Mukhopadhyay family who left the Middle East after the first Gulf War and decided to settle in Montreal with their three children, one of them the precocious Baijayanta, who seemed to have fallen in love with Montreal at first sight!

The language of the host country can be either a barrier to a newcomer – or a liberator – depending on how one looks at it. Many new immigrants go through a very personal journey of reconciliation and acceptance vis-a-vis the language of their adopted countries, and have had positive as well as negative experiences with their engagement with English and/or French. Interestingly, for Mukhopadhyay, diving into the linguistic landscape of Montreal wasn’t too hard considering that he was already multilingual by then and firmly invested in his own linguistic identity as a Bengali.

His parents had taught him Bangla and the worldview that comes with it. His mother, an Indian classical vocalist, taught him music, and this, too, had a marked effect on his understanding of his heritage language and culture. His early schooling in a British school in the Middle East helped him a great deal in giving him a firm footing in English, French and their cultural underpinnings.

So when his family landed in Montreal and he joined school there – English CEGEP (pre-university college in Québec) –  he was already familiar with most of the cultural cues and understood their world view. He wholeheartedly plunged into the world of French and revelled in it. It was not a foreign language that felt like an imposition but rather one of the languages he felt at home in. The extent to which language is a vehicle for our thought processes is evident from how he feels about his learning of French. According to him, “French has opened up my life to knowledge, to people, and to experiences that I would not have dreamed of as a child, and I am proud to be able to straddle the worldviews presented by the three formative languages of my life: Bangla, English, and French. Even if it is another colonial language, French also has a history of struggle against British imperialism in North America which ties many threads of my life together as well.”

Did he have any identity problems in this adopted country? Did people find it difficult to pronounce his name, for instance? They did, but he eventually managed to teach people across northern Ontario to pronounce “Mukhopadhyay” properly! It was a fairly easy transition into life as a teenager in Montreal. He felt accepted in the multicultural milieu of the city, and as a naturally outgoing person, he indulged in his hobbies: biking, running , reading, writing and swing dancing.

From learning languages to learning medicine was all part of how deeply he fell in love with Montreal, its culture and its people. Even though his family has moved away – his parents returned to the Middle East and his sister moved to the US  – Mukhopadhyay has always considered Montreal to be his home. In the last 25 years, he has been away a lot, but always returns to Montreal as nowhere else feels quite like home.

Coming to realize that interacting with people and being mindful of their problems and needs was what moved him the most, it was a career in medicine that became his calling. However, he didn’t get into it until later in life, after having worked in various fields like direct service delivery, advocacy, and research.

“I realized I was happiest working directly with people one-on-one, and given that I had a science background, it ended up making the most sense to pursue this line of work. Although of course, I do not think medicine is a scientific discipline, but a social one. You have to understand how people work – and I don’t mean their bodies!”

His reading choice also reflects his passion for justice and equity. Some of his recent reads have included As If I Am Not There by Slavenka Drakulic, a novel about wartime rape in the Balkans; Le Mammouth by Pierre Samson, which is a highly topical novel from 2019 based on the real-life events of a police murder of an immigrant in 1930s’ Montreal; and The Disappearing Boy by Neil Bartlett.

He is himself the author of A Labour of Liberation, a series of reflections on the way healing work and care work can be more justly and equitably organized.

What did his parents think of his choice to work in a village in Northern Québec? Didn’t they dream of a Toronto/Vancouver job for their son, with all the trappings of an urban lifestyle? Interestingly, Mukhopadhyay, who is single, gay, and lives in a modest apartment, says his parents gave up long ago about him being conventional in his choices, both personal and professional. He chose to work for Médecins Sans Frontières and was once posted in rural Guinea, supporting the team there to improve care and bring down the levels of infant/child mortality which tended to be very high in that region. His work there still ranks among his proudest as the team made a real impact on families who are largely ignored by the rest of the world.

So his parents have got used to him going off to work in places they didn’t know existed. What is important is that they empathize with his need to work for the disadvantaged wherever they might be and to provide them with the medical care that they may not receive otherwise.

Coming from a background of advocacy and being a doctor here, Mukhopadhyay is critical of Canada’s universal healthcare system, deeming it a myth. It’s not exactly ‘universal’, he feels, because governments can choose who and what they want to cover. Depending on the province, some medical needs like eyecare, physiotherapy or outpatient medications may not be covered. Also, some people with uncertain migration status, international students moving between provinces, or Canadians returning from abroad for instance, might not be able to avail of health benefits, thus making the Canadian healthcare system less than “universal”.

“What needs to happen is that people need to be able access whichever service they need, no matter who they are,” he says.

This need has become very crucial during the current pandemic as people without permanent residence status or citizenship struggle to access basic healthcare.

He continues to find his work in his small isolated community very inspiring. Being allowed into people’s lives, to listen to their stories, to be able to come up with solutions for every conceivable medical problem keeps his mind fresh and keeps him going, he says.

He candidly admits to not having any tips for newcomers because everyone comes from a different place, and everyone has a different definition of success. “My perspective may not apply to others,” he says. “I would say though, again, that people newly arrived in Canada should make an effort to reach out beyond their own community, to understand the struggles and the histories of the many, many peoples who live in this country, in order to better understand how our own well-being is connected to that of our neighbours’.”

He works out of a mobile van on the street sometimes and is indebted to the people who trust him with their stories whereby he learns new things on a daily basis. This, he feels is his biggest reward as a physician.

• Grant’s is proud to present this series about people who are making a difference in the community. Represented by PMA Canada (www.pmacanada.com).