An Intimate History of Bengal
BOOK XIII
CALCUTTA, CULTURE CLAIRVOYANCE: TAGORE
AND GLOBALIZATION OF BENGAL
The Pre-Conception :
Tagore as an Artist and as an Institution
This BOOK owes its
existence, in a mixed way to the efforts of my Housing Co-operative in
organizing a cultural programme to mark the birthday
of Rabindranath Thakur,
wrongly but conveniently called Tagore. We will use
this misnomer to call him all along, which has dual advantage; first of all it modulates the concept of Bengali-association
with him and secondly, it de-modulates
the eulogizing epithets bestowed on him quite liberally for a surprisingly long
period of time. Any discussion centered on Tagore, in
order to remain consistency has to be selective and focused due to the very
width of the personality and gravitation of it. Majority of commentators
fall into the subtle trap of losing the distinction between Tagore,
the person and Tagore, the institution. Hence, many
commentators, otherwise quite sincere, learned and having the virtue of
objectivity criticize the person Tagore for the inconsistencies
of the institution Tagore. On the other hand, institutional evaluation or the use of the institution
called Tagore projects
a personality-cult which later generation of rebel poets deplored as worship (Rabindra-Puja). Readers
may like to read the small volume authored by Buddhadev
Basu where he discusses those issues from an
objective standpoint without sacrificing the historical connection he shares
with the subject. What makes his work interesting is the fact that Buddhadev as a poet and a critique was a very sensitive man
not to have ignored the forces that were shaping poetry in other parts of the
world. To him and perhaps to him alone goes the credit of this signal service
to Bengali literature and it is no wonder why he could write an essay like Ek Grishe Dui Kabi ( Two poets in the same summer) where he discusses
the works of two ‘poets‘ of the same country but of different type : Dostoevsky
and Chekhov. In this petite volume on Tagore, there
appears more substance and signposts for posterity than are to be found in the
formidable array of works done on the subject, by individual or by the
Institution Tagore founded in Bolpur.
On 9th May this year, I have been passing my
days of royal luxury in a flat at Purbachal Housing
Complex, Saltlake, Calcutta. With family in
vacation, my father in his visit to North Calcutta and I have no office to go, I
decided to spend my time in home, wasting time in anticipation as Bertrand
Russell has provided the piece of wisdom – Wasted
time is not Waste of Time. As I was wasting my time, Tagore
reminded me that it is his birthday as songs after song wafted in the air, as
if soaking the strength of the May sun, becoming stronger each minute. The
songs were coming from a stage which was some two hundred yards away from my
second floor window. Tagore, I remembered had passed
quite a considerable part of his youth in doing things which in typical Bengali
society would be considered either worthless or waste of time. My self-love urged
me to discover the parallel between Tagore‘s
free-wheeling life on the boat of the river Padda and mine own spent in speculation in this East Calcutta suburb. By
coincidence, after two days, Bengal was going to
polls, one of the historic ones not in terms of the results but in terms of the
cause behind the result that had been speculated upon. In the evening, one of
the international TV channels informed me that 9th May is also
celebrated in Europe as Europe day, the day in 1992
when European Union formally took birth. Europe – the concept and
the land which has been a pervasive theme in the life and works of Tagore, sharing quite a complex relationship.
Since 1960s, the frontline
literary artists of Bengal started to ponder over the
relevance of Tagore in future. For some, this thought
was nothing short of a blasphemy and the
opposition came most from the Institutional Tagore-scholars.
Buddhadev, while writing about the imitations and
imitators of Tagore gave a honourable
coup-de-grace - ‘Having sacrificed
themselves in the flaming sun (Rabi-tap), they have provided next generation
with a necessary and useful warning‘. These imitations were nothing unique
for Tagore or for Bengal. As soon as flame of creativity shines stronger, lesser
lights tend to borrow. However, in case of Tagore it
was the flame of a true genius, a genius which finally consumed the bearer of
the gift and also the lesser gifted ones who came in close quarters, personally
or institutionally. At certain point in the literary history of Bengal, Tagore‘s work approached the applicability of that of Homer as regarded by the classical Greeks
that all wisdom can be found in Homer. As logical mind as that of Greeks could
have thought that Homer has something for everything. Homeric odes were sung
and consumed not as an artistic product alone but as narrating process of knowledge,
wisdom and many other desirable things which we don’t demand from literature
anymore now. However, Homer became part and parcel of the Greek world and
wherever Greeks went they carried their Homer. At the matured period of
classical Greece in 4th
century BCE, Homer was synonymous with the idea that was called Greece. The Bengali
colonists did the same as late as 1980s with sincerity and conviction. Later,
it became a form of habit, having little to do with any inner conviction or
internalization or even identification.
Bearing in mind the fundamental differences that remain
between classical Greeks and Bengali mind and situation, the colonization process has some
interesting parallel. From 1880 to 1930s – these fifty years witnessed some of
the grand crystallization of historical deposits in the history of Bengal. In this half a
century, her past Buddhist tradition, her reinterpretation of Bhakti spearheaded by Sree
Chaitanya and her interaction with Europe through British
ambassadorship provided a throbbing scene which was pregnant to give birth to
highly unique personalities. Literature, one of the strongest and most
sensitive areas of Bengal‘s psyche found in Tagore a
culmination of all these forces. In this way, Tagore
the artist functioned like fractal image of tradition where local historical
tradition of last thousand years found a complex and convoluted space. His
syncretism could seamlessly travel from the domains of Chandalika (Buddhist) to Bhanusingha (Vaishnav Lyrical poetry) and Bramho-sangeet (the monotheism).
It is interesting to note that he had reconciled and could persuade us through the
artistic instrument of willing-suspension-of-disbelief of the fundamentally
different philosophical ramifications underlying these traditions. This power
of persuasion has been the most profound aspect of the Tagore
the person or Tagore as an artist. If he were born in
other cultural space-time, he would have done the same synthetic persuasion. His
songs, a part of his short stories and a selected part of his poetry symbolize
this power of persuasion at the deepest level. Aided by a remarkable gift on
language, he became the architect-builder
and craftsman of Bengali language. It is a logical confirmation that today,
after a century after he wrote those works, his works of persuasion at the
deepest level never ceases to fascinate us.
However, as soon as we study the institution Tagore where he was a political activist, a strategist in
terms of practical methods of swaraj, a patriot or nationalist, builder of institution and
as soon as he took his greatest gift as an aid of persuasion in these areas, we
could always find almost exactly opposite results. This remains at the root of
his failure as a novelist, as an artist who failed to mirror the agony of his
time and for some Western critics, - a
boudoir poet.
During my stay in London as a student last
year, I could read a columnist in The
Guardian, while writing about Nobel winners bracketed Tagore
with Pearl Buck under the heading – who
are not read anymore and are not part of any living tradition. Off came a reprimand from the Bishop of
Oxford who justly rebuked the author for his euro-centricism
and extolled the virtues of lush mysticism of Tagore‘s
poetry. This action-reaction sequence has an interesting lesson: his syncretism
as an artist or an institution has a more lasting appeal than one of the
artistic hallmarks of portraying the agony
of the age. In this way, the characters of his novels have little life,
they raise no singularities on existential issues, they speak no truth which
only a novel can utter
and they smell too much of design and craftsmanship and have no element of
fantastic in them. On the other hand, in his short stories, he was guided by
his own spirit and his conscious and unconscious efforts gave birth to certain
characters and sequences that are unique in Bengali literature. They represent
what Tagore the artist always tried and succeeded and
Tagore the institution has failed most often: to re-present the eternal human dilemma.
Buddhadev has drawn our attention
to the historical setting of Tagore‘s mind while being
active as an artist. He argues that in his artistic geography, he was citizen
of another historical time. This
capacity remains his greatest strength and greatest weakness, depending on the
form of his art and what his readers or critics are looking for. The fault was
not Tagore‘s, nor Tagore
was ignorant of the complaints of his readers. Being acutely self-aware, he was
sensitive to his relevance also for the next generations to come. But when the
setting is right, when the historical age or the theme is beyond and pervading
all or any historical time, Tagore becomes the chosen
instrument of melody and yearning and we could detect a melting of the creator
with the creation. To the language, to the landscape and to the mind of Bengal, he gave the idea
and hope that the universe reflects here too, in spite of our repeated folly of
spinning a web of homilies and familiarity. If the entire landmass of Bengal in some geological
aeon goes under the sea or some catastrophe destroys
the land and the people altogether, if entire Bengali language is forgotten,
still it is possible to convey the essence of the land and its people from his
work. His life as a creative artist was an intense laser beam which opened a
new channel between the retina of the eye and the mind‘s eye and once that‘s
opened, the language and the meaning never remained the same. Also, this new
faculty, actually a miracle, in course of time became something so natural that
it has been taken for granted. We will focus our discussion on the relationship
between the Bengal landscape and Tagore as a creative artist. He has been an intimate artist
of Bengal and instead of going into the bemoaning discussion as
why or why not young people read him today, we would discuss some of the current
trends having influence on this landscape, to which the greatest poet of the
post-Tagore generation would like to have eternal
return.
Globalization and Landscape of
Bengal:
The core competence of Bengal, in spite of all
complex rhetoric and marketing communications remains her land, her geography
and her fields. Modern technology, in spite of its formidable power cannot add
another Bengal in the globe although it can destroy it in a violent
frenzy or through slow degeneration. Since the age of empires in India,
fertility of Bengal‘s land has been the major agenda in the policy of conquest,
colonization, settlement or exit.
This Bengal includes East and West Bengal alike. Forever
washed in the water of the sky and water of the innumerable of large and small
rivers, biological sustenance was never a problem in the land. If it was, it
was always the greed or the inefficiency of the people who controlled the
generation or distribution of the produce. It is a miracle that for last two
hundred years or so, this landscape could maintain a low-cost, abundant and
healthy supply of elements required for biological sustenance. There is a major
debate raging now in the land as to whether using the farmland for industrial
expansion will bring public good or not. This debate is important and more
important is to define the co-ordinate of the participant in order to escape
the follies of sentimentalism and conditioned response so common in the land
today. Another interesting experiment is to imagine Tagore
as a participant in this debate, separately as an artist and an individual and
then trace his reaction. This exercise would also bring an important aspect on
the larger theme – Tagore in the Globalized Bengal. Before undertaking that
exercise, there remains a little task of analyzing various choices of positions
a commentator of Bengal can take up, including me.
Nirad C Chaudhri had informed us, while rating five of the greatest
Bengalis, certain yardsticks and strangely, he argues that all of them share a
trait common – they are all un-Bengali.
We may also argue that the first criterion of attaining greatness for a Bengali
is to shed his Bengali conditioning. This is applicable in a general way, said
long ago by the Master of Galilee – A
prophet is seldom respected in his homeland. After a continuous struggle with the position
of myself as a student of the cultural history of Bengal, I had undergone a
process of evolution which has left me with few options lately. I would briefly
narrate this process of evolution. My first position was that of intense
identification, i.e. an insider. In this position, the greatest danger is that
of being sucked into the staid pool of chandimantap culture of Bengal which tends to make one
critical about everything else except that of one‘s own belief systems and
cultural make-up. The next was that of an observer without qualification and
there comes a bigger challenge – experience teaches me that in this land, an
observer needs to be always aware of the fact that he is dealing in much deeper
waters. He always stands a chance to deceive himself simply because under the
simplicity of these people lies a complex net of historical forces and being
acutely unaware of history, they deny it more, only to confirm its presence.
The next position was that of intellectual modeler and it was discarded as I
soon found that these people, highly sensual and sentimental in nature are
governed less by intellect than by feeling. In this process, I tried to look
into the land with the eyes and mind-set of an observer who might have come
here on an assignment and has no contract or obligation whatsoever to respect
any of the belief systems of the land. One implicit element in this kind of
position has a necessary power equation and I have no qualms to declare that
mine is essentially an aristocratic
position where I am acutely aware of the divisive line between my acquired world-view and the view that
could have come from a natural
association. Since I am not bound by the obligations of a judge, a curator or a
researcher with grant or a media professional, I may always retain the autonomy
of my position. I have few ears to please than my own fancy. The greatest
admiration that people have here if an individual can maintain his own fancy and these is the people who are also the
target for criticism for the chandipantap culturists. This group of people can be found
everywhere here – in the Offices, in the shops, in schools and colleges, in LIG, MIG, HIG
(Low, Medium, High Income group) colonies. They believe that if things are fine
in their own little world, then the world must be running alright. It never
crosses their mind that their little world (sukhi grihakon)
might have been intimately connected with the larger world. This group also
radiates a most despicable form of irritation and they carry it with them. This
group constitutes the largest proportion of the population and since this
irritation is quite impotent, no revolution so much worshipped by the Bengali
elite of earlier generation would ever take place here. I have heard Asoke Mitra‘s lament
but cannot sympathize as readily with him on his lament on the general loss of
quality in contemporary Bengali poetry.
Tagore - the aristocrat
by birth and aristocrat by temperament had to deal with this mass of people all
through his life and interaction in Bengal. His aristocracy
has the characteristics of ownership and that is the reason why he could call
any human product as his own irrespective of its origin in time and geography. Amarty Sen, in his essay on
Gandhi and Tagore in The Argumentative Indian has brought this feature of Tagore‘s attitude that permeate his views on nationalism,
civilization conflict and cultural exchanges.
Tagore himself
was well read in Kalidas and he was fond of a
Sanskrit word and concept -
Jananatar-sauhridani – it is impossible to convey the soft and subtle
sweetness of Sanskrit but it roughly means friendship
between one person and another. He would not have been surprised while
finding the stark contrast between the pogrom of Gujrat
and the liberal spirit of Bengal. He would have approved Nirad‘s displeasure of the naming of Bangladesh for Bengal
or Bangla-desh
had an integral cultural and existential unit in his mind. When the poet
bestows the artistic gift to Nawalkishore – Nawalkishore tomai dilam bhuvan-dangar math –
this is no Bengal or India, he is offering
the whole world – not the globe and globalization of any variant but what
signifies in the Sanskrit verse – Vasudwiva Kutumbakam, Swdesha Bhuvana-Trayam. It is no wonder that Gandhi and Tagore would have to have a radical disagreement over the
contribution of Western Civilization in view of the contemporary situation of India under the colonial
rule or mis-rule of the English – one of the
pre-eminent representatives of the European Civilization. For Gandhi as a
mass-leader and that too of the mass of India, it was
politically and temperamentally impossible to be aware of the distinction
between the European Civilization and the English administrators of India, petty or big. Tagore always did. He gave a very practical advice to his
countrymen that there is a distinction and that distinction is fundamental,
that lies between the English spirit and the behaviour
and policy of English colonists in India. Applying this concept with regards to India,
he grasped the highly significant aspect of contemporary Indian attitude to
India‘s ancient past. In one of his essays, he mocks the attitude of some of
the elites proclaiming the so-called Aryan heritage mixed-up with a hotchpotch
of spirituality, science, and technology and we-have-done-it-all-prehistorically. It was the reaction to this
attitude that James Mill had to observe that any Hindu pundit would come in
contact with modern scientific and technological ideas and immediately find
those in their own books.
I have heard this hotchpotch and this variation of themes so many times from
many educated and respectable people that I wonder how heroic was for him to
escape those follies. For him, India‘s ancient tradition was as much as
connected with him as that of other civilizations and other cultures. He was
also well-aware that to consider us as the Aryans is equivalent to comparing
the mammoth with the elephant. It is not false and being half-truth and shaded
truth is more dangerous if taken without proper critical and common sense
attitude. Hence, his globalization was of a variety which is equally mysterious
to the champion of Hindu pasts of the past days as well as those of the
present. His loneliness is his own making and that provides the clue why he is
being considered not a living tradition by certain commentators. These
commentators are not insincere nor all of them have very shallow knowledge
about him and his works, but it is the difference of the quality of thought and
perception that lies at the root of underlining the observation.
It is now natural
and interesting to review two questions which are not important for Tagore anymore but for us.
Firstly: how the globalized
and globalizing Bengalis would continue
to find Tagore in their intellectual and cultural
life? Secondly: how significant and relevant the ideas of Tagore
will remain in this globalized environment? In the next two sections these two questions
will be tackled, not from a scholarly standpoint but from circumspection and
observation, much of it personal and acquired while working within the
contemporary environment of Bengal.
The
agents of Globalization in Contemporary Bengal
In contemporary Bengal, the pre-eminent
agents of globalization are not hard to identify: Government of India,
Government of West Bengal, Multi-national corporations, Indian corporations.
The difference between multi-national corporations and Indian corporations are
now not as distinct as it was a decade or so back as many Indian corporations
are operating in different countries, although the penetration and dimensions
are much smaller while compared to their older and bigger counterparts. We may
now analyze as to the cultural make up of the people inside these agents and from
that we may draw the first draft of our answer to the first question.
The people who are in the helm of affairs in the Government
of India as public representatives or occupying high executive offices passed
three fourths of their lives where cultural interaction with the outside world,
notably West was limited, both in terms of choice and access, costly and within the realm of quite
microscopic minority. So, inside the Government also, like everything in India, there was and
remains a caste-system. I don’t use this term in a derogatory connotation but
use it like class in case of English politics. In their youth, they have shared
the great enthusiasm for the overwhelming but benevolent hand of state in every
aspect in the national life and were quite satisfied with low quality service
and products as a consumer. Culturally, they held the public opinion of being
part of a very superior culture but in private they had a gnawing feeling of
being quite the opposite. For the superior culture was quite far away in
history and intangible in essence whereas the military and technological
superiority of the West was quite clear in the broad daylight of here and now.
This dichotomy of mind never allowed these people any harmony in their public
and private lives. This disharmony remained a permanent feature of Indian
Government officials holding high public offices and displayed its presence in
their irrational and uncritical toadiness of the West
and equally irrational denouncement of it. Hence a highly sentimental, emotion
driven and wavering foreign policy where the self-interest was very much there
but it was perceived in a limited cultural sense. Being cut-off from the Indian
reality, they never estimated the core strengths of the country and face-value
impressions deceived those people, in general quite gullible in nature. By the
time, they reached their late forties, it was clear that the temptress of their
youth – self-sufficient industrialization has deceived them, not wholly or fully but in a substantially
good measure. The core result was a loss of faith but since they were in
the wrong side of the age, they could only wait with a stolidity which is
common in Indian polity. The patience was rewarded by 1990s when USSR disappeared as
un-naturally as it came into being and a new order was going to be established.
The worshippers of the closed void suddenly became worshippers of the free
enterprise and the West was quite obliging, as there was a high self-interest
involved. However, the old ghosts die hard and in spite of West‘s repeated
reprimands on the count of transparency in Government, there remained many
cultural obstacles. The matter-of-fact display of these forces at work is the
much debated reform process started from the same time. The inflow of foreign
capital into India made these people
gasp in wonder and they immediately rationalized that the core component
missing in their previous adventure has finally come and we have arrived. It
was beyond the understanding of these people that everything of the world comes
with a price, consciously or unconsciously set up by the giver and same way
accepted by the taker. The conscious part was the tangible self interest and
the unconscious part was mostly cultural. The cultural effect was
ground-breaking changes in Indian polity since 1992 and coming of BJP in power and thus catapulting Prime Ministers of
non-Gandhi-Nehru blood in their veins. There was the change of attitude towards
the Non-Resident-Indians – from apathy to avid interest which unfortunately is conditioned
and relates to naked self-interest. This association also highlights and
confirms the dichotomy that is fundamental to the Indian mind.
Taking up the second but nonetheless important agent of
globalization in Bengal – the State Government, our
analysis has been made easier by the long continuity of the Left Government of
the state. In the federal structure of Indian confederation, the relationship
between centre and state has been always under tension. This is natural and is
a healthy sign of a federal structure. The cultural make up of the leaders in
the state government also is fundamentally same as that of the leaders and
officials in the Centre. There is a competition to attract the same funds,
domestic, national and international by the states. This exercise in itself is
quite a normal affair but in West Bengal, the pendulum is
swinging from one extreme to another. Hence I find that the state may strike a
bargain where the loss will be conceded as atonement for the purported follies
of previous time for which there was no medicine. The result is that
Government, stretched inside by the tension from the caste-system as described
earlier and the direction of the process will invariably depend on the relative
strength of the groups involved. In this case, there is another unique factor.
I would call this as the Crisis of a Cadre-State. A cadre-state shields its
cadres (which in its most matured stage finds cadre and citizens substitutable)
from internal and external exigencies by appropriating public money and public
resources. However, by 1990s, the Central Leadership was forced to take certain
strong financial measures which pointed to the fact of decreasing supply of
public money. The second was more practical and human tendency to exploit opportunities
while the neigbours are making the best of the day.
The leaders of the cadre state soon realized the ancient wisdom that a pack of
country dogs remain docile as long as they are well fed and the moment the food
stops, they don’t stop at biting the hand but goes after the throat. The
initiatives of the state government, for certain years, in spite of great
verbosity and words are actually management of crisis. It is not positive
action to development but a re-action to the grim situation that would be if
things are left to its own. I would invite the givers of capital and know-how
to be aware of the undercurrents that lie beneath these words and verbosity, a
warning given eight centuries back by Al-Beruni – repeated
by Nirad in sixties when West was highly committed
financially, technologically and emotionally in the industrialization of India - beware of the verba magistri in India.
Now, I take up the third and the most active agents in
terms of doing this and that, operating this thing and that thing, devising
this idea and that – the multinational corporations. Let us forget felicity
awhile and admit that one of the reasons of interest in Bengal of multinational
corporations are two important factors : relatively cheaper land, water, power,
human resource, labour and perhaps lesser demand from
the leaders and officials for their services or duties whatever your
temperament allows you to say. Secondly it is really a one-stop-shopping which
consumers of any kind find so alluring and atrractive.
There is virtually no cost - money, resource and time in talking with the
opposition and if it is marginally there, this can be taken care of, through
the opposition‘s opposition itself. The convergence of needs of both parties in
the bargain is rare, an extremely rare factor in the history of capitalism on a
global scale. This is sure to succeed (don’t we see this in China?) and hence the
Rise of Bengal in the Indian and even International scheme is sure to succeed.
But I am afraid; I find the situation demanding more critical review rather
than celebration or even happiness. My worry is that in this scheme of things,
the greatest causality will be the landscape of Bengal because all the
three agents mentioned so far, in actuality has nothing to do with it. The
Central Ministers live in Delhi and in this age of
globalized movement, they might go anywhere, even in
moon perhaps. The multi-national corporation‘s true responsibility lies with
the shareholders who are also de-localized. The ruling elite of state government
where there are of course representations from the rural and most vulnerable
areas but their very coming to this much in the corridor of power is not to
identify with those whose representatives they are but to distance from them.
Hence, as I write this, the Cheel of Rajarhat and the Mynah
of Singoor face a future which is worse than
death or extinction. In Sunderban, there is someone
called Ban-bibi who will protect the tigers, there
was a tar-buro
who protects wild buffaloes as Bibhutibhushan has informed us but for the landscape of Bengal, there is no
divine or corporeal being at sight. This loss, if it really happens and I see
no way out from this; will be the most catastrophic of all losses of this land.
I need not say the symptoms of this in the land that engages a large part of
the law-enforcing agencies in containing militant groups who are on the rise.
Now, I come to the fourth but most potential agent of
globalization of Bengal – the domestic corporations who are showing signs of
becoming global, meaning investing in foreign companies or actually buying
them, de-centralizing manufacturing, getting more and more foreign and domestic
capital to fund those ventures, searching for attractive investment
destinations with a liberal spirit that would have been more welcome at home
and finally, shall I say it – the ravenous greed, in front of which rapacity of
all previous precedents will pale. I will try to put some evidence on what I
say on this greed which can be called as Hindu greed, in echoing the much
laughed at Hindu rate of growth during the previous idea-regime. The world is
not aware of it simply because for the entire history of India, Indians never
ventured outside as businessman as much they are doing now. There is also a
conditioning in the West in terms of undermining Indian potential and hence
they are not aware of the risks involved. It can also be a loss of vigour of
the West and hence we could find a kind of peevish hope of good manners in
future when Indian companies are actually buying them out. The pre-eminent and
majority of these companies are actually run like a family enterprise barring a
few exceptions and the caste which lead them are traditional bania class.
Fifty years back, Nirad was defining this class and
their talent and expertise in money-making which runs like this: This class does not consider money making as
a profession but a vocation but for them, money is not a means but an absolute
end and absolute good. This single-mindedness practiced over generations
and aided by the selective in-breeding has given this class a formidable
genetic advantage which other classes would never acquire. This single
mindedness has also precipitated a moral standing which is no less fanatic than
any religious zealot. In my lifetime itself, I may see this clash between the bania single-mindedness and the Western values as more and
more bania-led companies make acquisitions abroad.
Western democracies face a graver threat on this count because this threat is
subterranean, insidious and unexamined. I hear very few thinkers from the West
actually aware of this impending crisis and thus indicating to the general loss
of sense of history in the young generations of West.
The second threat from this bania-class
is more tangible and easy to see. In Western Democracies, it is quite common to
see industry leaders joining government in various high public offices or the
other way round where high officials in public offices, after retirement or by
their own choice join industry houses. In India, the bania-class never practiced that even though
this process has high incentive in terms of shaping policies. I cannot, after
my reading of the Indian history can attribute this to the class‘s respect for
separation of power and avoidance of conflict of interest between private gain
and public good. Keeping in my mind the single-mindedness of this class‘s and
their highly shrewd, sophisticated, evolved and matured economic thinking, it
is only due to a cost-benefit analysis. The cost of shaping policies through direct involvement is much higher than
that of influencing policies. The
cost of influencing polices was not only less but there were highly obliging
persons. The bania morality approves this quite
sincerely and in good humour because of another powerful
device inside the bania moral system: religion. A true and honest bania
in Indian sense, as long as he is in his swadharma (i.e. of multiplying
money) need not fear any crisis, either in material plane or in the
non-material plane, under one condition. Hindu religion or to be precise, its
presently practiced form in India with its moral
code bases a strong emphasis on the
idea of rebirth. Western democracies have no idea that these classes who are
making inroads to their countries as man of business are trained in a system
which does not busy itself with this quarter or that business cycle but of some
infinite cycles of births and deaths. According to this system, all the moral
scruples which man is heir to can be taken care of if he does certain activities
completely unrelated to the causes of the moral scruple. This dis-association of cause and effect in the domain of
morality directly follows from the infinite cycle of births and deaths. Hindu
morality, as understood by these banias provide them with a psychological and moral tool about
which West has absolutely no idea and they are going to understand it while
they face and suffer from it. I think, it’s appropriate to illustrate what is
this concept and system by way of an example.
I hear in the newspaper that an Indian company has sold blood testing
kits to the Government and these kits are found to be duds and the result was
that many innocent people who were given blood from the blood banks got infected
with diseases like HIV, many are children. Also note the fact that these
procurements were done by Government officials and after a little research I
found that there was none in the Government side who were related to anyone
with the supplier. A fair system in theory. Now, let us imagine, for a moment,
how this tainted supplier (We presume that he is guilty and he was aware of his
guilt even before the first kit was supplied to the blood bank. In legal terms,
this is a pre-meditated, cold-blooded conspiracy of mass-murder of innocent
people without any agenda - religious, political, other than making money with
a single-minded fanaticism) thinks inside himself and defends his stand, within
the larger framework of mind which is not only shaped by law but by those
aspects of man which lie outside the law. It is not only irresponsible and
fanatic greed, although a fair part of it. This same supplier, in his moral
universe filled with infinite cycles of birth and deaths, argues that from his
gain, he will definitely donate a part to some ashrams, dharam-shala, temple-building and such philanthropy
closely connected with religious connotations. The people in the Government who
were equally responsible for this act of mass-murder believe in the same logic
and that is the reason why India‘s rise as an economic power also witnesses
parallel development of new religious systems, institutions and framework and
this is more among those classes who are making more money and can afford a
better lifestyle. I have only one word to the West, quoting their greatest philosopher
of twenty centuries back, Plato on the nature of Gods: Gods cannot be venal. The bania class‘s most practical statement on religion is
nothing but the simple observation that in this infinite cycle of coming and
going, everything including gods are not only venal but can be manipulated.
Let us now consider two cases where Gods intervene among
the affairs of men – one in Homer and another in Mukundaram, a Bengali poet of the
fifteenth century. In Iliad, gods
regularly intervene but never have we seen that they bestow their grace on a
weakling and make him great in a capricious act. Hector, Achilles were great
men first and then the chosen one. In Ramayana and Mahabharata also, the same
trend is clearly seen. Arjuna was already the
greatest warrior and then a disciple of Lord Krishna. But in the work of the
Bengali poet we have mentioned, a hunter, hungry and weak, suddenly goes into a
dream and then suddenly some goddess helps him and he defeats an entire
army! There is absolutely no logic, no reason,
no qualification but only this that his wife was worshipping the goddess. This
capricious act, this wanton transgression of any pattern was noted by Tagore in one his essays in the selection quoted earlier.
His outrage in this kind of caprice was vocal and he could draw the general
rule behind such behaviour. It was in essence a kind
of resort of the weak – a kind of faith which in surface is beautiful and
attractive but fundamentally damaging and degrades the essence of Man. In contrast, in
the same volume, he could detect, of a far earlier age, the great skepticism – whom to offer our offerings?
From the great debate and fighting between gods to get the obeisance of Man,
there also arose, in course of time, an idea - austere, impersonal and of a Law
abiding Universe: His rules are swast (eternal) and samabhya (regularly consistent).
It is a common observation but quite commonly forgotten. The Hindus of India or
rather who claim to have been in the fold of a historical process called
Hinduism, needs to be very clear in understanding this fact that there is a
difference, and a qualitative difference of the quality of the civilization of
the ancient India and that of the present. It will be as foolish and laughable
if a homely lizard claims to be the main hero of Jurassic Park arguing of the evolutionary process and correctly so
- to be the living descendants of the T-Rex. In the next section, we take up an
example as how an idea/activity that came from outside, got accepted and then
while Indians started dominating the activity on a global scale, what happens.
The greatest example is the game of cricket whose position in Indian psyche is
as unnatural and as natural as that of English language.
The Indianization of Global
Cricket
I would now return
back to provide an idea on the ravenous greed of the rising bania-class of India, most of them
Hindu. Take the example of the great game of cricket. Except the half-educated,
few will contend that cricket has high aesthetic appeal as a game and a part of
English life. In the height of their power, Englishmen delighted in their
coinages of ‘The Bradman
Class‘– a test to rate a scientific or mathematical theory as Thomas Hardy,
the Cambridge mathematician did.
It was the prose of Neville Cardass equally matching
the grace of Frank Wooly‘s willow which he was
describing. Within last twenty years of
so, Cricket has become the national game of India with high
commitment from the entire public and private machinery of India, including of
course the Indian public. I have observed, with mortification and despair how
the greed slowly made a ferment of one of the greatest of English inventions
into something so pathetic and present English Civilization has a fair share of
responsibility in this. Just to make a long story short, here are the symptoms
of what has Indianization of Cricket has made to
pass:
·
Political interference of most sordid and shameless
kind where a deposed ex-captain moves from the door of one politician to
another and this is considered quite normal and ‘part of the job.‘
·
Making the commentary of the game for viewers a kind
of Indian nautanki
where intelligent marketers ( I was always fascinated by observing that fact
that these people understand Indian history much better than then historians)
provided the viewers a typical Indian concoction of lasciviousness, incentive
to earn money and a thoughtless kind of entertainment, if this can be called as
entertainment.
·
Exit of one of the most successful captains of Indian
cricket and perhaps the last artist wielding a willow-blade through
match-fixing, which was discovered not by accident but due to the unregulated export
of Indian art of moneymaking into sophisticated international markets
specializing in the same trade. In the home front, more drama - in mixing
religious discrimination etc with an issue which is not at all religious in any
way.
·
Parents of different class and clan suddenly waking up
to put their sons into Cricket academies, the core reason behind this is not to
make a good player but...
·
The Great Game has become a business dominated by the bania-class and value and beauty, even gods as I have
argued do not matter much into these scheme of things. My heart goes out to the
young men of the country, who come to the game with a genuine spirit of youth
and also with a tremendous effort they come to certain level. But I am also
aware of the gladiatorial arena
where, to the manipulators of the game, the green reminds them of green
banknotes, that soft, sweet contact of the bat and ball another clink to the
moneybag and decisions – already designed through a labyrinth of contracts,
bribes, obligations and so on...
I have spent many a
sleepless nights during my boyhood watching those matches in Australia when Call Centres did not educate us about time-zones so vividly. I
have seen those misty evenings in muffusil towns when
the field gets darkened and invited to come tomorrow with our bat, ball and
bamboo stick wickets. I have been part of that Great Game and when I see the
degradation of cricket in India now, I like to
cry, a tortured cry - ‘Schone Welt, Dost du bi?
– Beautiful world, where are you?
Bengal
and Tagore : Opera Globalicorum
This year witnessed
the forced, dramatic ousting of one of the most successful captains of Indian
cricket of all time and he happened to be from Bengal. I am not
qualified to comment as regards to the merit or demerit of Mr. Ganguly being ejected from the team, but I am a lifelong
student of the process that makes those decisions in India. In passing, I
have not found any critical murmur in media while it was told that Sachin Tendulkar visits certain
temple (while he was suffering from injury and a lean patch) in South India and
the priests advise him that behind this lie the unrest of some of his
predecessors killing a snake ! Those who doubt my argument that Indian morality
is a thing of its own kind and West will soon suffer from it may note how cause
and effect, in Indian scheme of things can be seamlessly and irrationally
connected. It is this attitude which in this particular case is innocent and
little strange, nothing more than that. But once that attitude permeates in
other areas, in more serious business, the implications are serious. In Calcutta, I find media
reporting of pujas
being performed by fans of Mr. Ganguly for recovery
of his form and passing away of bad times. Earlier this chandimantap culture of Bengal used to surprise
and irritate me. Three years living in Calcutta cured that. I also
reminded myself continuously of the advice Tagore
gave to Syed Mujtaba Ali,
another Sylheti-Bengali like me: Beware of the provincial note and note of the centre.
Tagore, in his whole life
encountered this spectacle as a person and as an artist. In Bengal, this kind of
activities and the underlying faith behind them is so commonplace that none
takes up any interest in looking at the monstrous absurdity behind that.
Globalization of Bengal, with its more unrest and
uncertainty will amplify such absurdities and unbalanced attitudes, instead of
attenuating it. A part of his work as a
lyrical artist will be accepted by this candy-floss
generation and since they will be incapable to distinguish the fine line
between lyrical tenderness and sweet nothings, this part will remain in popular
culture. In some happy moments, we would see re-interpretation of this part of
his creative oeuvre.
For his idea of India, Tagore will be a person-non-grata in the unfolding economic rise of India. Indian bania-class is entering the world scene with a deep-seated,
hidden and highly reactive anti-imperialist and ethnic identity. In surface,
their apparent global outlook has fooled many a commentator, after all one of
our most quoted similie of God is that of looking at
a chameleon. Nirad called this as Janus Multifrons or Janus
with many faces. During my stint as a freelance consultant, I have met many
people in outsourcing business which makes it a necessity for them to talk with
people of the West. In public, they maintain a very respectable and pleasing
attitude but I have often heard, in their private conversation, - saale gora log – literally meaning - Damn! These white people! For the Hindu bania,
it is impossible to distinguish between Western people and attitude with which
they come in contact with and the Western Civilization which among other things
have a direct bearing on his vocation - i.e earning
money. Tagore, whose core disagreement over Gandhi
was on this fine distinction, will not be accepted. The part of the class who
got exposed to the lifestyles of the West will criticize his respect for
Western Civilization because they are in capable a prirori to appreciate that. The class
who are home-grown will accuse him of being a toady to the West and the worst of the lot who are full of passionate
intensity will label him as effeminate and weak in terms of defending India
which means to them - Hindu, which worships Ram, which considers anybody a
traitor who does not support India in a India-Pakistan cricket match, who does
not consider a white woman a kind of gori-whore, which
considers English language a kind of necessary evil. All political leaders of
India, petty or big find their mass base or appeal in this group and hence we
could find that fatal weakness of Nehru in terms of resisting his idea of
India, the vacillation and irritation of Vajpayee, the wavering of Narshima Rao. Tagore
will be lonely man in India today. The
aristocrats will attack him for his sense of aristocracy and the
non-aristocrats will attack him simply because he is aristocrat. I use the word
aristocrat with qualification here. I don’t mean this in terms of blood or
birth (as is generally understood in India and accepted over
a surprisingly long period of time) but for that habit of mind which a person acquires through a lifetime of
struggle.
In Bengal, he will fare
worse although there is another chance of re-dividus for him in this land. After a discussion full
of gloom and dark forebodings, I think there is a bright side of the night of
darkness. As more and more capital flows into Bengal, there will rapidly
emerge a class among Bengali speaking people of Bengal whom I call
Generation – DJ or Discontinuous Jump. This DJ-generation has sufficient
exposure to the global environment and hence they are more immune to the chandimantap culture of the land, they will also
have access to leisure because of their lesser greed for money and also because
of lack of sheer physical vigour due to the climate of the land. Thirdly, being
first mover, they will have more resources in their command. These forces will
automatically bring forth a situation where this class will start searching for
an identity. Unlike other parts of India, in Bengal, this identity
will not have any pre-eminence of religious, i.e. Hindu or Muslim identity.
This search for identity in a world without bearing and leisure in command will
start to look for a secular, aesthetically pleasing, charming and essentially
global outlook. Tagore is like a lighthouse of
trillion watts and their ships, even though not with very advanced cultural
navigational tools cannot miss Tagore even if they
wish to. I look forward to that interaction and even though I am not capable
enough to provide a picture of what it would be, but I can point to certain
patterns.
1.
In all major cities of India, there are
specific locations where NRI colonies are being set
up. These colonies will contain people of Indian origin who in future will
actually come and live, rather than using them as holiday-in-India or
investment. Once that population reaches a critical mass, both in terms of
quality and quantity, they wont have anything ‘Indian cultural product‘ of mass
appeal that is unknown to them. This fact can be singularly attributed to the
sustained marketing and penetration of Bollywood in
the NRI market of other countries. Due to the abject
xenophobia of the purely local people, they will suffer from an identity crisis
and adjustment problem. Technology, planners, architects, city-administrators,
law and order agencies will provide much relief from the maladjustment in the
physical and material level (which is also not a thing to be looked over in
context of Indian cities) but there is
no new cultural horizon for them. They will also become the inevitable target
of some of the educated, cultured-in-the-surface but unscrupulous and vindictive
elements of purely local population, high and low alike who would try to sell
them their wares at a profit. They will also feature in the local polity and
will be cause of more disturbances in the status
quo. The most-ambitious or the most innocent among them would like to join
politics and this will open up still more serious areas of conflict. In their
process of re-habitation in Bengal quite in the same
way as early British administrators and officials, they will need knowledge,
data, systems, structures and signposts and more objective and wider this is,
the better. They cannot but re-discover Tagore. This
class will remain in a more favourable position to
appreciate Tagore‘s globalization, the conflicts, the
anguish and liberation in the greater and higher aspect of man.
2.
I think I should note it now that it is in the
writings of Nirad C Chaudhri
that one will not only find India of recent times
but also of timeless India. Nirad told the same thing about Kipling‘s work on Indian
themes. It was virtually impossible for the generation of his and beyond to
appreciate what he stood for. At a time when crossing the nation‘s (which in
itself is a continent) boundary was the
privilege of a few, it was easy to attack this irascible Englishman and Bengali on the ground of being envious – the
strongest and perhaps the only feeling his detractors were capable of feeling.
His intellectual honesty, his Rembrandt like obsession with examining his own
life within the historical background was bound to elude a nation which was
beguiled again and again.
3.
It has always fascinated me that since early nineties,
there have been a large number of young men from India going to United States as part of the
workforce that used to provide technical support to the jobs that being created
there due to adoption of new technologies, i.e. new ways of doing things. For
last ten years or so, we can estimate that around half a million young men from
this country, aged between 22 to 26 got a first-hand exposure to another culture
and ‘reality.‘. Some of them have lived there for years before coming back to India and in their
professional work must have come in touch with people from other cultures. I
also know that a most of these young men come from middle class families where
this itself was an achievement of sorts rather than any thinking on the issue
of cultural change-over. I have interacted, first hand with many of those
returnee engineers and professionals and apart from few (who owe more to their
upbringing at home India rather than the
stay there for their unique expression of experience) all of them have been
able to absorb anything authentic of that culture. This is quite strange and
demands attention. I will be annoying many ears and heart but I have to forward
an analysis, which is not my own but of Nirad‘s. It
was written some fifty years or so back and completely valid in terms of its
ramifications and predictions that come out of it.
According to this analysis, the young people who went were brought up in an
environment and got an education (including from the greatest of technical
institutions of India) which provided
all the training of doing and making and very little of becoming. The
net effect was this: having gone into the country which was the fountain-head
of all the technologies they were studying, there was no other way for them but
to get completely entangled with the formidable array of techniques, systems
and blind-alleys of those subjects that there were little intellectual energy
left for anything else. If it were, the home-environment had all the incentives
arrayed up in terms of social mobility, matrimonial choice to provide an
anodyne to the pain of intellectual sterility. Finally, in terms of cultural
interaction, their lifelong training was to gather those skills that would
enable them to go there as a
technician rather than an active cultural entity. I would rather give a very
matter of fact example where most of my class-mates (who now work in
multi-national corporations as technocrats) laughed at learning of languages
and liberal arts as a waste of time and spent all the energy into the
analytical subjects. Professor Amartya Sen informs us that behind the Hindutwa
movement, there are active fundraisers abroad and obliging donors and many are
quite wealthy there.
He attributes this to the larger canvass of searching of identity, of course an
exclusive identity called Hindu. The large proportion of donors whose wealth is
due to the technological boom of the period are those same people who have
undergone this ‘analytic-loading‘effect in their
intellectual make-up. They are quite incapable, partly due to their upbringing
and partly due to their training to address any issues of ‘identity‘ and
‘culture‘ in a balanced manner, irrespective of the fact of their vaunted
skills in their narrow subject and domain of specialization. Since, the issue
of identity has been a crisis for them from the day they set foot into that
land, only never felt that intensely as long as they were at home, it was quite easy to get the funds out of them
so that they may have an ‘identity‘in a seething mass
of cultural interactions. This generation, now little older and matured would
be in a position to start searching for identity and those who have gone from
Bengali speaking home would someway or other re-discover Tagore.
It is only when these people feel that intense agony of loss and a sense of
melancholy that any search evokes, they will come nearer to understand what Tagore meant while he defined literature : How much the author finds the universe close
to his heart and permanently the author could express it.
We
need to understand the fact that a man of the stature of Tagore is surely
not in the need of patronization by the country of his birth, either being dead
or alive. Now, since he is dead, he needs it all the less. However, we cannot
say that. We, Bengalis are not supposed to examine his works because he is a
Bengali or he wrote in Bengali. It is rather a happy coincidence and good luck
for us that we may find him bound in the same fellowship with an exception: He
seems to be quite like us but no one is like him. In the next cultural episode
of Bengal, I would not be sad if he loses relevance or becomes
irrelevant altogether or but woe to the Bengalis if that or its other extreme,
manifests in an unexamined and un-critical way.
In the whole intellectual history of mankind, there was never a man so
sure of his powers, so sure of their ill-use, so aware of the people who are
his readers, yet so human in sacrificing those rare powers in communicating
with them. The future Bengal, under complex forces of
Globalization may actually do that. There lies my hope and I see a vision.
