An Intimate History of Bengal

BOOK X

[Einmal est keinmal – What has happened once has not happened at all]

The moment I think of adding some pages to this Contributory enterprise of Intimate History, the spectre of that short, acidic and bony man – Nirad C Chaudhri hovers nearby. Among her all children, he loved and hated her with a consistency and constancy that is rare in Bengal and perhaps elsewhere. Among all intellectuals of Bengal, I would have chosen him as the critic of Intimate History if I ever happen to choose one. Bengal is a typical patient of recurring amnesia and his true worth cannot come from this land. His contemporaries had little idea what he was speaking about; the politics of the time was not for a man of aristocratic attitude and Nirad’s aristocracy was wholly earned by himself. In his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Contemporary Bengal only found self-praise and bad smell of colonialism but totally failed to register that urge to grow into something broader than everyday homilies. He was given the choicest names and hounded at times. He shifted himself to Delhi, lived in one of the most squalid part of that un-natural city and his comments on Indo-Gangatic plains and its inhabitants are theory & observation in parallel. In Oxford, the man who mourned the general loss of Civilization at Bengal has been sincere and maintained his integrity and his later writings vindicated British as well. Let us praise great men and in this part, we would like to travel along with his life and in one way, it is representative life of Bengalis during a broad span – 1920s to 1980s.

He was from East Bengal’s Mymensingh District and one of the most beautiful landscapes of Bengal is to be found in that area. This old Nirad, after a lifetime’s struggle with his countrymen, his time and destiny remembers the loss of water – the boyhood images of the majestic waters of Meghna and Brahmaputra and remembers the lines of Tagore. His formal education ended after his Graduation in History with distinction but a man like Nirad does not read to earn degrees. He witnessed the fiendish pursuit of money by some of the section of the society and his verbal whip was without quarter. Behind his self-ego and a very acidic tongue without consideration lied a tender heart – a heart that wished greatness for us, in whatever way that greatness took shape in his highly-read mind. He was also perhaps quite aware that his evaluation would come later and he was the last Bengali, who said across the Western Seas – I never wrote for money or fame as such. I always wrote to propagate my ideas. It was true and when he again started writing in Bengali at his late age, we experience mellowing but the old fire was still there. The man has not changed in the core. In his writings lie the struggle and a sense of sincerity of a man, a apon-bhola bangalee, blissfully unaware of implications and self-interest, a colonial subject who could chastise the empire for withholding citizenship. He lived a life few of us can dare to think. He was equipped to think of projects and ideas very few of us would, his courage was phenomenal and his idea of Bengal and its relationship to India is very relevant today. Kishoreganj-Calcutta-Delhi-Oxford – the man of East sailed long back, from the bamboo walled house of Kishoreganj and the petty English and their pettier imitation in India might have laughed at this Don Quixote and his expeditions but Nirad knew that likes of Ulysses and Drake, Momsen and Toynbee, Don Quixote and Don Juan would have given him that respect what was in general withheld by his unfortunate countrymen. He was, in the intellectual history of Bengal a true self-made man. None but his likes can understand the true import of this.

He wanted to be a scholar. Nothing short of a scholar of great magnitude whose works he read in Imperial Library – in its great Metcalfe Hall of Calcutta. He was interested in history and at a very young age, he befriended Gibbon, Starchy, Mommsen, and Macaulay and soon launched a Project of History-reading which as per himself drained his energies and he started a fatal drifting. His apology to himself of not becoming a scholar was contained in a grand refrain, tragic but surpassing the speaker – I had that attitude of scholarship and even though I could never become one, every true scholar will forgive me for this attitude is the métier of scholarship. Without this there is no scholar and scholarship and is some career or sort. He made a standard for himself and wanted to add his name to the fifth of a list of four historians he prepared in his youth. Later, after a life-time struggle he conceded defeat, a wholesome defeat and the world was surprised to hear this from Nirad himself – he has failed. He could not become the fifth. But, after all, a standard is a standard!

Readers of Intimate History, rarely the whole essence of a man’s life has been indebted to so few words ! This was it –after all, a standard is a standard. This after all is life itself and standard is that pole star which shineth and with our limited energy we may fail to reach but let us not delude ourselves with that so endearing chalaki we practice with such dexterity.

He came to Calcutta as a young man and lived there for quite some time. He narrated the experience of an East-Bengal man in the colonial capital with the objectivity of a historian and style of a novelist. You may criticize him for being selective and drawing generalization from particulars but the intellectual environment itself was like that. He found no living guru in his life – intellectual or spiritual and was a living example of the great lesson by Buddha – Follow no one. Be a light unto yourself.

Nirad’s house at Kishoreganj and my ancestor’s house at Sylhet were not very far away. So, as a young man when I first came to Calcutta, I found remarkable similarities between his experience and mine, even though the experiences were separated by almost a century. This might either mean that city of Calcutta has learnt some charm of defying time or I might have been born old or both. Nirad was a student in the city and he left a record of the developments of the troubled times when an age was ending and another breaking. In his old age, he could write, age has mellowed it but not weakened – Now, I realize that after so many years, I have not changed much; I have remained that small boy of East Bengal. Old men have a habit of going back to their childhood. In the same vein, he admits that he does not belong to the age to which a historian will pin him like a fly on a card, but an age preceding his historical time. And then, from the history-student comes a great wishful thinking but few have the equipment of scholarship to question its truth – I sometimes feel that I would have felt at home even if I were born in Greece, Persia or Egypt in their height of Civilization. While speaking about Rammohan Roy, he compared this great visionary as a Dantean figure, hovering alone, surrounded by his own loneliness, least understood by their countrymen. Thy great hand, Nirad, it sounds equally true for you too…

Autobiography of Nirad gives a graphic account of Calcutta between 1920s-1940s and it is full of imageries and anecdotes, punctuated by Nirad’s persistent observation and cross-comparison. In his heart, he was a systematic and organized man whereas Calcutta was almost an anti-thesis. He continuously tortured himself in asking why it is so and this mental itch led his historical sense to venture far behind the past and came his findings. The findings hit at the very core of a grand idea of synthesis between East and West that shaped the cultural journey and labours of some of the greatest men and women of East and West. His objective findings of the Civilization of East and West per se led to some of the disturbing questions of history, including the idea of nationalism. His critical attitude towards prevalent nationalism was quickly concluded to be an anti-national stance in a land which is liberally given the boon or curse of credulity. But likes of Nirad do not live an un-examined life and his whole life was an examination of his Life and Times and it was this urge that led him from one shore to another, never home. In his very late age, while writing in Bengali, he seemed to be finding a very rare tenderness, a homecoming, tragic grandeur of a self-exiled lover of Bengal who could claim that he is more Bengali in Oxford than the most fanatic one at Bengal proper.

Now, I return back to the Calcutta of Nirad, now some eighty years older but surprisingly familiar as if the imageries of Nirad are morphing into the present and the canvass is not at all beyond recognition. My physical stay in this great city has been only some two years and thanks to Nirad, I could de-compress that time span to have a longer span and that remains to be told in conclusion. I am also aware of the East Bengal factor ingrained in me and this factor as in normal case gives a bias but in the study of Calcutta, this is an advantage rather than a handicap as my readers may judge for themselves.

A casual visitor in the city will be immediately aware of one thing in particular: an overwhelming magnitude of street side eating places. Wherever you go, you will find abundance of eating material in the form of rice, roti, fried items, sweets, tea-shop, corn, phuch-ka, seasonal fruits, spiced pea-nuts, chattu and other local variants. Buying and selling is brisk and there is no concern about the dish, plate or serving ambience. Leaving about the hygiene and nutritional value of the food, this continuous eating frenzy leaves a mountain of paper, plastic, left-overs in every nook and cranny. The dirt and squalor that embrace the city like grease owes its source to this wherever-you-eat culture. There are bazaars virtually everywhere and those bazaars spill into the footpath, then into the streets and in public thoroughfare. In a bad mood, you may find that the very existence of this city is to eat, to keep the mouth perpetually busy like some creatures who share much with humans other than a pair of additional feet and a tail. This culture is a part and parcel of the City Culture and none of its citizen finds it amusing but considers this as a matter of pride and quite pride fully continue eating up and dirtying up.

I could only come to know later that ladies in Calcutta are also vociferous eaters. The lure of the tongue is too much for them and even young women are ready to sacrifice a blithe and slim body for some more chicken roll or half-a-dozen more phuckhas from that local phuchka-wallah. This passion for eating has its toll like too much addition to Venus has its price. Calcuttans in general are highly dyspeptic and hence drugstores are a very profitable business here and generally co-habit those food joints. Being newly-wed, we invited some of our relatives for an evening treat followed by a dinner and the proceeding was memorable for my wife, quite new to the City. The guests arrived somewhere seven in the evening and within an hour; fruits and biscuits in the household were attacked and consumed. Later they decided to go for some appetizers and it happened to be chicken-roll –a cylinder some half a feet long and two inches wide stuffed inside with chicken pieces and spices. Onward that, some after an hour or so, my wife was asked whether there was any muri in the kitchen. To her positive reply, there was a feast of muri with chanachur, doused with a cup full of tea. By around ten, dinner was served and the guests displayed quite a healthy appetite. The best was yet to come. One of the heavily built guests happened to be wife of my elder brother looked for some sweets and effortlessly almost gulped down two sandeshes with a glass of water. As the guests were ready to depart, singing the praise of the hosts, most of them complained of heaviness in the stomach and such and we were obliged to give them some antacid, which was quite stoically taken in. My wife, quite frankly admitted that she has not seen such thing before. I nodded and presumably, she is also having her lineage from East and water of the city has not yet worked the magic on her stomach and senses.

Calcuttans may burn the effigy of any detractors of their city at the slightest utterance of some homely truths connecting them and their habitat but it is a fact that the city totters miraculously on a fine balance of order and catastrophe. Extremely high density of population and this chokes the streets and almost everything. Intellectual Bengalis have all the arguments and analysis at their command to fool you in believing that this ugly spectacle is a very ontological issue having roots in highly theoretical areas of economics, migration, and demography and is beyond comprehension by common sense. But their likes could not fool Nirad some eighty years back. Nirad’s perspective into the problem was based on common sense observation and certified by day to day living in the scene for some thirty-two years. The basic argument was that an average Bengali home simply sucks. It has no invitation in it. It is drab, having either a very drab routine or no routine at all. Passing an evening in home and its subtle charm has no place here. Hence the crowd. Hence this spill-out into the street where at least the scene changes. This argument can be extended to explain the grand fascination for the citizens here to make anything into a mass-gathering – be it a meeting, a street-fight, an accident, a funeral march. To me, it is the million mouths uttering in unison the grand query - ki holo dada and the conditioned reflex which being rhythmic has got a nice intoxicating regularity – chalche na, chalbe na. It aches the mind and slowly, if mercifully you get accustomed to this, you are saved, otherwise you can only mourn. I now go for this sweeping generalization: The great passion for politics in this land stems not from some understanding of either polity or political power but from this running away from home, of spilling into the streets and parks, maidans and parade ground. I will substantiate my generalization with the strongest of examples I love to cite: In post independence India, how many Cabinet Ministers from Bengal? Count and you will have the experience of revelation unless of course you don’t want to open the blindfold.

My experience for two years confirmed some whisperings that in general Calcutta resident Bengalis are quite economic in their affairs and in my transactions with them I discovered something more than the eye sees. One’s own house at Calcutta is half the battle own. Cheap raw food material makes other half quite easy. Then remains entertainment, transportation, education and medical expenses. The first is freely available in the streets itself, the second is cheapest perhaps in the world in all segment, the third is ubiquitous and the last a matter of doubt. Middle class Bengalis enjoy the cheapest metropolitan living (?), thanks to the industry and foresight of their ancestors and with some touch of luck. Since life-style of Calcutta did not change much for last hundred years in general, there is always a trend towards saving rather than consuming. Now, any saving is always guided by quite a firm sense of future not being dramatically different from present. Calcuttans knew from experience and last hundred years have taught them this lesson: the show goes on. Surrounded by states whose situation is at par or below par than Calcutta, she still attracts labour and they in their turn further pull down any upward movement of sustenance pricing.

I stayed in three distinct places of Calcutta – in College Street area (the heart of North Calcutta), Near Dumdum in far north (a city suburb) and Salt Lake (a relatively new and planned residential area). College Street is a heritage area and in the last century, its colleges and universities were connected with all the greatest names of India itself. Dumdum was a strategic area developed by British and prided on the airport and Ordnance Factory. Jessore Road, the famed road that used to connect to Jessore of East Bengal and further north to Assam was main road connection between India and present Bangladesh. If College Street area can be compared with a shrunken and emaciated old woman, then Dumdum is like a placid middle age woman and Salt Lake a young woman in age but lacking joie de vibre`. In terms of urban amenities, Salt Lake is considered one of the best places for residence but as luck could have it, this is the place which is least authentic in terms of spirit of the City. It is an artificial area where population density gradient has a steep descent and the very airiness and open spaces give this a highly melancholic tinge. Even the residents there are little different than the populace elsewhere. They are in general quite home loving and less garrulous, prefer to remain inside their houses and are quite prideful of their position co-ordinate in the city-maps. The roads are empty by eight in the evening and due to the highly homogeneous and symmetric structures in the form of Blocks all round, it is a navigation exercise every time to locate some house. There are no roadside markers, no directive, no signboard and Calcuttans practiced to become Captain Cook for last fifteen or so years! In the late evening, if you are obliged to find a house, God help you as you may find that you are inside a labyrinth that looks same everywhere.Below is reproduced a rhyme of Mr. Sukumar Roy(a genius himself but known as the father of the last genius of post-renneasiance Bengal - Mr. Satyajit Ray) with the name as Thikana meaning address and how uncannily he anticipated the Salt Lake Navigation some hundred years back !This gem of a piece belongs to the class of "untranslatable" text and is forwarded by a fellow wordsmith and poet Mr. Sankhadip Sengupta.

While I was writing this, I happened to read one essay by Mark Tully, the BBC man entitled Communism in Calcutta and the observation period was somewhere when the second Hoogly Bridge was having a gaping gap in between. Mr. Tully writes without much ado and his writing is journalistic in structure but the texture is different than that of monotonous summary-writers who are quite majority in present media. Mr. Tully’s focus, presumably was on the Communist Bengal and his narrative has been quite peppery for the ruling elite`. His personal position as a Calcutta-born Englishman makes the essay more interesting as he was not that tourist type but someone whose forefathers were connected with the City. He rightly indicated the skewed relationship between Central Control over state revenue and touched the personality of Asoke Mitra, who was such an unfit in the Communist scheme of things as Tully also understood and confirmed today. His last line in the long essay (which started with a reference to Stalin) captures the essence of Communism in Bengal – Indian situation is different from Soviet Situation. I wish, our previous generations would have just remembered that simple common sense wisdom while the best among them were dragged by honorable convictions and worst ones, as always in all Civilizations, by the pursuit of self-interest. However, he reserved something of greater value while he touched the subject or the institution or the innings called Mr. Jyoti Basu. The paradox of Basu’s rise and hold over power and party for such a long time justified Mr. Tully’s attention and the paradoxes are in order : Not a gifted orator, a London-trained barrister and communist later, not a prolific writer, nor very distinguished in personal appearances and the last – not finding any opposition whatsoever in this long interlude.

The time has come to answer this and I am tempted to think that it is like the Judge whose gaze will not withheld what the man’s due and will not hide the chastisement the judge is bound to deliver. So will I. This is no mathematical or logical paradox but my dear senior citizens of the City, pardon me because my words will be shattering for your pride too. In earlier volumes, I tried to observe the operations of a cosmic law where any supreme adventure by an individual or a community is followed quickly by abject degeneration. This is not something to mourn for but it is the nature of things or more fashionably – statement of fact. In this way of looking at things, individuals are the momentous instrument of history, in their respective capacities. I find no other consistent framework of explaining these phenomena where generations degenerate successively, like a ship is pulled by whirlwind into its fatal end and none other can capture these phenomena in more totality than this hypothesis of karmic law which operates in cycles and epic-cycles. The subject of astrology, while analyzing the fortune also elicits this idea of cycle and epi-cycles called dasha and antar-dashsa and I extra-polate this while charting the fortune of a community or a race. Lord Krishna witnesses the collapse and blotting out of his clan in his own lifetime, Thomas Mann finds Hitler and Nazi Germany after a hundred years of glorious flowering of German intellect. George Washington’s country presents Abu-Gharib. Dear Bengal, we wonder at your rise, we feel like dwarfs while we see the giants who strode past yours almost unchanged streets and now, the same historical force has presented us the Contemporary Bengal which has been carried on the shoulders of many and the oldest shoulder and the most tireless carrier is Mr. Basu who bore a great burden for such a long time. However, it is painful to hear and terrible to absorb the true import in one’s own life when the future historian, innocent and as disinterested (like Johnson talks about the future critic of Shakespeare) has nothing much to say other than the extra-ordinary length of the innings. Our time is a cursed time and since its event-space is so fast and convoluted, one find’s terrible realities all around as how the history will judge him and as for Mr. Basu, he can only pray that History may be kinder to him….

The forces of Nature which shapes our destiny was tried to be understood by generations men long before Das Kapital was written (this simple thing needs to stressed more in Bengal just because of the too much intellectual cloud-fog hanging overhead ) and this country of ours, India, can easily claim to be one of the pioneers in that. Not only that, she could also claim without fear that this truth is neither her only property nor something unique but generations of seekers will continue discovering it. For an individual, the elemental essence to seek truth is to have shraddha which has no English equivalent. This is state of mind like Rabelais says – Poetry is one of the states of soul. True geniuses of all time were fuelled by this shraddha which is the door to immortality and a community will degenerate the moment it lacks shraddha in its core.

Onwards 1950s, Bengal’s flame of genius has exhausted its most refined fuel. The country became free and along with it, there was no immediate mission in sight. Here comes the second law of thermodynamics at our aid to explain those cases where we leave an amount of energy and observe its future. Without a proper directivity which only geniuses can give consciously or unconsciously, the social energy follows the natural path and gets disordered which is termed as the measure of entropy of a system by a physicist. What is than social entropy: mediocrity? What sustains it: absolute faith in collective wisdom without a narrow lane for exceptions, i.e. shraddha for exceptional and exception-raising geniuses? Joining freedom struggle as the wholesome mission by Bengal, discounting everything else of far and near was point of entry into the number-game of multitudes. Embracing Communism by that same generation with a juvenile enthusiasm was the next level. Losing shraddha over the Indian Situation and highlighting another situation for its pure fashion and use-value was the third: promoting a wholesale scaling and managing anything that goes against this scaling. True genius started drifting and then left because a genius never cares for any community or race, the race has to care for genius or die. The general loss of shraddha gripped Bengal in its all social organs slowly, like a upturned can of grease slowly but with a painful surety covers the entire floor, so it gripped everything. Grandsons betrayed forefathers, fathers were prisoners in their own homes and all else faded and in the jaded social landscape, and pure chance prevailed – the random game. And now, I come to the true mission of a Genius: Humanity’s last pillar of resistance to a Random Universe. The last word that separates Order from Chaos. The Last Warrior who perishes by the overwhelming crushing force of the cosmic existence but sings the last song: The force than crushes me is not aware of anything but I am. There is my final victory.

Mr. Basu is the child of that Pure Chance at its first wake and he was chosen by history to be the hammer and crucible of history which crushed the Civilization of Bengal to its present stage. In another historical situation, he might have been chosen for more noble purpose as they call it but until we have the power to tread the alternative histories, we have to bear this in mind and that feeling incites not hatred but forbearance. Not anger but a silent sigh on human situation itself. My dear Bengal, you have not allowed your children of this generation to find the noblest part of you but in this also, a lesson delivered and we thank you in the name of words.

Dear Bengal, Mother Bengal (No fatherland please), she is our mother eternal` and in her garments outline her greatest poet has found the greatest hope: the reflection of the Earth-Mother. Another of her noble sons echoed the same heart-felt feelings immortalized in a single line which all languages would have found fortunate to have carried : Banglar much ami dekiachi tai prithivir rup khujite jai na ar.

My own writings make me sad for I find that I see only squalor, dirt and a vapid smell of degeneration. I never wanted it to be so although I expected it. A part of my psyche owes its growth and structure to the labour of the citizens of this city. But the signals are clear and my logic tells me of things to come for Calcutta and the community at large there.

· Marked heterogeneity in the city in terms of almost everything except Cable TV and cheap internet access.

· Colonies of the rich and criss-crossing of city-pathways that will mask the other half.

· Bengali Language will fare the same as that of Greek and in some other aeon will be re-discovered and that time of re-discovery may be centuries later if no major geological catastrophe occurs. The wait starts now.

· Bengalis will be sooner a cultural minority in their own land within two decades and as economic power has already gone; they will be active politically and culturally as long as the economic power finds it convenient.

· For poorer class, more migration outbound and as the rich has already done that, there will be some homecoming for some NRIs and non-residents and they will populate the NRI-colonies. They will be as alien to the city as that to Contemporary Bengali Culture. As age goes by, one year for one’s home, whatever way you may interpret it.

· Communism or the present variant of it will metamorphose into a polarized di-pole and will be more aligned to mainstream Indian Politics. The attraction of the di-pole will be geography /location and stability will be decided by national and international events. Here comes a chance of some young Turks from Bengal entering Politics of the Centre.

I read an essay of Dr. Asoke Mitra in Bengali, entitled Bangladesh 1969 and he writes about the Bengal of that time. He was based at Calcutta, a very sensitive and talented young man, carried on the waves of poetry and new ideas; Calcutta was not a city but a window to the new world, waiting to be explored. It was also the time, when (West) Bengal was burning its last refined fuel and within a decade will fall that smoggy darkness which will blot everything out.

Calcutta 2004 – I come back to her again because like Paris, she is the nerve-centre of Bengal and Bengali Cultural Space. Like sparks, sometimes you find traces of true nobility, aristocracy and that urge to dream and those moments console me. Calcutta – she looks like a small pebble of light from a NASA satellite photo called Earthlights over the huge darkness of Bay of Bengal and one way she is a pillar of light in the darkness. Her image has undergone a complete change – from respect to fear – of dirt, of chaos, of bandh, of lawlessness and laziness, of outmoded thinking and annoying pettiness, of poverty and lack of opportunities. All these, my logical reasoning concludes is factual even exaggerated but Pascal has said it so beautifully – there is a reason of the heart that the reason can never fully comprehend.

Dear Brothers and Sisters of Bengal, even though there is darkness all around and reason points to a future more terrible to bear, hope, the most perfect condition in this imperfect planet abounds in our heart too. Our suffering and humiliation (a part wholly justified) should lead us somewhere, out of this pettiness and chalaki-filled universe of ours, of short-cuts and narrow gains, of amnesia and self-deception, of menopausal moods and perpetual irritation, of dreamlessness. In this great city, there are those hearts whose light has not gone out, there are those mothers who are feeding their children with the nectar that strengthens, there are those darlings, the men and women whom the lie of the land has not mummified into speaking skeletons, I bow to the feet of that coming Future, future which Bengal will chisel out from the unforgiving rock of Providence.

Darling Calcutta, Dreamer Calcutta, and Noble Calcutta – You are like the great Albatross, you cannot even walk today properly and some of your citizens have made a business out of it. Let them. The best of your children will answer for you and every noble heart which has felt much will comprehend the reason of the heart is: She cannot walk for her Great Wings.

Editor wordsmith can be contacted for any further query on the Project AIHB