An Intimate History of Bengal
BOOK XVII
The Non –secular heritage of Bengal: A personal Journey
The Conception of this Book:
It was a desire as
mentioned in the previous book of writing on the spiritual tradition of Bengal. However, that desire,
like many desires, material or intellectual remained unfulfilled. The reason of
the failure was partly lack of scholarship and partly trepidation. The matter
would have ended there. But a month of restful reflection and living in a
spacious, non-polluted environment
and a re-reading of An Autobiography of
an Unknown Indian provided me with a possibility of writing a BOOK based on
one‘s personal involvement and observation. I have always found inside me a conflict in
terms of the idea of secularism as professed by the Indian state and as
illustrated by the wide geographical, cultural and historical sweep called the
Indic Civilization. I am aware of the fact that in terms of age, Indic
Civilization is like one of the grand old men of World Civilizations; whereas
the Indian state is like an infant. I am also aware, quite contrary to the
self-proclaimed exponents of Indian tradition that age in itself does not
necessarily confer dignity to anything. It only confirms the fact that there
are certain patterns of human behaviour which are older than others. To my
understanding – Indic Civilization‘s one of the most seminal and sweeping
observation is this: Although there may be change in patterns all the time, the
science of detecting a pattern and
the art of appreciating is
fundamental and encompasses all that come across or don’t come across. The
similarities and the clashes between this grand old man and the infant
constitute the dialectics of the Indian mind. As an Indian, I am heir to it –
the senile resignation of the old man as well as the wonder-eye of the infant .
The most important aspect of this dialectic is that both are genetically
related – only apart in space and time. This connection is common but in case
of India, there is something
which is so striking, so strange – the apparentness of this connection in modes
of thought, behaviour and finally – in arousing such grand and colossal
sentiments in each historical age. The
grand old men can be pre-eminently personified as a thesis called dharma which is wrongly translated as
religion with devastating results and the infant, at a snap-shot of time can be
pre-eminently personified as the state or nation-state. It is quite possible
that in future, nation state might metamorphose into some other configuration
but it is quite unlikely that all religions would re-configure themselves into
something radically different. All radical elements would have to get out of
the main mass and has to establish itself as another alternative. In addition,
there would be various non-religious religions like ISCON, Art of
Living, and Rajneesh and so on.
Religion, non-religion
and its Indian state-implied opposite - ‘secularism‘is not a settled topic and
has its own discontents. In my memory, the greatest force that stirred up the
masses and the classes in last twenty fives years was the issue of Hindutwa movement. Let us
side-step the issue of evaluating the moral and cultural implications of this
movement for the moment. But no observer could deny that there was a huge
amount of enthusiasm and energy displayed by the common people, who by
definition and implications were Hindus. In terms of number, this was a from a
significant portion of the population. In contrast, I did not find any other
phenomenon which could unleash such a movement of people, money, bricks, trains
and ideas. Indian intellectuals for last few decades, to the greatest irony
have always been oscillating from a sterile form of secularism and their
opponents from an equally ugly form of Hindutwa. The sterile secularism
has been a curse on the people and that stifled the only authentic energy of
the mass and the Hindutwa movement has made the same energy spiraling into a
closed chamber. Unless, there was a secular balance, this energy, however
degenerate and gross, due to its core authenticity would have blasted the
entire edifice from the bottom and top and the secularist energy would have
dried up into a staid pool unless counterbalanced by the raw and gross energy
of the Hindutwa. The Indian state, for last fifty years has been operating on
these dual forces. Economics, industrialization and contemporary socio-economic
issues are auxiliary and not significant in shaping them. It is rather these
two forces alone or their resultant that shape these issues in India. This is not a new
discovery. Swami Vivekananda has advised the same in essentials, a hundred
years back in identifying the core note of India throughout his public
lectures from Colombo to Almora with an
unusual consistency.
The secularist ideas as
driven by state of India for some time assumed
something very alluring politically and administratively but completely
out-of-reality in terms of culture and religion. The first idea was of course
the essential unity of India – which is ancient
compared to the idea of secularism. The second idea was that in terms of
secularist outlook all the communities of India are in the same level of
maturity. Or in other words, after 1947, all the people living inside India have become citizens of
state de jure, all of them have become citizens de facto. This
was a noble wishful thinking but not a fact. There was tremendous amount of
disparity in terms of adopting and assimilating evolved or imported ideas among
various communities of India. For example, just like
during the peak of the flowering of Buddhist tradition in India, there were some places
in India which were like Athens
of Pericles but the neighbours were not like Persians but Visigoths and
Vandals. The relative curve of civilization and civilizing influences were steep
and the gradient was too steep. This facilitated immediate transfer of culture
(Culture, in a limited sense can be said to behave like temperature – it naturally
flows from high to the low. The only parameter to distinguish a high or low
culture is its self-awareness. ), facilitating new and new
cultural circles in a relatively less time. This high disparity in terms of
cultural effects of civilization lie at the core of the secularist discontent
in India. Hence the moment secularist
camp became less active or became less powerful, the Hindutwa movement rose
from the centre of Aryavarta like a Tornado, it immediately moved West, then a
deep move south – a circuitous route beyond the Vindhays, then touching far
flung corners of North-east (not even an Indian cultural zone but more of
Mongol and Thai cultural zones) and then back to the centre of Aryavarta. I
have witnessed this tour as described the journey of the cloud in the Meghadootam
and wondered as to why Bengal (the part of Bengal within India which is called West Bengal) remained un-touched. I
have found no Indian intellectual – either of the Left or Right stressing this
unique behaviour of Bengal. This behaviour of Bengal, first of all supports
my argument of core disparity in India in terms of response to
civilization and its influences and it also provides me with courage to write
this book on the non-secular tradition of Bengal.
I write this as a Bengali
as well as someone whose childhood and early youth were within an environment
where secular ideas were under heavy debate but the outcome of the debate was not
clear. But now, the debate has grown, so also the people who organized and
enriched the debate – both in terms of thought and action. We have witnessed
the pogrom of Gujarat as well as the liberal democracy of Bengal. We have seen ridiculous
efforts to resuscitate a mummy of tradition as well as sterile agnosticism of a
segment of Indian intellectuals. We have witnessed the unceremonious exit of a
non-Aryavarta Prime Minister of India, recently dead and denying another from
Bengal the post, this man being still alive. We have seen few strange accidents
where top leaders died, another more outré where another leader got eliminated
from the scene from the bullet from a brother and the son of the dead involved
in more bizarre act by the side of his father‘s ashes. A Macbeth-ian pall of gloom and anxiety hang like
a cataract over the country. There came situations when it seemed that under
the impact of various developments, internal and external, the old conflict has
died or under control, these subterranean forces emerged with new energy and
vigour. There seems to be a hidden, partly-understood yet and on account of that
a completely mysterious inner core of India which refuses to make
any clear or dignified exit in any historical era. I call this inner core as
the non-secular essence of India. It only remains to be
told my personal interaction with this tradition with an objective of
concretizing the abstract ideas propounded so far.
Earliest Recollections
and first encounter:
Although I was born in a
Brahmin family, I had missed strict religious orientation. But that does not
mean that I did not have religious mood. My mother has been a highly religious
and deeply conservative person. My father, on the other hand did not share that
to the same extent, although he was not openly opposed. He had been highly
critical of the Brahaminical superiority and at later age, openly opposed to
this idea that permeates the very fabric of Hindu society. An outsider won’t
have any inkling of it unless one tries to become an insider, i.e. trying to
enter either into the social institutions of matrimony, adoption or
inheritance. Hindu society makes clear distinctions between one‘s
belief-systems and social behaviour. For example, contemporary Hindu society
would pleasantly tolerate a person who does not hold the Vedas or the Gita as
sacred but would be much agitated if that vigorous sceptic either a) eats beef
with a relish and / or b) marries another person of Muslim faith and/or c)
openly criticizes the idol worship. I was born and grew up in such a society,
in a small town in South Assam. In sexual matters, Hindu society
would follow the policy of ‘no ask – no tell‘ and there also, I understood in
my boyhood that fornication was considered a pardonable mistake within caste
but an union of love in another faith (notably Muslim) was a severe crime. The
more I grew up inside, I started finding these contradictions until I thought
this to be nature of things. I was twenty years old or so, the voice of Nirad
shook me by my very being and I started to strive for freedom. It seemed to me
that within a decade, a blessed day came when I felt, again to the core of my
being that I have escaped from the prison and also securing my body, made from
the clay of Bengal.
My fist memorable
interaction with this tradition occurred, while I was some five to six years
old while watching a yatra, in a local mela
in Silchar. It was Raja Harischandra – which is
a very well-known story from the Puranas. The story, to me seemed and
still seems one of the most direct, straight and devastating narration
of the entanglement of death, destiny and loss ever attempted in literature –
historic or pre-historic. Like some short stories of Maupassant (The
Necklace as an example), the author of this Puranic story seems to take a
strange delight in depicting a capriciousness of Fate. This is was my first
direct interaction with the tradition of world-weariness that is a recurring
and an inescapable theme of Hindu views on Life and Death. I spent many a
sleepless night playing the drama inside my mind and shivering at the heartlessness
of its depiction. It was not the tradition of Enlightenment or the skepticism
that made me doubt the liveliness of the entire corpus of Hindu
mythology, but this emotional reaction to it. It was quite vague in my mind
that people capable of making such stories must be in a grand inner conflict
themselves. At that point, I could not articulate the cause behind the
emotional reaction. It took almost two decades for me to formulate my own ideas
about the inner cause that made those books to be written and the specific type
of emotional reaction to it. It was the study of Indian history and comparing
those readings with the happenings seen in front of my eyes.
Strangely enough, the
story of Ramayana did not make much impact upon me, nor did I find anything
very impressive about the hero Rama. It
was the Mahabharata that caught my attention, specially the garish
illustrations in the Kashidas’s Bengali version which my mother used to read
during afternoon. I was highly attracted to the structure of the Mahabharata of
story inside a story like an onion with layers and layers of same material. Lord
Krishna never seemed to me a Lord or something and continuous reference to him
as Lord of the Universe by characters left a permanent disgust in me. Only
later, when I read Buddhadev’s epic commentary, I felt that the speaker of the
Gita, even if human was an unusual individual in the whole of human
history. There is no other man who can be so egoist and on the other hand so
full of humility. A normal human being would have been torn into bits and
pieces under such opposing forces.
By the age of sixteen, I
felt that I harbour genuine religious sentiment with appreciation for its
cultural expressions in music and literature but despised the outward practices
of the religion. It was also the time; I was heavily immersed in the literature
of Ramakrishna Mission. In parallel, I was finding the stirring of another
unknown force inside me and since I read Navokov’s Lolita (searched and read
from my father’s library – attracted by the cautionary words and the bust of a
young blonde in the cover) and Swami Vivekananda’s treatise on Bramhachraya,
I experienced a feeling I would like to call Russell’s personal paradox. I
have forgotten where I have read but it is reported that Russell has somewhere
said that during his early adolescence he would dreamily ruminate on a line by
Shelley in a sublime passion and the next instant would have an equally
irresistible urge to have a sneak into the housemaid undressing. My
confrontation with sexuality was silent, intense internally but calm outside,
with no opportunity of experimentation in reality except in the highly
guilt-ridden but regular masturbation. The guilt was overwhelming and my
interpretation of Vivekananda convicted me more and more in my own inner court
of justice. Until that time, my main reading was in Bengali and I was looking
for deliverance – a succour and few witnesses who would lessen my guilt if not
punishment in the inner court by narrating their experience. A teacher came at
that time. Although he was not my formal teacher but he remained the only
person who exerted such a strong influence upon me and my thought process. He
introduced me to the English literature, to the synergy that remains between
European Civilization and Bengal’s renaissance, the conflict of
Tagore, the decadence of culture. In his
personal life, this teacher of mine, a young man of twenty six or seven was not
a man best fit for mentoring young men like me. He was an alcoholic as well as
a connoisseur, he was a philistine as well as a highly temperate men, he was
addicted to drugs but having a deep knowledge of pharmacology, he was a very
bad-mouth man if he wanted to and also spoke six languages, he was a dandy but
preferred otherwise as well. I found in him bits and pieces of Sherlock Holmes,
Don Juan, Don Quiixote, Tagore, Nirad, Srikanta, Pip,
and Sinai. Interaction with him released me from the increasingly stronger
conditioning of the native environment and provided me with the confidence that
I have an inalienable right to claim my inheritance of any human product
irrespective of its geography and history. It also made me respect the ebb and
tide of the body and its bodily bodily sensation. This way, I could nod yes to
what Gibbon has seriously said about a successful Roman emperor and generalized
it: a man who can avoid the pitfall of either becoming a saint of Middle age
and a philistine of modern world is capable of ruling an empire.
I
have given this long introductory note only to provide the readers with a
background as what kind of a ‘cultural particle’ was going to make its
experience and judgments about the non-secular tradition of Bengal. I have little to care
for those critics of the secularist camp who could swallow James Mill’s
authority on India (who knew no Indian
language, did not ever visit India) and nor care about
those who have left the path of Rahi Aql to intellectual equivalent of rahi
rokra. I call this great not because it is old
and exerted a strong influence but because of the fact that it was a work of
greatness spanning generation of noble human beings, some of whom were not
Bengalis in strict or loose sense.
From the Books to the Eye
The eyes that read a
printed book are the same apparatus that see the world in and around. Nature
has given us an instrument which works for past reading as well as present
viewing. The vision of the future, minus its prophetic import is a mixture of
these. Historical scholars are supposed to specialize their eyes more for the
past reading and as a necessary hazard of any specialization; they sometimes
lose the capacity of viewing in the present. In its acute form of this
manifested lack, historical congress can resemble, without any derogatory
connotation as something of a séance session. The methodology offered here is simple
observation through a specific cultural lens (the cultural particle) and
interpretation of the output of this lens by a device called mind/brain which
is more of a collective, shared and continuously changing system.
A
casual observer in Calcutta or in towns of Bengal would find the following
visual relics of religion:
- Kali
Temples
- Temples of lesser gods or demi-gods like Shani
(Saturn), Shetala Mata
- Mosques
of all variety and denominations
- Shiva
Temples. This might be by the side of a tree or near its roots
- In
the morning, a priest would be found having flowers, vermillion,
sandalwood, sprinkling over shops and putting a dot in the forehead,
collecting a daily amount
- Kirtan
or chanting in the streets depending on some occasion
- The
Durga Puja and various other pujas spreading all
through the year but none can be as big and great than the Durga Punja
- Chirstmas while Park Street is lit well
- Sammelan for different ashrams for religious
leaders like Baba Lokenath, Balak
Brahmachari, Mahanambrata
- The
Namaj in the mosques and streets during Id
- Beggars
often displaying photo of a god or goddess and collecting alms
- The
Fair of Baba Taraknath
- Bauls
and Fakirs
- Tantriks who follow a special religious doctrine
within the fold of Hinduism
- Gajaner Mela during
March-April
- Paying
respect to pitris during the pitripaksha
- Liturgical
ceremonies during birth, death, marriage, first eating, sacred thread
ceremony
- The
fair of Bauls in Kenduli
The list is not
exhaustive but I think it includes the major ones and provide a panorama of
religious activities in the land which has Hindu, Muslim and little Christian
population. In order to manage this list
into class, this list is headed under the following heads with an
empirical criterion that worship is a part of religion
- Worship
of dead ancestors
- Worship
of potentially malevolent natural forces
- Worship
of song and dance, design and poetry.
- Seeking
blessings of higher powers in events of importance in one’s life or of
family life
- Celebrating
the auspicious occasion in the life
of a man of God
- Celebration
of a God who is beyond religion – The Bauls – The Song of Holy Fools
- Celebrating
humanity and human concerns where God has taken a back-seat – The Durga
Puja
- Hoping
for good luck in day to day operation. See point 2 as above
If we try to further
condense the types of underlying philosophy behind the pre-eminent
motives behind these activities, we can easily see that more or less the
following tradition is clear
1.
Ancestor Worship – a trait common to all
civilizations and to those as well whom civilization does not confer the
epithet of being civilized.
2.
Nature Worship – Worshipping benign and
malevolent forces of Nature, finding expression in trees, stones, any other
objects.
3.
Worship of God-Men – Paying respect to those
individuals who have evolved spiritually and realized God or have claimed to have
realized God..
4.
Fulfillment of Cultural and Social
Needs – The Durga Puja and
others
5.
The Non-religious Religion – Bauls, celebration of being
human rather than being closer to God. In these schools, God is considered to
be residing so close that we risk forgetting it any moment – The greatest
irony of man is that he practices Samadhi.
But religion cannot and
is not restricted to these types only. The types above only denote the
karma-kanda part of religion. There is another fundamental dimension of
religion where it is invisible and happens inside a person or a select group.
It is also observed that this person or group’s thinking exert influence on
these aspects and these processes get modified. The social impact of a
religious reformer / reform movement is directly proportional to the impact it
can make on these aspects of religion as understood / practiced by its
adherents. History of Bengal provides interesting clues in this
influence-reaction pattern. Intelligent religious leaders always display this
subtle understanding of human nature. Influential Religious leaders of Hinduism has consistently
remained true to this understanding – like any hierarchy, there is hierarchy in
religious needs and need-fulfillment. Hence they did not condemn any of these
practices, only pointed to higher and higher spheres of evolution. This was
followed by rulers of Bengal as well. Starting from the Muslim
rule to the present Communist rule, political leaders and administrators have
either remained neutral to the activities of the mass in terms of religion or
tolerated it with a calm which is quite strange. Communist’s leaders and their
families in Calcutta had to face this
question of their visiting temples but they know their Indian communism well
and replied quite sincerely that religion is after all a personal affair.
A Generalization – and
personal memories
It is my opinion and I
would like to elevate it to the level of theory that contemporary cultural and
social behaviour of Bengal in comparison with the other parts
of India can only be meaningfully
explained by focusing on the religious history of Bengal. I would also forward
the hypothesis that one of the reasons of Bengal‘s utter material, intellectual
and aesthetic downsizing has been due to a partial denial of the core within.
In spite of my limited, unorganized but passionate reading of Bengal‘s cultural
history, I could find that Bengal has always behaved in a strange fashion under
the dual impact of the tradition of Vedas and Tantric tradition. I read a book
by a Bengali Tantric of hundred years back and I could agree with his argument,
on historical grounds, that there is
something in the climate of Bengal where the Vedic
tradition does not naturally grow. So time and again, this needs to be cultured
by grafting imported material – be it in terms of five Brahmins or making an
organization altogether. The air that blows in this land has a sireni song
within itself which mellows down the neti neti of an Adwitist,
the impersonal becomes too personal – Ramprasad finds the Mistress of the
Universe coming as a daughter to help him mending a bamboo wall.
My readers would surely
ask me to establish or rather defend this generalization put forward earlier.
This will be done but in stead of going into a debate, I would rather tell you
a story so that you may make your
judgments. The story is about a book. In a way, a very strange sort of a book
which is a mixture of history, biography (but not of someone whom you will meet
in the Hall of Fame of history but in the narrow lanes or corridors), personal
observations and struggle, sober and reason-oriented interpretation. Most important – completely devoid of that
ugly, immoral (by the same logic Nietzsche spoke of Victor Hugo's novels) and
rampant Bengali sentimentalism which proves to be too much to overcome even
today. The author of the book loved Bengal no less but refused to
be prisoner of being a Lotus Eater in her myriad blue-green pools of imagined
tears.
In the next Book, a continuation will be
presented in the form of analyzing a book, a book in Bengali entitled – রামতনু
লাহিড়ী ও
ততকালীন
বংগসমাজ (Ramtanu Lahiri and Contemporary Bengali Society) – a book apart from its historical significance is distinguished by its prose and unique architecture. Strangely enough, certain issues
discussed in the book, historically and personally share significant parallels
of present Bengal.
I have another vested interest to discuss this historical document. This
book shares some similarity with Intimate History of Bengal. Just like AIHB is designed not to be a dry historical narrative, this
book has already achieved that. Secondly, AIHB always aspired to produce
high-quality prose; the book has been extremely successful there too. The
author was not hesitant to put minor personal incidents while weaving the grand
historical canvass. In other words, he was aware and exercised an autonomy
without which all works of art or science degenerate either into an attempt to
carve or continue a career or pamphleteering for some noble or ignoble
cause. Finally, just like its author
came to Calcutta as a boy, only to be charmed by the
great city more than a century and half back. So is me, who came to Calcutta some twenty five years back for the
first time, and now after many a cities and many books, find it is a kind of a promise given to her that I write
this journal – An Intimate History.
On a summer afternoon, more than two centuries back, a Briton sat near the Roman ruins in Rome and as the afternoon sun touched
the crumbling pillars of that great empire, a dream was born. Edward Gibbon
wrote the history of that empire that continues to charm
us. The times are different but greatness remains. Five years back, as I was
driving towards Bolpur with my teacher by the side,
the whole green canvass of Bengal melted in the blue infinity. It was this wide plainness that made me
feel like writing about this land. After five years, this book has got a life
of its own. Every time I walked, traveled or moved in this land, the ghost of
this History was pursuing me like an invisible third. An unrest of strange kind
permeated my thinking being and I always felt deep down that I am tied up in
hundred urgent and inconsequential things and neglecting this project.
April 2007
North Calcutta – Raining...