BOOK
REVIEW
TITLE:
THE BENGALIS-A PORTRAIT OF A COMMUNITY
AUTHOR:
SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI
PUBLISHER:
ALEPH BOOK COMPANY, 2017
PRICE:
HARDBACK, Rs.799/-
But
Why Should Anyone Fight Over Beauty?
The last line in this book,(But why should
anyone fight over beauty?), makes fair, if poignant comment, on all that is
Bengali. It is by no means the whole story, any more than the snippet of lyric
at the very end of the last LP from The
Beatles. That bit of whimsical farewell, which said: “And in the end/ The love
you take/Is equal to the love you make”.
The
Bengalis is an astonishingly good book, written by an
author at the height of his powers. If Sudeep Chakravarti was an American,
preferably a Jew, he’d probably be
sporting a well deserved Pulitzer Prize for writing it, his sixth book.
Who knows, the highly educated Bengali diaspora,
many in academia there, could yet propel the American version, if there is one,
to just such an outcome.
And that is another point to make- this book
targets the “Banglasphere”, certainly in India, Bangladesh, and then Bengalis
and “not-Bengalis” anywhere in the world. All, in fact, interested in this
quirky community capable of exaltation and terrible pettiness, in almost equal measure. The
range and depth of it, over 400 pages, marks it out as a labour of love,
because no publishing advance in India can compensate for the obvious research
and prodigious amount of work that has gone into it.
The Publisher, Aleph Book Company and its
visionary Editor David Davidar, possessed of excellent taste, is to be
congratulated for producing this sumptuous “keeper” of a book. The Bengalis tells
a story that needed to be told, before it all went to pieces in incompetent
hands. The production values too are superb,
at least in the hardback edition.
Davidar was, long ago, Editor of Gentleman
Magazine, and then the first Editor of Penguin India and later Penguin Canada.
The Bengalis is a mixture of research based
history and restrained personal anecdote
blended together with considerable finesse. Its content is vivid, humorous in
parts, but also sad, because there is evidently enough potential unrealized in
the community to float an entire civilization on the clean slate of a new-found
planet.
Having said that, much indeed has been
accomplished over the centuries, and in multiple directions. Chakravarti chronicles a great deal of it, as
if loath to leave any significant aspect out of his remarkably unbiased account.
There is the bald fact of happening, the
opinions and attitudes that shaped it, and the consequences- all laid out with
great lucidity.
The present low ebb in Bengali fortunes can be
traced, as is fairly well known, to Viceroy Curzon’s Partition of an
insurgency-ridden Bengal, in 1905, along cynically communal lines. Chakravarti
calls the section, towards the end of the book, The Age of Fire.
By the time the British re-unified Bengal in
1911, cutting it up again, but along linguistic lines this time, the damage had
been done, even as the terrorism had only intensified. The Raj on the back
foot, moved the Capital to Delhi, truncating the importance of Bengal forever.
And this repeated fracturing that never healed
came to its bloody climax through the forties and into the Partition of 1947.
Independent India too, for reasons of its own,
made busy with cutting what remained of the “arrogant” Bengali down to size. And
today, self- confidence gone, the residual, self-destructive fractiousness, is
a tangled skein, that may take a generation again to unravel.
It has grown intense
over the Naxalite years, the anti-industry rule of the Left Front, and that of an
agitational Trinamool Congress. It is as if a talented people have been
blighted by the Arab/Turkish/Indian concept of the evil-eye(Nazar).
But Chakravarti manfully ploughs through his
material, refusing to be burdened or side-tracked by the ruined promise of
Banglasphere, both on this side of the border or that.
He writes of a once composite culture of Hindu, “Mussulman”,
Christian, Tribal, leavened with the mercantile Marwari, even Bengali
entrepreneurship, and those others who made the place their home. It is a composite ethos that is both there and
not anymore, but with the potential to rise once again to its glory days,
should some as yet unknown stimulus catalyse it afresh.
Is Chakravarti, a well-known Liberal journalist
in his earlier avatar, hinting at a renaissance brought about by the BJP, in
his maturity?
Mukul Roy and Amit Shah will certainly do their
damndest. And when Marxism, Muslim
appeasement, and reckless Populism has racked West Bengal with debt and
damnation, why not? Who knows but the Saffron “Nationalists” may well come to
the rescue.
There are excellent Bengal roots. Echoes of the
“bluechip bhodrolok” Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who coincidentally not only headed
the Hindu Mahasabha and kept West Bengal from slipping into East Pakistan, but
also established the Jan Sangh, the predecessor of the present day BJP, can
still be faintly heard.
Chakravarti describes the contribution of the
rich elite (Borolok), the middle-class (Bhodrolok) and the delightfully
unrestrained and numerous poor(Chhotolok).
He points out the passions central to a Bengali’s
way of life, not only food, though that too, and the classist hypocrisies of
what the Naxalites contemptuously referred to as the “Bourgeoisie” and “Class Enemies”.
That the entire leadership of the bloodthirsty
Naxal Movement came from the Bhodrolok, slumming it as revolutionaries in the
woods, never once entered their heads.
Chakravarti also goes further back to the
Bengali dynasties that ruled before the Moghuls and the British. He draws
cameos of the stalwarts, and interesting, if unknown persons. In a way very
different from Amartya Sen, he describes the Bengali love for verbal sparring
and pushing the envelope with their opinions.
He goes forward too, away from the heat and
dust of Bengal, to the mostly distinguished, “great scattering” abroad, not
just of today but yesterday too.
He travels, as only a Bengali and a Gujarati
can, with both “love “ and “fortitude”, just for the pleasure of it. And
everywhere, he takes the reader back to intrepid and thoughtful Bengalis who
happened to have recorded their experiences before him.
For:
The Sunday Pioneer BOOKS
(998
words)
November
27th, 2017
Gautam
Mukherjee
No comments:
Post a Comment