An Intimate
History of Bengal
BOOK X
It was a happy
chance that made me leave Calcutta
on a cold February morning for England
as a student. A week back, I went to Silchar flying over Bangladesh
air-space after getting my one month old son entering our ancestral home at
Silchar – the vaastu-vita where my father was born some
sixty odd years back. The Family thus settled somehow, I came back to Calcutta
and started into last minute preparation for the journey.
There was
urgency and so many finer and annoying details need to be taken care of and it
made quite a good travel in the city. Amidst such travel, I passed near the
Cemetery where Michael Madhusudan Dutta has been interned and during childhood
my father used to show me the place whose only decent exhibit is the epitaph
written by poet himself. This unique poet was bewitched by the Albion’s distant shore and could finally manage to have a life quite
identical to that of the great Romantic poets he admired. It is not in the
scheme of things of municipal Calcutta
to have any spending on something as useless as a poet’s last resting place
because the dead poet, after all cannot give votes nor get investment. So the
grave of this poet now lies by the side of a busy road among dust and squalor.
It was fortunate to find Madhusudan’s grave in better shape than Derozio’s –
the organizer of Young Bengal now receives gift in the form of nitrogenous
waste from modern Bengal. As I was moving past College
Street in the afternoon, lazily sitting in the taxi,
Nirad broke my reverie - It is ingrained
in the nature of tropical climate to degenerate things, ideas, traditions and
nobility. I don’t know whether to agree or not.
This restless poetic
genius of Bengal was a dreamer and he was one of those
Bengalis whose imaginary faculties got burned by the noblest and strongest
cultural radiation emanating from the Literature of Europe that suddenly
flashed in Calcutta. Of all the
gifts of Greece
and Rome that England
brought in India,
Bengal’s response was most active in the domain of
Literature. A generation of young men of Bengal got
permanently bewitched by Shakespeare and Romantics, Chaucer and Virgil, Keats
and Shelley. Madhu-kabi* was having
all the gifts of Fortune to launch his ambitious career to be one among the
greatest English poets. He learnt English, French, Latin
and started living in virtual England.
Some of his friends have noted his state of mind and he scorned Bengali
language as something totally incapable of being the conductor of carrying his
poetic electricity. He was quite convinced that he was among those immortals
and if his immortal fame has to be rested, it was the marble of the English
language and not the muddy slime of Bengali. But Madhu-kabi’s England
was not the real England.
It was the England
that literature of England
shaped in his eager and credulous mind and the enervating atmosphere of Bengal
and his personal situation of being son of a rich landed aristocrat allowed his
fancies to run wild. The poetic genius discharged in the form of promising
imitation of English and European masters and mahdu-kabi decided to sail for England
at any cost. The first was Hindu religion, he embraced Christianity as it was
an enabler and leaving Calcutta
behind, saying Good Night, Bengal like Byron started a
journey that will prove fatal for him, England
and Bengal. He remained the last Bengali who loved
literary England
with such force and intensity that the rejection by the real England
of his imaginary future sowed the seed of Modern Bengali Literature. He became
successful in securing poetic immortality, not in the English Marble but rather
transformed the slime of Bengali into a marble that bore the weight of his epic
genius. His epitaph is significant and very few poets could capture in a mature
tenderness and epic grandeur the summary of a gifted used as well a wasted
life. In his death, he was reclaimed by Bengal again and
as Bengal was mourning her gifted son, the novelist
Bankim celebrated this mourning for a poet as an indication of a higher culture
and ended his observation in a very hopeful note. He was right.
In this age of
jet-set travel, some of the grand beauties of inter-continental Travel are lost
forever. Imagine the Journey from Calcutta
to London a hundred years back.
Most of the traveller’s tales of that period constituted this journey as the
larger part of the entire narrative and most notable in Bengali are that of
Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda. The former wrote his Europe Yathris Diary and the later wrote
Prachya and Paschatya [Orient and
Occident] and the long voyage from India
to London via Suez Canal
was more interesting than the actual travel in Europe
itself. The Journey was through Red Sea and then
entering into Mediterranean waters and the journey was also a journey through a
cultural thread that war, religion, trade and commerce built through centuries.
On a
cold February morning, I looked from the aisle of a British Airways Jet and
only the traffic of Jessore Road
and some coconut tree was visible. The ugly Calcutta
buses were seen plying at a distant. Then, surpassing all anxieties of a unknown place and stay there, a very strange thought came
to me – the place where I am going is as integral part of Bengal
as its local place and there are lots of people in both the cities of Calcutta
and London whose cradle and grave
were vice versa. Or in terms of cultural memory, there is a common space which
Time has modified, mellowed and in cases, erased.
As I was
contemplating on the issues that surround the relationship between Calcutta
and London, I remembered Strachey
who’s Eminent Victorians carry more
content of Victorian England than the huge volumes professional historian’s
write about a period. The art of a historian is subtle and cannot be so easily
codified. There is a fundamental difference between enjoying poetry and the art
of enjoying it. Or there is a fundamental difference between communication and
strategy of communication. Strachey’s work gave me some kind of strength where
ignorance can be a weapon to fight conditioning of formal education in any
subject. So in this English soil, after a month stay I write about intimate
experiences, personal although but in a way nothing in this world except death
can be told to be a strictly personal matter. From our birth to the last
breath, we either relate or depend and in death only we undergo a completely
pristine personal experience. No one can have a proxy death for you.
A Tale of Two Cities –
Part I
The city of London
and Calcutta have seen each other
in best of times as well as in worst of times. There were men and women in both
the cities who were star crossed to share a common destiny. London
as described by Dr. Watson in late Victorian era – the cesspool where all loafers of the Empire some time or other join
and Calcutta where Apu, the young man come to vanish into
its lanes and by-lanes. London and Calcutta
share another distinct common perception – it is singularly singular. A Briton
reminds London and a Bengali
reminds Calcutta. These two cities
are the common currencies of ethnicity which different ethnic groups carry with
them and get identified, with or without permission or even intention.
The
day East India Company was formed, having the advantage of surety; we know that
Calcutta – her historical horoscope
was charted. But it would have been almost a prophet to have predicted so in
1600s. Any humane reader of history
would not fail to observe that in case of historical development; cause and
effect are not events in themselves but possibilities with reference to time.
Without the timeline, history transcends into myth and myth with timeline is
the best readable history. Due to this phenomenon, myths seem to capture a
nations history and Wagner was right when he said that destiny of a nation is
in their myths.
If individuals
can have horoscopes which without its explicit but debatable implication can be
considered as a strategic blueprint, a city can also have a horoscope in this
world of birth, growth, decay, fall and revival. Horoscope of any city can be
divided into three broad classes - Lucky and long, lucky and short, unlucky and
long, unlucky and short. Now since our lifetime is small compared to the life
of a city, as a standard we can take the long and short of a city as being 10
times the life of average individual life and set this as some 400 years. If we
take candidate cities within last three thousand years and sufficient
relaxation of our standard as what population, area, and infrastructure will
qualify a habitation to a city, we will find we have some 100 cities which we
can easily consider in our City List for studying our horoscope classification
of cities. Now our list will look something like this –
|
City Name
|
800 BC – 400 BC
|
400 BC to 1 AD
|
1 AD to 400 AD
|
400 AD – 800 AD
|
800 AD –
1200 AD
|
1200 AD to 1600 AD
|
1600 AD to 2000 AD
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Sodom
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Babylon
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Jerusalem
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Pataliputra
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Paris
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Delhi
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Calcutta
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London
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Vijaynagar
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Rome
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New York
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Athens
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Now, we come to a very
interesting situation. Our first column now is nothing but geographical
positions of globe [GPS Co-ordinates] and their naming at different times
during the timeline [800 BC to 2000 AD]. As we go on ticking the 7 columns, we
will find a pattern like this in whichever way we list the cities –
We use the following colour combination –
Green à
Born.
Blue à Active.
Red à Not Active.
Black à
Destroyed/ruins.
Yellow à Another city on the same space.
This colour combination tries to
take into account major phases in a city’s fate and very much like the life-cycle
of a star. A city might be born in a place where there was once a city in
earlier times or just be a fresh one. It might be active or in-active in
certain periods (of the interval) and might have been destroyed by some natural
catastrophes like flood earthquake, invasion etc. Now active and not active are vague terms but
they are like tuners to adjust the relative nuances of interpretation in
relative to time. Now when we say a city in our model, it is nothing but a
space on earth probably some 500 square kilometres in area and can be
considered as point. We are observing these 100 points for 3000 years (say from
Moon) and what we will find for them? For these 100 points, we will find set of
combinations like this at some time or other –
G
B R w G B R w
Y G B R Y G B R G B B R
Class A Class B Class
C Class D Class E Class
F Class G
So we have seven states for these 100 points in 3000 years
and following are clear from the classifications –
- Class
F and Class G points will be
rare and Class F rarer still in line with the common observation about
Fortune – it is temporal and so is the opposite – misfortune.
- Class
B and Class C points have all the freedom to follow any other classes
including a repetition of themselves, i.e. a point whose fortune is quite
turbulent but fertile.
- Class
A points can be said to be cursed with non-succession.
- Class
D are those which can be compared with a family having long line of
succession but continuously diminishing fortune.
- Class
E and F are the most fortunate among all and are again rare.
- Class
G has got a strong chance of either becoming Class F in some time and vice
versa.
Now we can add more information
to this representation by adding the colour length as per the time, i.e.
comparable time period during when they remain in that state. This will also
provide us with the proportion of green and blue
and thus highlighting the critical time a point takes to reach critical mass to
be called a city.
Having
ourselves satisfied with these colour notations, we can very well try to find the
correlation of their fate as a city using a computer program. The scene is a
grand one – 3000 years of past and somewhat known fate of 100 points on the
planet. We are going to churn out any trend, if exists and then from that to
predict the future for the cities. We can also ask, quite
decently whether any correlation exists between any two cities, separated in
geography as well as in time because the operating time of 3000 years is too high
to offset any local effect of geography.
We postpone
this discussion for the time being and take two concrete examples – Our Tale of
Two Cities – London and Calcutta.
The grand model that we conceived was only to broaden our perspective to such a
degree of remoteness in time that we may not fall into a very narrow time bound
interpretation of their horoscopes and exclaim dismissively – Oh Calcutta! Centre of a Colonial Empire with central
control at London. This
is reading the horoscope without the art of knowing the difference between
individual and city horoscope. A city and an individual are altogether
different things in horoscope scheme of things.
If we live not
in a completely random universe, then there will be some relation between London’s
and Calcutta’s horoscope as points
in the globe in last 3000 years. When Romans used to buy pepper from Malabar in
India, Trafalgar
Square was perhaps a bush and Park
Street at Calcutta
might have been a swamp where fishes used to play. But within 2000 years, at a glance
you could say that there has been some relation between them! The same issue is involved in case of star
and galaxy formation only when we increase the time scale some millions of
years. So searching correlation among city horoscopes is as important as
searching for our origin in cosmos. In cultural context, similar search is the search about our cultural roots.
Indic
Civilization (a citizen of modern India
uses terminologies that confuse and diffuse to identify Indian-ness) can said to have definitely spanned our observation
period of 3000 years once we are relaxed about geographical extension. One of
the towering contributions of this Civilization is the generic idea of dividing
a person’s life into chaturashram-
the four Orders of Life – the preparatory, the householder, the meditative and
renunciation. No Civilisation can be stable without having this structure on an
average scale and all complex social
and genetic institutions we have
today will collapse without such an ordered scheme. The final order of
renunciation or Sannayas was the
pinnacle of preparation of Life and to enter into Life Beyond. Since the idea
of reincarnation is the only
objective explanation of what we call fate and individual differences, one can
enter Sannyas at any age implying the
fact that the preparation was completed earlier and that earlier extends beyond this present Life. We have sannyasis like Shankara who became a travelling
mendicant at the tender age of sixteen. It is one of the duties of a mendicant
to wander without any apparent aim and they are called wandering monks or ramta sadhu. Any cultural observer is
actually a wandering monk and that is the reason why we always find that
wandering monks have captured cultural nuances the best way compared to
tourists, traders and peripatetic
teachers.
I
wanted to simulate, if I can say so the spirit of a wandering monk as I came
into this land and using the Stracheyan instrument of ignorance as an enabling
tool, I would act like a fool and relate the personal experiences taking
defense under the adjective intimate
and tarnish the noble subject of history as some might complain so.
North
of England greeted me with a chill which I knew had taken lots of tropical
lives earlier and for most of the Indian of earlier days, coming to England was
a question of physical survival versus the survival of one’s religious faith
because English food was equal enemy of Hindus and Muslim religion before and
since 1857 and it was not anything but English food habit that symbolically united Hindus and Muslims
for the first time in India!
Generation
of madhu-kabi used to come to England
after a sufficient exposure to Shakespeare, Milton, Homer (through his English
admirers including Chapman Keats and Shelley) Chaucer, Virgil, McCauley,
Wordsworth, Lamb and likes and they used to look for these symbolism in the
actual landscape. My generation has little to do with it, thanks to our
education system and except for re-cycled tourist attractions and car models
(this owes to liberalization of Indian economy since 1992) they have nothing to
neither observe nor match. One of the effects of English Education in India
during colonial times was to imbibe a tender love for one’s city (a honourable imitation from London Bridge) and best of Calcutta
citizens had it from the best of its practitioners. Even today, an aristocratic
Calcutta citizen speaks of its
city-sights with a tenderness and affection because it was taught to be a sign
of urbanity. The spirit of this city-love was perhaps one of the lasting
cultural heritages of crossing of horoscopes of London
and Calcutta and it finds its echo
in Suman Chatterjee’s classic lyric in Bengali – Garihatar More.
My
father has entrusted me the responsibility as well as assurance of reimbursing
the cost to visit Westminster Abbey and after having done this walking among
the dead, I went to pay my tribute to my childhood hero and favourite
Englishman – Mr. Sherlock Holmes Esquire at his Baker
Street home. Next, my horoscope’s pull took me to
Didcot where I met Mr. Andrew and his wife Susan for the first time even though
we have been in electronic communication for quite sometime. Mr. Andrew’s
grandfather was a tea-planter in Sylhet [now in Bangladesh]
and Silchar [now in South Assam in India]
during 1860s and it was his horoscope pull again that made him wonder to see those places through my grandfather’s eyes.
The eyes of mine that saw the Grecian Urn in British Museum the previous
afternoon was actually a camera fitted up into a box made from the clay of
Bengal but the internal organ that actually sees meaningfully into the output
of the camera is neither mine, nor Bengal’s but is an alienable heirloom to all
humanity as the Ode to Grecian Urn
contemplates over so beautifully. Under a tender light, Pastis and Red wine’s sweet glow, they narrated their story of the
birth and growth of one of their children – their home in a remote mountain
area in Southern France and as I was leaving their home, Susan embraced me like
a mother does to her son and making this Bengali forever indebted of getting
the proof what my native Scripture declares – Hark, my son – I dwell as Supreme Motherhood in all feminine forms in
the Universe.
Then
I went to Coventry to meet another
friend and co-worker on Sylheti culture – Ms. Kavita Gupta, a resident in England
for some thirty odd years but speaks and cooks purest Sylheti. It was an honour to know about the cultural issues that
shape and re-shape the immigrants in their adopted land and their aspirations
and anxieties. Calcutta features prominently in the discussion not only because
British Airways and Bangladesh Biman
(which is generally preferred because of additional 25 kg it allows as baggage
and physics calls it weight but in the culture scheme of things this is
carrying a bundle of curiosity through oceans) touches her but also for the
fact that just like a British soup has English, Scotch and Irish flavour in it,
Bengali sweet of Calcutta has variant mixtures of communities that make and
break Greater Bengal.
Then
to Birmingham where lives a sister of mine after getting married, not by
relation but being neighbours in Silchar for some sixty years. They are in
restaurant business, a virtual monopoly of Sylhetis and suffice to say this
much that the curries they prepare and excel has something to do with the
unseen mixture of admiration, anxiety, jealousy and longing they put into the
boiling excitation. There again, Calcutta
features for altogether different reasons. They observe the stark difference of
efficiency between Heathrow and Calcutta
Airport and the way officials
behave. They narrate with relish how, after landing at Immigration in Calcutta,
the situation dramatically changes as they take up their acquired pure British accent (as courtesy they
spoke in Bengali first with the official and received not a good response) and
the things changed immediately. But the relish has a tinge of sadness in it
because they also contemplate of having a home in Calcutta
for their old age.
In
London’s Hounslow area, I have my
old friend and colleague Mr. Deepak Sharma who is the Technical Head at the London office of the same Tata Company
I work for (another post-liberal India’s symptom of going global) in India.
This connection made London air
sweeter for me considering the painful or pleasant exchange rate of Pound and
Rupee, depending on which way the Queen or Mr. Gandhi is looking at. His flat
was my resting place and met some young Punjabi student there. There I met Mr.
Harpreet, meaning omni-pleasing - a
young man of barely twenty. He is a student and works harder than a Cabinet
Minister to earn his living and study costs. As an aside, he lives upto his
name and having learnt that I am coming from Scotland,
he arranged a Johhine Walker Blue Label
and the rest is silence.
I have an uncle in Calcutta
– a mellow old man who had a phenomenal ability of making you laugh using
ordinary conversation. He came to Calcutta
somewhere in 1942 from East Bengal and fell in a
life-long love with the city. He started his life helping his older brother in
setting up a Book Binding Business near College Street.
The older brother was a Graduate at that time but left the cushy Government job
to start a entrepreneur career. The venture had a
grand success. During 1960s, an Englishman came to their Press to get some of
his old books bound. He had promised to come back after a month to take them
back. He never came back. My uncle, quite an Anglophile and very systematic man
kept the package ready for some fifteen years. Neither the man came nor any
communication for the books. So around in 1987, my father came to know of this
incident and took the package to Silchar. I remember two of books in the package
– Collected Essays of Edmund Burke
and Decline and Fall of Roman Empire bound
in leather and I loved Mr. Burke’s language and I could only remember his
reference of ten thousand swords not coming off the scabbard of the French
nobility as a look of insult was thrown at the Queen of France. Mr. Gibbon
swept my feet away by his unforgettable starting which is still felt by the nations of the earth. In my bus journey, I
read Mr.Burke again after some thirteen years sitting in a bus bound from Glasgow
to London, rethinking about the
first reading in our sweet Silchar home. With Mr. Burke in my pocket, I
loitered in the Trafalgar Square
after seeing Waterloo Bridge
and as I walked casually in Waterfront, the book store, a strange hand of destiny
made me buy The Social Contract in
condensed form. In the evening I landed up in another bus with Mr. Burke in my
right and Mr. Roseau in my left (no
symbolic connection please in choice of pockets). They co-habited by my sides and
as I landed in Glasgow in a chilly
morning, I smiled at myself – little mischievously of being the carrier of
essential opposites
I
leave the job of documenting the historical relation between London
and Calcutta to the historians of
both cities – a task, which will require the labour of a Gibbon with the
steadfastness of Momsen. I also relinquish all claims of writing the breezy,
public-consumption oriented journalistic sweep that flows - to the happy
majority of writers that flourish in present literary weather in both cities.
And finally, I leave this intimate
history to those readers of mine who might have once experienced the profound
feeling expressed in these four lines:
The Moving Accident is not my Trade
To
freeze your blood I know no ready Art
It’s
my delight alone in summer shade
To
pipe a single song for a thinking heart.
A Tale of Two Cities – Part II
The time has now
come to go into the horoscope scheme of things and study how individual
horoscopes are related to city horoscopes. In finding the connection between London
and Calcutta, a strange image
haunts me, sketched by few lines in his novel Pather Panchali, by Bengali novelist Mr. Bibhuti Bhusahan where he
describes the ruins of a Nil-Kuthi [the
all powerful office, estate and judiciary of Indigo plantation that flourished
in Bengal and ravaged the land and its tillers] and little far away lies the
grave of the child of the Head Official of the Kuthi, long gone. The whole
place is in ruins, the grave also shares the overall sense of being lost,
forgotten, and uncared. Only light yellow flowers from the nearby sodal tree fall softly on the grave and
there, the poet of Pather Panchali
again became a chosen instrument of history that lies beyond it and uttered
something profound but in simple sweetness of Bengali - “sakale bhulia geleo baner ei sodal gach-ti sei bismrita engreg
sishuti-ke ekhono mane rakhiache.” [Everybody has forgotten, but this Tree of
the Forest has still remembered the long dead English
child]. The author of Pather Panchali was a friend as well as a mess-mate of
Nirad C Chaudhri in Mirzapur Street
in Central Calcutta while he was writing Pather
Panchali. One day, Nirad found the author simply telling that sometimes he
feels like Count Bezhukhov of Anna
Karenina and Nirad observes – The
possibility that there can be a connection of spirit of a Bengali Brahmin with
a Russian Count was something unknown to us in previous tradition. Nothing but
the new spirit that rages among us can be held responsible for that. The
author of Pather Panchali went on enriching Bengali Literature and Nirad lived
in Calcutta for thirty two years, shifted to Delhi and then adopted Oxford as
his last place and died past ninety, active as a writer in English and Bengali
almost upto his dying day.
In
another of his novel Ichamati,
Bibhuti Bhushan sketches the relation between Gaya-mem, a local Bengali woman and an Englishman, an Indigo-trader
somewhere in the early eighteenth century in the most beautiful part of the Jessore
district of then Undivided Bengal. In a poignant scene - as the Englishman was
dying in a far away Indian village, far away from home, Gaya sits by his side,
not connected by any legal or religious bond but by the pure and primitive bond
of flesh and blood, of man and woman and there he dies. The drops of tears
trickles down from Gaya’s face and in these tears, the poet transcends all
local relations, all national and foreign issues, all that divide us and
unsettle us, we find echo of one of the profoundest observer of human hearts – There is a reason of the heart which Reason
can never comprehend.
Far
away from the Ichamati and Bengal,
in one unusual chilling morning in February I stood near a grave in Bristol
cemetery where lies interned Raja Rammohan Roy since 1833. A rare man of East
and West whose true contribution is too early to predict as a historian of
twentieth century told while asked about the implication of French Revolution
of 1789. The chilling air from the Bay area blew hard and cold and it was a
historical tribute as well as a personal journey.
The
Tale of Two Cities – London and Calcutta,
as my readers now might have anticipated cannot be contained in the Art form of
an essay. It perhaps requires a novel in epic dimension and I leave here with
the hope that there will emerge, in God’s own time a wordsmith who will write
that tale and whichever city he might choose to be born, we will look for signs
in the skies to know that the hour has arrived. Until then, we can keep our
memories fresh and spirits high so that neither the tropical heat nor the
freezing cold can wither the infinite varieties of the Tale.
* madhu-kabi: kavi : poet. An endearing and short name for Michael
Madhu-sudan Dutta. He was born in Jessore, Bengal by the
river Kopothaksha – meaning eye of a
pigeon
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