An Intimate History of Bengal
BOOK VII
We find it opportune to pay our tribute to
Niharranjan Roy, author of the monumental Bangaleer
Ithihaas – a work whose illumination radiates in its all glory in spite of
the great intellectual gloom that surrounds Contemporary Bengal.
He
wrote in grand style and it is duty of every literate Bengali to be aware of
the work. It is not possible to communicate the true essence other than in
original but let us listen to the scholar himself as to why he undertook such
an enterprise - I was inspired in this
work not by the quest of knowledge. The spirit of my early youth and the
passionate intoxication to serve my motherland has made me a wanderer in this
land. I traveled far and wide and in these travels in fields, rivers, farmer’s
huts, in the waters of Padma-Meghna-Surma, I discovered a land and fell in love
with the land and its people. This love for the land and the people has
inspired my work. This work owes itself to that love – to establish this love
into the hard and reasoned ground of Knowledge so that it may broaden our
horizon. Our country does not lie in the royal chronicles nor in the dead man’s
tales but in the love and lives of people. I tried to capture that living
tradition, not the skeleton of the dead.
This work, a truly lifetime achievement was dedicated
by Niharranjan to all living and dead, known and unknown scholars who have
traveled in front of him. In a grand humility, he could admit that he has not
done anything new but tried to bring coherence in the existing material and
works. Rightfully so and what Gibbon did for Roman Empire, Niharranjan did for
Bengal’s History and what is most striking in his work is a gentleness, a cool,
winding rivulet like narration where facts are not diluted by digression nor
logical chain is weakened by verisimilitude.
The purpose to remember this work is to mourn the
general loss of this passion in the intellectual life of Bengal. This noble passion, this mystic love is at the root of all great
individual and collective enterprise. An immediate outcome of this feeling is shradhha – a state of mind which made
Nachiketa, the boy seeking Lord Yama, the God of Death. It is this state of mind which pushes us
towards greatness, it is that sublime
faith mixed with heroic conviction that made Swamiji declare – Give me hundred such young men and I will
change the world. Without this Life
is not worth-living. Swamiji warned Young Bengal of the general loss of shraddha and he was merciless in
pointing out that this lack of seriousness is at the root of our all weakness
as individual and community.
Intellectual Life in Bengal is intimately related with the intellectual life of India for the simple reason that it was Bengal which in nineteenth century and later guided the development of modern
Indian consciousness. The true Calcuttan
prototype, in spite of his phenomenal wooliness of self-ego and lost sense of
direction in all that matters can claim this and quite truly that the city of
Calcutta produced some of the personalities who cannot be compared with anyone
before. They were markedly different. They were ambassadors of very new ideas
and novel in the implementations. Take
Swami Vivekananda – he belonged to the oldest monastic orders of the world, he
was as great a saint that adorns the Vedic Scriptures which we chant in all
religious rituals but he forbade the culture of ash-smeared sadhus sitting cross-legged, stressed heavily on an efficient, aesthetically
beautiful organization. Take Tagore – made a jungle into first Indian Resort. Take
Bankim Chandra – the first cultural historian of India who happened to be a novelist.
Where lies the fountain head
of Bengal’s intellectual life? Where from intellectuals and
thinking men have sucked their nourishment? The answer will elude us unless we
see the present more closely and there from we may retrace back because
intellectual life of a community is a continuous affair and outside exigencies
may affect them but the thread of continuity remains. If that were not so, political
geography and cultural geography would have been one and substitutable. But
simple observation convinces us of the contrary.
To
be brief, the Intellectual Life of Bengal is completely related with the Rise
and fall of world empires. Or in more plain terms, intellectuals of Bengal are highly sensitive cultural particles that had that uncanny precision
of aligning with the dominant intellectual movement of the world. Just like
magnetic fields can act-at-a-distance, so for a Bengali intellectual and it is
this property that provides the answer for the great international concessions Bengal is always ready to display. However, we observe a sense of inertia
associated with this alignment. Let us take step by step and retrace ourselves
by steps of 25 years, a time span long enough to observe a trend and short
enough to make predictions.
The
heady days of Congress and Freedom are over. The indigenous element is a spent
force. Bangladesh is born and Emergency experience was quite fresh.
The Power Centre at Delhi was undergoing bouts of unrest and Bengal was slowly sidelined. The land that bled white in the Struggle was
finding a slow flight of capital from its interior and it was the time for
something new. England, poorer in balance sheet of finance and energy was
fading fast and her worldwide prestige in the decline. So declined the star of
a part of intelligentsia in Bengal. New, new is
the star of Communism and while Russia was highly involved in the very complex Cold War, Bengal embraced it as quickly as it embraced the Imperialist virtues and
vices. Overnight almost; a cadre-population emerged who could be immediately
recognized by a badge like jhola or
bag containing food, clothes and leaflets. Their leaders were honorable men and
they traveled across the country and dreamt of
a classless society. Their intentions noble, their spirit high and the cultural
and intellectual output of that period is part of the culture. However, the
inertia-factor started manifesting itself within a decade and the Marxist mind
was clouded by feudal predilections. In a remarkable power struggle that
ensued, the inertial movement could not be held further and first there was a
silence and then phase-shifted uttering. The internal radar of Bengali
intellectuals registered the international events and was confused for the time
being as by habit they knew only one way of tracking and only one source. The
signal went weaker and at last completely lost. The convenience of single-minded tracking sans
alternatives made the faculty of exploring alternatives a forgotten art and off
came the crisis. A spectre never seen in
this land descended and that was off an intellectual vaccuo and in its
periphery was unknown faces and voices, half-audible and the centre sucked
everything inside a memory less world.
There
is a proverb in Bengali – the greatest darkness rests below the lamp. In the
sixties and seventies, it was made something like a theorem that Progressive
means Left and Lord has forgotten to prefix leftist before the word intellectual. This hubris had left two enduring influences. As my friend Rajeev
Sreenivasan says it so sweetly – The history started the day Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. This kind of undignified simplification could
not but produce an amnesia regarding the local traditions and cultural deposits
that Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity precipitated through individual
or combined interactions. This brought about an internal hollowness and the
moment foreign element went weak, there was nothing to fall back on. The search by the so-called intellectuals for
something to fall back on took grotesque proportion and it was also the time,
Capital was making its slow but steady movement out of the land. Young
intellectuals of the land, juvenile as they were, uttered – China’s Chairman
is our Chairman and except in India perhaps, they would have been shot by the nearest
wall for daring to write such treacherous, foolhardy as it was
proclamations. Bengal’s intellectual hubris culminated into such mainstream short-sightedness.
The greater problem was the semi-permanent hardwiring of such notions in the
psyche of that generation and as time passes, the land pays heavily for
that.
Young
Bengal, for whom I write and I am qualified to say that I also share some of their
perplexities and concerns. Let the dead
bury their dead. Let us cleanse ourselves in the fire of exile, despair,
hopelessness and dilemma and let our suffering be the heritage of next
generations. I am no scholar nor do I want to be. I am simply curious and
passionate to see this land rising like Phoenix from her ashes. I am waiting to see that Living
Personality who will command her to come to the living. I feel a thrill in
blood when I visualize that nameless spirit whose call Young Bengal will listen.
I am thinking of the lion-hearted personalities who crossed Himalayas to teach China of the message of Buddha. I see before me those intrepid sailors who
crossed oceans to connect trade, people and ideas. Rub your eyes and look back
as far as your memory can see and you will see a glorious procession of culture
and tradition that have made what we are.
None is to be left out. When we look around our country, we see how
destitute we have become. Young Bengal, don’t be foolish. Don’t think that just
because you have a mob behind you, world will respect you. History of all ages
teaches us this simple lesion: To earn respect a community needs to have
wealth, knowledge and culture and these three are interdependent and culture,
most intangible of the three remains at the centre and controls everything
else.
Look
at the intellectual harvest of our previous generations: wealth has fled the
land. Except for some tricks or chalakis,
there is nothing to mention even. As for culture, the land is a loveless
place where an average Calcutta resident
is hell-bent upon convincing you that all statistics point to the fact
that they are well-off than most of the country. These statistics and figures
however can only be found in the impenetrable bosom of a Fuehrer like entity, however scaled down by general scaling down of
everything else here – in Local Committee.
This Land, in its passionate zeal for equalization banished heroes from
its urban legends and the day Satyajit Ray died in Calcutta, taking cue from our intellectuals; we may say that
the last Pillar has fallen. With Ray
gone, the last true intellectual beacon of the magnitude of a light-house has
faded. There are lamps and fireflies but they underline the gloom more than
they illuminate.
But
that was not so. Bengal was a powerhouse of ideas and enterprise. From their
small houses as well as mansions, dhoti-clad Bengalis dreamt of dreams for
which all noble souls of past and present would consider them their brothers.
Her teachers were revered and now – teachers and students are both members of
the same Committee that has more power than anything else, nominal as well as
actual. Her healers and doctors were known everywhere and in any film, the
doctor-saab was always a Bengali. Now, even the poorest of man in the land
tries to avoid government hospital. Her poets and wordsmiths were treasured and
now the next generation could not protect the material ensign her greatest poet
received from petty burglary or theft as they call it. I would not make the
list longer. Young Bengal knows it but what they don’t know is this: we carry this dark tragedy on our head. The
unpardonable sin of defiling geniuses is on our forehead. The crime of
de-civilizing one of the most-civilized populations of the world has made us a fugitive
like the creator of Frankenstein. We need to change our orbit altogether.
What
is that new orbit? It is actually not new. It has always been an old and simple
old thing. We need to re-think. We need to be cool and be full of humility. We have
to be man enough to learn from those whom we taught once. We would at least look around us and tell our
deepest point- What sickly existence is
this!
We
have to be Leader in the true sense and the way world respects and understands
it. Strength always respects strength. Even from this low state where we are,
we need to burn this living faith that all these are like nightmares and Bengal has to rise again. She has to rise not by borrowing fashionable hubris
but synthesizing her own inner dynamics. Brothers and Sisters of Bengal let us
be blunt and blunt we should be. We have
fallen and we cannot hold anything responsible other than us. If we could fall
this much by our own karma we may rise again through reverse karmic cycle.
This
message was given by one of your greatest intellectuals and you may have
clothes over your eyes but this intellectual of yours taught the world and the
world listened with reverence. In
writing the Intellectual History of the Land, I can only point to the leonine
figure of Swami Vivekananda because if you can and only can look at his eyes
for long, you will see your entire intellectual history. That is the true soaring of intellect – the
sharpened being and not the petite chalakis,
you have been asked to master by your political masters.
Brothers
and Sisters of Bengal - believe that you are the momentous instrument of
history and we have half a century of mortal existence with us. Live and work wherever you are, profess
whatever faith – we are history’s children and that is sufficient qualification
to build a new intellectual history. Tamoso
ma Jyotirgamyo - Let us take from the Gloom of Ignorance to the Effulgence
of Knowledge.
In BOOK VIII, we will examine the Professional Life of Contemporary Bengal.
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