Book review: Pains, gains of Indian Renaissance told by m©lange of frescoes

Chennai: “But Gandhi arrived in Bengal, when so many others in India would not….There is no exact record of how many people died in Noakhali and in adjoining Tipperah district from October 1946. Estimates range from 500 (Muslim League sources) to 50,000 (other sources)…..Even before he reached Noakhali, on his way from Kolkata, Gandhi was emotionally battered. The fires of Kolkata had spread to Noakhali and then on to Bihar…..Gandhi sensed it was as bad as it could get.”

“Is counter-communalism any answer to the communalism of which Congressmen have accused the Muslim League?” he asked of his colleagues. “Is it Nationalism to seek barbarously to crush 14 per cent of the Muslims in Bihar?”

While capturing some of those most poignant and dramatic days when Mahatma Gandhi was in Bengal to quell the ‘communal madness’ in the wake of the pre-partition riots, writer-author Sudeep Chakravarti, who had served in senior journalistic positions earlier, in this latest work, ‘The Bengalis – A Portrait of a Community’, was far from touching a raw nerve. The cycle of violence then until “finally cooled to embers”, was the culmination of a wider socio-historical process of which the community he has chronicled in this work played a big role.

Combining the nonchalance of a professional scribe with empathies for the suffering masses as someone who has also seen some of these ‘Bangla stories’ from within since his younger days, Sudeep Chakravarti dwells deep into various facets of what has gone to make up the Bengali identity over the recent centuries, not just through a nostalgic lens, but has been equally critical of Bengal society.

For the author, Gandhi may have been the ‘Brief Bengali’ as he puts it in the section from where the above quoted passage appears. Gandhi was at the receiving end of much criticism in Bengal, the land of the fiery patriot Subhas Chandra Bose.

After all, the modern Indian Renaissance, substantially a Kolkata-centric Bengal Renaissance had produced such dazzling array of figures from social reformers like Raja Ramohun Roy, the universalistic and austerely cosmopolitan Brahmo Samaj he had inspired, Ishwara Chandra Vidyasagar, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, defiant contrarians like Chittaranjan Das, M.N. Roy and Rash Behari Bose, genius of a physicist in Satyend-ranath Bose who was compared to Einstein, three Nobel Laureates so far – Tagore, Amartya Sen for Economics and Mohammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank microfinance fame in Bangladesh that has played a big part in women’s empowerment, to Satyajit Ray in film making,- it is said even C V Raman doing all his pioneering work in Kolkata made a big difference than if had got stuck in old Madras.

The list is a heady mix of variety and excellence to grab the crown of chauvinism. But Sudeep has commendably taken the ‘Bengalis’ story right up to Mamata Didi, to a higher, historically self-critical level, blending scholarship with lucid style, in drawing the big picture of a vibrant, linguistically bonded culture of romanticists, football lovers, foodies and travel adventurists. As the author says, “Gandhi was also breathtaking. This was a man from Gujarat, by way of South Africa,…charioteering of India’s collective nationalism…..At one stage, Gandhi had even said he had “become a Bengali for all intents and purposes.” Sudeep Chakravarti goes on to add: “I would put my neck on the line and say this Gujarati, who claimed for some weeks to be Bengali, whom many Bengalis still love to hate for his dislike of Subhas Bose-, did more for Bengal and Bengalis in those darkest months in 1946, than did millions of Bengalis who let their leaders mix rationale with religion.” …”50 years later, I went looking for Gandhi, that Brief Bengali, amid the detritus of history, to understand better his presence,” confides the author.

Simultaneously a chronicler’s journey, weaved in with his personal family anecdotes, Sudeep has functionally circumscribed his fluid landscape with a series of what may be called sub-books- his Book I starting with ‘Genesis and More’, Book-II is filled with ‘Culture Chronicles’ and Book-III with what the author calls ‘Age of Fire’. His emphasis on the ‘Bangla phonetics’ with diacritical marks all through, is to bring out the flavour of a much-talked about South Asian language, even among the NRIs’ abroad. Sudeep Chakravarti somewhat dons the hat of a later Wittgenstein in telling us that a language when relished in the way it is spoken is a world in itself.

So, the ‘Bengali’ identity is not just about Kolkata and West Bengal as we know it, right from the good old Presidency College, the famous La Martiniere School which the ‘Bournvita Quiz’ popularised to a whole new post-Independent generation of Indians, other venerable institutions like the Calcutta Medical College, Calcutta High Court, University of Calcutta that was started alongside Madras and Bombay Universities in 1857, the Indian Institute for Cultivation of Science right up to Jadavpur University, etc., not to forget the changing face of Alimuddin Street that has housed Bengal’s principal Left bastion for decades.

Amid all these sociological forays, a deeper point that Sudeep Ckaravarti drives home is that the ‘Bengali’ identity is as much about the once-lowly Bangladesh, which has now made handsome strides economically, particularly in textiles and garments. “Bangladesh is a country that was born because it wanted to be Bengali”, writes the author.

And yet the integration of the ‘Banglaspehre’ as he puts it, is not so automatic, even if a common language and culture binds them.

Even the famous ‘Badralokh’ is found to be so finely graded - across class, caste and religion, in both West Bengal and East Bengal which is now Bangladesh.
As a “land of liberal thought”, diverse streams and sub-streams, reflecting the underlying commonality among a rich diversity, have made the modern ‘Bengali’ identity over centuries. There is now also a fear that very identity could be ‘unmade’.

“It is through our openness to the world and cultures other than our own, that we have evolved our Bengaliness that is so distinctive,” writes the author, adding, towards the end that the ‘continuing renaissance’ that Bengal has flagged would require the reaffirmation of that spirit of cosmopolitan open-mindedness. This last word is not just relevant for Bengal, but for the entire country now.