WHO ARE THE BENGALIS?
And why, the question in the headline begs the response, should anyone other than Bengalis care? Sudeep Chakravarti, a journalist and prize-winning writer of both fiction and experimental non-fiction, appears to argue in the prologue to his new book, The Bengalis, that to the Bengali it is a matter of supreme indifference if anyone cares or not. The Bengali is a vain, querulous creature, self-absorbed enough, as Chakravarti puts it, to view the non-Bengali as “closer to non-person than persona non grata... ethnically, intellectually, culturally and historically your every not-Bengali fibre, provenance, present and future may be construed by the Bengali chauvinist as being one of colossal insignificance”.
Chakravarti is, of course, writing with his eyebrow raised. As he makes clear, on the phone, he has spent much of his life as a wandering Bengali— boarding school in Rajasthan; professional life in Delhi; and working as an independent writer and researcher in Goa and, latterly, in a village on the Tamil Nadu side of the border with Kerala. “It has brought,” he says, of his itinerant life, “this question of Bengaliness versus not-Bengaliness into sharp relief.” It is not quite the question, though, that animates this book. The divisions that exercise Chakravarti are not between Bengalis and not-Bengalis but those that striate what he calls the “Banglasphere”.
Quoting the archetypal self-hating Bengali, Nirad Chaudhuri, Chakravarti notes that Bengalis are among the “finest virtuosi of factiousness”. The most obvious manifestation of this is, for Chakravarti, the divide between Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims, “the unity of language and shared purpose rent by religion, a process that began several hundred years ago, became more pronounced during the Raj and has not stopped growing since Partition.” For those who might roll their eyes at the vanity implicit in a book-length study of oneself, at what might turn into a paean to middle-class liberal Bengaliness—all macher jhol and erudite adda—The Bengalis is a reminder of the horrors of Bengali history and the horrors Chakravarti imagines lie ahead.
The 1905 partition of Bengal, Chakravarti writes, marks the beginning of Ogni Jug, our ‘Age of Fire’, the embers of which still hiss and crackle. Vande Mataram, from Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, Chakravarti points out, “a call to arms against the British and, at another level, for Hindu revivalism rang out loudest in western Bengal.” Its echo, well over a century later, means, Chakravarti says on the phone, that “West Bengal could tilt very far to the right in the not so distant future, largely aligned with the national project.” It would be in keeping with “partition politics” as practised in Bengal since Curzon, and in keeping with Bengali radicalism as an extreme response to and disavowal of the current government, the current status quo. West Bengal, then, would mirror what is happening to its eastern half, teetering “on the edge of an abyss, buffeted by highly emotive positions—the extremism of liberals and the extremism of extremists”.
As it must be, The Bengalis is a sprawling book, threatening always to spill over like the unpredictable rivers that has made the land synonymous with bounty and destruction. Its expansiveness is a counter to the chauvinistic pettiness that Chakravarti fears could be the “unmaking of the Bengali”.
“West Bengal could tilt very far to the right in the not so distant future, largely aligned with the national project.” SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI