Evolution of Bengaliness Across India and Bangladesh
Evolution of Bengaliness delves into how colonial rule reshaped Bengali identity, often overshadowing rich pre-colonial history. In the second part of his three part composition, Somjyoti Mridha explores the complexities of Bengali culture and modern amnesia.
Continuing our exploration, this article examines colonialism’s lasting impact on Bengali identity, culture, and memory.
The spread of English and the rising fortunes of the British in the Indian sub-continent had earlier provided easier jobs with fixed monthly salary for educated Bengali youth proficient in English during the colonial era; it moulded the mindset of the community. British, Armenian, Marwari and Gujarati traders filled the vacuum left by Bengali entrepreneurs who diverted their attention towards zamindari estates providing fixed income. In a rapidly changing economic scenario of a post-colonial India, it has greatly diminished the economic heft of the community.
It is rather ironic that British colonization, its cultural ramifications and subsequent negotiations of the dominant cross-section of the Bengalis have emerged as the determining factor of contemporary Bengali identity and culture, completely disregarding the pre-colonial history/culture of the region.
How is it that two hundred years of British rule (1757-1947) is more consequential than five hundred years of Islamic rule during the Sultanate and Mughal era (1204 -1757) or four hundred years of the Pala Dynasty (750-1161) with all its cultural glory.
A General Amnesia
There is a general amnesia about the socio-political and cultural achievements of these glorious pre-colonial periods. There is a need to interrogate the cultural contours of this development whereby a period of servitude is recognized by the community as a golden era.
The ‘glorious’ history of the Bengalis during the colonial period is a history of collaboration and servitude. Most of the cultural icons including historical figures with supposed nationalist credentials were collaborators of the East India Company and subsequently of the British crown in some sense or the other.
What is also interesting is the fact that the cultural memory of colonization is restricted to the advent of colonial modernity and cosmopolitan urbanity of colonial Calcutta. Colonial hangover is so prominent in the city that Victoria Memorial Hall, built in the memory of Queen Victoria, continues to be a landmark architectural edifice of Kolkata; a new miniature Big Ben has been constructed to realize the present Chief Minister’s dream of transforming Kolkata into London.
Public discourse on urban infrastructure or civic amenities always brings forth the absolutely illogical comparison of Kolkata with London. There is curious amnesia about the atrocities perpetrated by British colonizers. The great Bengal famines of 1770 and 1943 artificially created by the machinations of empire building significantly depleted the population of the province. These historical moments of humanitarian crisis have been completely wiped out of public memory. The destruction of the globally famous Dacca Muslin textile under the aegis of East India Company is also a forgotten episode in collective memory.
Nostalgia for the “Golden Era”
Nostalgia for the ‘golden’ era of the 19th century has emerged as a popular cultural trope in Bengali literature, cinema and culture signifying amnesia about the profound sense of disenfranchisement, cultural servitude and precarious existential conditions of most Bengalis during the colonial period. This overarching sense of nostalgia for a period of political subjugation may be due to the loss of pre-eminence of the Bengalis in education, cultural sphere and government jobs in post-colonial India.
Bengali cultural icons from the period known as Bengal Renaissance still have a lot of cultural relevance in contemporary West Bengal and Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore always has a place of pride in contemporary Bengali literary discourse. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee have greater cultural relevance in contemporary West Bengal than any contemporary writer.
Satyajit Ray and Subhas Chandra Bose have the same stature in cinematic and political discourses respectively. Ray is generally considered a Renaissance man though he was born in 1921. Tagore and Ray are touted as popular icons of cultural modernity. The culture industry in Bengal also possesses a curious myopia about other literary icons like Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Manik Bandopadhyay, Shankar or Ritwick Ghatak while concentrating on the global success of Tagore.
Renaissance in the evolution of Bengaliness
Bengal Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon may have really influenced a very small cross-section of Bengalis, mostly urban Bengalis living in and around Calcutta during the 19th century. The epithet of ‘Renaissance man’ has a much broader application and longer after-life. It has been historically applied to cultural icons like Soumitra Chatterjee and others.
Literary modernity/nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th century has been reconfigured to frame the contours of Bengali sub-nationalism in post -colonial West Bengal without apotheosizing new literary-cultural icons. Literary modernity continued to be constitutive of Bengaliness since the 19th century. The decision by the Trinamool Congress government to play Rabindra Sangeet tunes on traffic signals in Kolkata in the recent past may be considered as a case in point.
In fact, Bengali cultural discourses seem to have an overdose of anodyne nostalgia for the 19th century, exposing contemporary decay and devolution. Of course, the Bengalis of Bangladesh have a completely different trajectory since it is a Bengali majority nation-state founded on the basis of linguistic nationalism in the 1970s.
Emergence of ‘Bhadralok’
It is crucial to understand that fruits of colonial modernity were enjoyed by a small cross-section of the Bengali society which primarily comprised the Kolkata/Dhaka centric, upper-caste, upper middle class, urban Bengalis labelled as the Bhadralok. While there is no singular definition of the Bhadralok, yet it ubiquitously refers to Bengalis touched by colonial modernity as opposed to the traditional orthodoxy termed as Babus during the 19th century.
Bhadraloks emerged as the dominant section of Bengali society with the aid of Anglicized education which opened up channels of social mobility transgressing hierarchies of caste/class/region thereby modernizing Bengali society to a certain extent.
The majority of rural gentry, peasants, the urban poor and people belonging to the marginalized castes were outside the purview of colonial modernity therefore in extension from the ambit of dominant forms of nationalism spearheaded by Congress. Post-colonial Bengal continued the tradition of excluding every segment of society apart from the educated Bhadralok.
The dominance of left politics in Bengal since the 1970s kept the delusion of revolution alive among the masses while providing electoral dividends for the left parties. The cradle of Hindu nationalism of the19th century became the fort of revolutionary /democratic left politics which became inextricably associated with Bengali identity.
To be Continued in Part 3
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