Existential crisis
The present existential dilemmas of the bhadralok seem less focussed on the contours of identity. Judging from whispered conversations, the preoccupation is with survival
One of the appealing features of pop sociology is to identify a few disparate incidents and elevate these to a social trend. On many occasions, the attempts to discover a social phenomenon seem woefully contrived. However, on other occasions, the anecdotal approach turns out to be remarkably prescient.
The three months of agreeable weather in Calcutta — the proverbial ‘season’— have also become a season of intellectual indulgence. At one extreme, there are the rarefied ‘Lit Fests’ that have mushroomed all over India. These appeal to a small but influential clutch of Indians still at ease with the English language. At the other end of the spectrum is the hugely popular Kolkata Boi Mela— a fortnight-long festival that attracted 32 lakh visitors and yielded book sales of some Rs 32 crore — where the concerns are clearly more authentic.
Attempting to discern common patterns in the galaxy of interests that appeal to the middle classes of the metropolis is a forbidding project. This is more so because there are clear political preferences of the organisers that range from celebrating the Left-Liberal consensus of the Anglosphere to flattering the poetic pretensions of a chief minister. Then there are the quirky diversions. It was intriguing, for example, to detect an extraordinarily long queue at the Book Fair before a modest stall that was selling a book on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose that, as far as I am aware, bypassed the exacting scrutiny of the gatekeepers of the literary world.
At the risk of misreading smoke signals, I was struck by a theme that is resonating among the ‘thinking’ sections of the Bengali middle classes although its reflection may also appear among those who prefer TV serials to the printed word. The world of the Bengali bhadralok seems to be preoccupied with bouts of navel-gazing (or introspection if you so prefer) over its future. The publication of Bangalir Mon (Mind of the Bengalis), a collection of articles on various aspects of Bengal’s cultural and social life, by the retired civil servant, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, was the trigger for a round of deliberations on the future of the Bengali babu. From the social media, I discovered another recent publication on the future of Bengalis by a distinguished former professor at Calcutta University. And finally, I was a speaker at a festival of global Bengalis where the intriguing question, ‘Does Bengali imply bhadralok?’, was posed and addressed with some humorous banter.
To equate this bout of self-indulgence with the present epidemic of identity in national politics will be misleading. Till radicalism of multiple shades of scarlet broke the back of West Bengal’s economy and precipitated a decline that has not been checked even after five decades, there was a loose agreement over what constituted the bhadralok.
Apart from common cultural assumptions, there was also a loose bonding around the three upper castes that made up the bhadralokcore in the final decades of the raj. When Birendranath Sasmal, a celebrated nationalist leader from Midnapore district, made a bid to become the mayor of Calcutta Corporation — then the nerve centre of Congress politics — he was quite emphatically rejected by a coalition of the established leaders. Although it was never said explicitly, Sasmal being a Mahishya appears to have disturbed the social consensus centred on Brahmin-Baidya-Kayastha dominance.
This metropolis-mofussil divide still persists in unspoken ways. But the narrow exclusivity of the earlier, pre-1947 bhadralok has been broken, not least owing to the democratisation of public life. The enlightened Bengali would love to believe that the earlier bar on including Muslims in the bhadralok fold has disappeared. But while this is partially true, much of the cultural idiom of West Bengal is still Hindu, notwithstanding decades of secular engineering by, first, the Left and, then, the Trinamool regime.
The issue is further complicated by the ambivalence of the Muslim middle classes towards bhadralok-isation. Recently, the West Bengal CPI(M) general-secretary, Mohammed Salim, berated me for referring to him as Salim saheb while others were referred to as babu. The point is well taken, and while I will in future refer to him as Salimbabu, I wonder how many other Bengali Muslims would like to be honoured similarly. Bangladesh, for example, has been yo-yoing since 1947 over prioritising its Islamic or Bengali identity.
The present existential dilemmas of the bhadralok seem less focussed on the contours of identity. Judging from whispered conversations, the preoccupation is with survival.
It is largely a question of numbers. The past five decades — coinciding with the truncation of West Bengal’s economy and shrinking opportunities — have seen a brain drain of the bhadralok. The Bengali communities that have emerged in the centres of growth — whether in Bengaluru, Noida, Gurugram and Pune or in the United States of America — are undeniably bastions of bhadraloklife. Yet what haunts Bengalis is the fact that a future generation, while carrying Bengali names and some hints of their parents’ culture, is likely to be permanently lost to thebhadralokworld. Those familiar with the agonising identity concerns of the Jewish diaspora in the US will find similarities with what the expatriatebhadralokcommunities are slowly confronting.
Reflections of this existential concern are to be found within Calcutta in particular. A big cause of concern is the skewed demographic profile of the city — its appearance of being a large retirement home on the one hand and the shrinking number of Hindus in the surrounding periphery on the other. The persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh and the religious transformation of districts adjoining Calcutta are being seen as ominous. To the bhadralokcommunities, they indicate a grim picture of decline and growing irrelevance.
Ideally, these concerns should have been reflected in the public discourse. Alas, what is discussed in private gatherings and among friends is viewed as being intellectually unworthy and politically dangerous. From being naturally argumentative and difficult, the bhadralokappears to have retreated to timidity, overcome by fear of neighbourhood goons with political patronage.
The obsession with decline — at a gathering in Calcutta Club, Alapanbabuinvoked the imagery of an Edward Gibbon ruminating before the ruins of a fallen civilisation in Rome— may also be seen to be arising frombhadralokself-censorship. Redemption is never possible unless the magnitude of the fall is honestly acknowledged.
Source: The Telegraph online
