A bhadrolok is someone taken to be urbane and informed, with genteel manners and liberal political values, whose authority derives not from class or birth but from having attained a cultural referentiality through education and through participation in enlightened debates. Here, two books by two eminent bhadralok Bengalis are being reviewed by another – not eminent but self- confessed – bhadralok Bengali. Does this reinforce the self-assured, self-governing, self-congratulatory and hermetically sealed world of the Bengali bhadralok? It apparently does. Why? Because the world of the bhadralok, peppered with actual and mythical stories of their triumphant exploits – artistic and intellectual rather than military and vulgar – over other collectives of the Sapiens should, in scale and scope, only be comprehensible to one of them. Or should it? If these two books are to be believed, then we do have a route of escape from the tyranny of this impression. Like that famous Bengali Subhas Bose, who escaped the tyranny of oppression. Escape how, pray? The putative answer: the bhadralok must let go of themselves, they must emerge into the light of forbearance and egalitarianism, and agree to see the world as it is and not through lenses coloured by layers of filters. Both these books, by providing a very wide-ranging history and conceptual and critical schema of the Bengali people, make a strong case for that escape. You may even want to call it liberation.

To that end, both books are a history of those ‘filters’ generated by the giants in every sphere of life who roamed much of the land of Bengal – unified, undivided Bengal – in the 19th and early 20th century, if not also earlier. There were so many of them and some so utterly dazzling, their presence so commanding, that most Bengalis have, over the last century, grown up, to quote the literary critic Harold Bloom, under great anxiety of influence. Some have been able to transcend these myriad anxieties; some have subverted them; some have managed to live with them without despondency and with humour. I would like to include the two authors, Sudeep Chakavarti and Parimal Ghosh, as part of the third group. But a large number, probably those that have engaged the least with the real métier of that greatness, remain perpetually besotted by the lost utopia of Bengaliness. This is most certainly truer of the Hindu Bengalis because Partition had cut up their geographies of lordship and thrown them into what seems to be an endless cycle of historical mutations. But, the authors say, if the Bengali Hindu bhadralok are battling the ghosts of their past, the Muslim Bengali bhadralok is throttled by the poltergeist of radical Islamisation that is their most dreaded future.

In their own way, the authors are most suitable for their kind of probe. Ghosh, whose declared plan is to zero in on a period and the making of a certain archetype – the bhadralok – brings an erudite historian’s eye to his task; while Chakravarti, whose ambition is daring, proffers a roving writer’s haptic sense of place and time. WB Yeats, that famous Irishman and from a Bengali’s point of view the admirer and then enemy of our great Tagore, concluded his famous poem ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ thus: “I have spread my dreams under your feet;/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” The two books tread on similar dreams of purported Bengali greatness, but they do not tread softly.

Ghosh, a recently -retired historian from Calcutta University largely concentrates on Bengal this side of the border and looks inwards, harshly. His work is structured, each of his chapters taking up a theme or two concerning Bengali cultural life: literature, theatre, the detective novel, football and the idea of the neighbourhood in south Calcutta, for example. He unravels the lore of the upper-caste, Hindu, middle-class, urbane bhadralok, who through their self-defining contours of culture and taste, ever so proud in the sagacity, aggressively looked to expand their base. Ghosh suggests that like any empire at its territorial climax before the inevitable fall, bhadralok ambition may have endangered its very survival.

Chakravarti was a former journalist who is now a full-time writer. He has contributed, with extensive barefoot travels to various corners of this vast country, to a vital polemic about the state of India’s chequered democracy. In this book, Chakravarti embraces the encyclopaedic mode, sauntering effortlessly between the past and present of his subject. He travels, he sees, he talks, he smells, he reads and he veers into the alleys, ever more dark, that make up the fascinating, crisscrossing networks on which Bengalis have left their imprint, whether willingly or not. Hence his Bengal, rendered in prose that is often biting, is all-encompassing: two Bengals and the broader Bengali presence – the diaspora, the migrant, the refugee – which, taken together, he dubs the ‘Banglasphere’.

Both of them are scholarly in their pursuits even if Ghosh’s work can be called more programmatic in nature and hence more trimmed and controlled. Chakravarti’s oeuvre appears, in contrast, free-flowing, unregulated and unmindful of the peril of becoming perhaps too voluble. Neither of them, however – and thankfully so! – go about their work of unravelling memory either in a fashion haphazard and distracted or in the manner of a stern and arid academic interrogation. Personal histories, anecdotal family legends, partisan memoirs and reflection that can only be called private in a certain way, merge seamlessly with the moving, crowded, embattled course of the social, the cultural and the historical. And this is how it should be, especially when the subject of enquiry is not just of ethnographic interest or a territorial platitude but a vigorously lived, fiercely debated, and often inescapable, fortuity.

But space is also crucial. Walter Benjamin, that eloquent German philosopher, ever in thrall to Paris, considered it the capital of the 19th century — giving a quantum of space the fulcrum of time. And so is the Calcutta of the bhadralok the capital of Bengal’s intellectual aspiration and interventionism. Whatever happened – good, bad and ugly – happened in Calcutta, in that much-loved, much-maligned but ever-irrepressible city of ours. More than Dhaka or any other town of the global Bengali stratosphere, Calcutta is the city that remains the fountainhead of the elusive, messy idea of the Bengali and also, perhaps, the epitome of its retreat from global and national importance.

Probing any ‘identity’ is a risky enterprise. Too thin a definition will not hold; too substantive a one would veer towards righteous authority. And the second is precisely why Bengalis are so often reviled in other parts of the country. Chakravarti is conscious of this and in the first half of the book he seems to be keen to sequester his probing from any act of stereotyping that may creep into his arsenal. Hence, from time to time he invokes the ribald lingua-franca of the average, short-sighted Bengali, positioning himself at the opposite end of the garrulous self- importance that Bengalis often reserve for themselves. The problem can be gauged from the patronising phrase non- Bengali (O-Bangali), used in both Bangla and English profusely and often without self-consciousness. It is a singular, all-encompassing form of invective that is reserved for the “linguistically and culturally challenged”. Anyone who has travelled outside Bengal would be drawn to the wonder and diversity that is India; the wondrous wealth of great folklore, fiction, poetry, design, fashion, music and cinema in other parts of India. Within Bengal, one remains shackled to one’s past, unable to see that the world has moved on to happier and often more productive grounds. Ghosh recalls the sheer ignorance that Hindu Bengalis reserve even for their Muslim brethren who share the same language, refusing to acknowledge what he calls “epistemological apartheid”. Chakravarti’s visits to India’s Northeast reinforce this claim. His very edifying section on Tripura, historical ‘playground’ for the Brahmins of yore and then of this dreaded sense of sovereignty.

The irony is that the inwardness sits uneasily on principled adventurism that has never shied away from embracing the new. Chakravarti goes as far back as Atisa Dipankar, the 10th-century wanderer who had left a mark on Tibetan Buddhism so indelible that he is still revered. Both authors – and rightfully so – ponder seriously over Rammohan Roy, who was both an actual and intellectual cartographer and set the template for Bengali cosmopolitanism. Roy’s embrace of Persian and Arabic, unfortunately, remained an exception, but his European- ism was energetically followed upon. Rabindranath Tagore is, of course, the most enduring and talismanic fruition of the figure of the globe-trotting Bengali, inquisitive about the world beyond his own backyard (his sphere of influence included everything between Argentina and Japan). His grandfather, the visionary Dwarkanath, who virtually funded parts of the so-called ‘Bengal Renaissance’, was no less a protagonist. Since then, Bengalis have travelled, engaged, settled and have been relentless purveyors of enchanted globalism. Within this template, there are some rather curious cases: from Suresh Biswas, the Brazilian colonel, to Sarat Das, the intrepid nomad; from the revolutionary MN Roy, who debated Lenin, to the radical Chatto (Virendranath Chattopadhyay) who held ground against and was eventually murdered by Stalin; to the ever-so-erudite Nirad C Chaudhuri. In this scheme of things, it is difficult to come to terms with the fact that these same people evolve into navel-gazing regionalists — racist, provincial and secure in their self-containment.

The same conundrum informs Bengal’s complicated relationship with the ‘woman question’, aka the ‘mother figure’. Here too, some of the most progressive riches of enlightenment – the founding of schools, colleges, medical schools, universities and social reforms that produced graduates, writers, poets and revolutionaries – were recompensed by patriarchal violence, hollow religiosity and entrenched misogyny of the vilest kind. Similarly, Bengalis have sought to create a world of equal rights and felicity, have been the most devout anti-colonialists in British India, as well as socialists (or ultra-Leftists) in free India. Yet, they have remained woefully ignorant of their own marginal castes and genders, not to mention their Muslim neighbours. For every Rammohan Roy, JC Bose, Tagore, Vidyasagar, Amartya Sen and Satyajit Ray, Bengal has also produced a Vivekananda and a Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, the last two being the darling demagogues of India’s illiberal, atavistic Hindu-Right today. The appeal and eloquence of both these books are largely drawn from having trodden deep in this miasma, this peculiar and somewhat disturbing contradiction that is at the heart of the bhadralok Bengali culture. As Chakravarti writes:

“It is through our openness to the world and cultures other than our own, that we have evolved our Bengaliness that is so distinctive, so unique. It’s what makes us enduring, indolent, insular, outgoing, endearing, adventurous, gypsy-like, nesting, sentimental, adaptive, rebellious, questioning, accepting, and infuriating in turn — or all at once. To be anything else would be ever so boring”. (p 315)

Ghosh, too, critically endorses Chakravarti’s perspective:

“The bourgeois bhadralok intellectuals, who had founded the new drama movement of the 1950s and 1960s or the new cinema of the time perhaps had a difficult trajectory in mind. The logical sequence of their exercises should have seen, politically, more democracy; socially, greater equality; and economically, a higher standard of living for all…but to achieve all that a price had to be paid… Perhaps the bhadralok was saved by his own demise”. (p 188)

The fact that these two books have been published in less than a year of each other may be a sign that informed Bengalis are now less hesitant, less resistant, to probing the void that lurks just beneath the gloss of their assured selfhood. This cannot be but a welcome move in the right direction. Between them, the books cover a lot of ground. And I dare say that not only will Bengalis of a certain generation and those curious about us benefit enormously from these books, they will also appeal to the forgetful millenials, whose memory of yesteryears seem to last only until yesterday. Here, I would especially recommend Chakravarti since he is explicitly writing for a readership that goes well beyond the academic.

My only peeve is that neither of the books spare any word for Bengali cinema and art. In Ghosh, who has a wonderful chapter on Bengali theatre, one can still, if grudgingly, accept the absence of the other two as he has made his selections deliberately. Cinema, art and theatre – the three elemental yet popular constituents of Bengali self-representation in the 20th century – remain inexplicably and conspicuously absent in The Bengalis, whose claim is to be an exhaustive documentation of life and letters of the Bengali people.

Slippery as it always was, the idea of Bengaliness, if at all, was built on a roster of extraordinary men and women, the heroes that have come and gone with unreal regularity. Bereft of heroes, the idea seems to be on the wane and one may want to look upon this development in hope or in despair, depending on what one wants the future to be like. Here I want to end by recalling Galileo’s famous retort in Brecht’s eponymous play, a response that the at once adventurously cosmopolitan and the stubbornly stay-at-home Bengali would surely appreciate. On having been reminded, with remorse, that a country that sends its heroes to the gallows is a miserable one, Galileo, on his way to dusty death, remarks: more wretched is a country that needs a hero. Bengalis today might want to evolve into an empathetic, informed and inquisitive collective rather than wait for another hero to deliver them into the next Jerusalem of their purported, protrusive greatness.

What Happened to the Bhadrolok | Parimal Ghosh | Primus Books | 200 pp | 2016
The Bengalis: A Portrait of a Community | Sudeep Chakravarti | Aleph Book Company, New Delhi | 457 pp | 2017