How many Bengals ?

Was a time I used to consider myself primarily a Bengali. That was when I was a school boy, in Santiniketan. Thinking back and looking across decades of growing up, growing wiser, cockier, narrower and broader and with decades of interaction with other people inside and outside of Bengal, India, and Asia , not to mention having my genes analyzed to trace both my paternal and maternal ancestry - I have come to realize that my idea of a Bengali, an India, an Asian, and indeed a human - has undergone some subtle change.

Further, since I left USA and settled in Canada about ten years ago, my reading habits have changed for the better, and I got to acquire a lot more information about my ancestral root, the “home” button - Bengal. In 2008 I had attended the annual North American Bengali Conference in Toronto - and was pleasantly surprised with a book the organizers presented to all attendees - A book on the history of Bengali speaking people - by Nitish Sengupta. That book both enriched me, and wetted by appetite. Soon after, on Leena di’s insistence, I had written a 23 stanza kobigaan about Rabidnranath Tagore’s geneology - history of his ancestral lineage going back 12 generations, as best as I could find from Prasanta Pal and Bomkesh Mustaphys works. The ground work I had to do, to gather the necessary information, helped me acquire a better perspective of the shifting sands of Bengali society, culture, economics and politics going back a few centuries.

Nitish Sengupta’s book traced the history of the Bengali speaking people all the way till 1947, when India and Pakistan got their separate independence. He stopped his book at that stage because he claimed that the Bengali people got divided into two countries and stopped sharing a common history. From that point, his statement implied, the history would have to follow two independent branches - one from the Indian perspective, and the other from East Pakistan - Bangladesh.

I could understand Mr. Sengupta’s logic. Still, it felt kind of sad that the history of a people had to stop in 1947, after which the so called Bengali people - were not to have a common history any more. As if, the Bengali speaking people started on their own a process - End of History - a generation ahead of Francis Fukuyama writing about it in the late 1980s.

Then came another few sources of information thanks to technology. I ended up owning an iPod, and instead of using it primarily to listen to music - I discovered the world of audio books. Here, someone recites an entire book, records it, chapter by chapter. Then the recording is sold officially to listeners. The narrator is, at times, the same person that wrote the book. But often, the narrator is a professional, separate from the author. Besides, a lot of such audio books came to the market, whose authors have long since died. I have, thus, books written by Charles Darwin, Rabindranath Tagore, Karl Marx, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy as well as recent publications from Madhusree Mukherjee and Joseph Stiglitz, in audio format. In the process I came to read, or rather listen to, books by people like Amitabha Ghosh, who, while writing a novel, obviously did his own research on the modern history of Bengal going back about a century or two, and the interaction those people had with the surrounding lands, all the way to China, the Malay peninsula or the jungles of Myanmar. Such stories, too, enriched by understanding of the people, and the land, and helped anchor it within its surroundings.

And then came the latest new twist - the iPad. Unlike a listening device such as an iPod, this was, for me, primarily a reading device. And this time I re-discovered the world of e-books, and Project Gutenberg. I found an enormous wealth of printed matter, available virtually free of cost, from a bewilderingly vast pool. And so, I ended up reading Annie Bessant’s presentation “A case for India”, as president of the Indian National Congress party in 1917, making a case for India’s independence. Also, I got hold of forgotten books such as “Three Frenchmen in Bengal”, the commercial ruin of French Settlements in 1756 and 1757, compiled by S.C. Hill centuries later in 1903 when he stumbled upon the records. The book was amazingly detailed, and from a neutral perspective of the rule of Aliverdi Khan and later events that lead to Robert Clive’s conflict with Siraj-Ud-Daula. But even more so, it contained minute records of the time, such as the European trade and commenrce interests in Murshidabad, Chandernagore, Chinsurah, Dacca, Cossimbazar etc. The records even had hand sketched maps and details of river bank development, dyke construction, garrison and fort construction - and the worry of marauders such as the “Maratha” bandits. The story of the three Frenchmen were an intoxicating glimpse at the not so distant past, from the point of view not of the Hindu, the Muslim, or the British, but from the point of view of the French, who were, like the Dutch, more concerned of establishing trade links and industry, rather than empire building. A small twist of the events could have possibly lead to a different history. All such books have helped the realization, that more we learn, more we realize how little we know, even about ourselves.

So, in the last ten years, I have read up a lot of information, and have had time to sit back and think things through, coming to realizations which people wiser than me must have known for long - that Bengal, while comprising an integral part of the Indian subcontinent, is geologically, topologically, demographically and hence even socially, and historically, quite distinct from the rest of the plains India. By the same token, the distinctness of Bengal extends a pretty large swath, from the Mythily and Oriya speaking regions east of Bengal all the way to the Burmese foothills.

Bengal was in general distinct because of the Gengetic delta, a very very vast swampland that was the end points of some of the greatest rivers of the area, and had over millennia, created an ecosystem to which its inhabitants had adopted to, quite different from the plains and the hills of the subcontinent. Bengal was both integral and yet different. It was the famous flood plains, a vast land of soft soil, mud, swamp, dense jungle, brackish water, absence of firm land, mosquito, snakes, crocodiles, monitor lizards, porcupines, tigers river dolphins, and a shifting landscape where rivers changed course, new silt deposits created new islands while washing away old ones, and the constant tug of war between the tidal current and the mangrove forests - the tide wanting to move the silt constantly around, and the mangrove roots attempting to anchor the silt to create new land formations. There wasn’t another place quite like the sunderbans, where the mightly rivers of the Himalayas met the Indian ocean.

And these days, living away from the “home” button, I am exposed to meeting people from Bengal - both sides of the border and some unique ethnic variations of them, and living on a neutral ground - has offered opportunities of exchange of views I might not have had while living in Kolkata, or Miami, or Hong Kong. Somehow, Vancouver, on the north-western corner of this continent, allowed me to once again rediscover the concept of Bengal and how it ties up with Indo-China and how the Gangetic delta it tied to and is yet different from the gangetic plains. It has help me understand a little bit more of the other part of Bengal, albeit the larger part - i.e. Bangladesh.

The Gangetic Delta itself has a plethora of rivers directly or indirectly connected to it. There is the Gangles and the Brahmaputra. Both of them were either created or greatly altered by the rising Himalayas. Brahmaputra is recognized as a pre-himalayan river that originated on the Asian mainland before India collided with it, and somehow survived the 40 million year rise of the Himalayas that totally transformed the geography of the place. But Ganga and Brahmaputra are not all. There is Teesta that joins Brahmaputra. There is also the renaming of rivers, where Ganga becomes Padma in Bangladesh, whereas Hoogly is often called the Ganga in West Bengal. Brahmaputra itself has a new name, Jamuna, not to confuse it with the other Jamuna that joins Ganges at Allahabad. And added to all this is Meghna.

The coast itself is less than 400 km long - but is supports a estuarine and flattish marshy landmass that holds a phenomenally dense biomass of flora and fauna, including humans.

The first attempt at writing on this topic, posted only as a note on Facebook, resulted in a handful of comments. Sandeep Sukla, Computer Scientist and professor at Virginiatech, a well read man whose interest ranges far afield from his profession, had made his comments - but that was more to do with the tone of my first post. Basically, he did not wish the article to appear cocky, or boastful, as if Bengali speaking folks were somehow better, more deserving of our attention.

That, of course, was not my angle. My angle was thinking about the long term future of the Bengali speaking people as well as the long term future of the language itself.

Predicting future is a hellishly difficult task - but difficult or not, there is nothing preventing you from making an effort.

To me, How Many Bengals is a way of asking, is any one of the parts going to survive independently, or is there a need for a collective effort at self preservation. Is self preservation in this case a genetically inherited trait, or social obsolescence is a natural outcome of the sprouting of societies, some of which, speaking from a Darwinian point of view, would invariably lead to evolutionary dead ends, while other branches carry the genes forward to another species, and another era.

This article’s scope was supposed to be wider than the circle drawn by the Bhadralok clan, like a Lakshman’s gondi. It is also supposed to be wider than the flip side of the Bhadralok coin - the Chhotolok clan. And outside all that were the adivasi groups, who were happily unaware of any gondi, though ignored by the chhotolok and looked down upon by the Das-Capital toting Che-Guevera worshipping leftist intellectual bhadraloks.

So how wide is the scope ? How wide can a person presume to think and see, while still attempting to talk of a people tied to a language ?

Well, my views on the future of the people is more gloomy than positive, I must admit. Firstly, Bengal is no more a single unit. So one would require to cover this in two branches, one for West Bengal and the other for Bangladesh.

For West Bengal, I believe that the Golden age has passed. The age created a lot of stalwarts, culminating perhaps in the genius of Rabindranath Tagore. But now that the age is behind us, new blood is not being infused into it in the three generations after Tagore’s death. Thats a long time. Most societies hold memory only a generation deep. So, todays youth, or even the seniors, do not have any memory of a time when the society was thriving with brilliant leaders. Social stagnation has been the norm for over one generation, and that is what the Bengali folks have left in their collective memory. This stagnation and sense of drifting in the current like flotsam, is multi-faceted - cultural, linguistic, political, commercial and spiritual.

And what about Bangladesh ? My understanding is that they have had a more eventful two generations, and these events have lead to different kind of issues than across the border to the west.

… to be continued. ...