Firstly, this song. May is Tagore’s birthmonth, he was born on 7th May, 1861.
All
through the A-Z I felt weirdly wrongfooted for not sharing more about his
music and celebrity really, because he does impact Bengali
culture in this overarching way.
It's been buzzing around in my
head - the offspring reaches adulthood this month. Talk about a song summing up the current mood! The song has been sung by many stalwarts of Bengali music, a million others more accurate
in their pronunciation, more polished in the technicalities of rendering,
recording and production. But I
found this rendition beyond moving – non-native speakers singing
Tagore more than 1½ centuries since the songwriter’s birth. No fancypants
visuals, no drama in the arrangement, just straightforward heartfelt emotions, voices raised unpretentious. The
guy gives a translation at the beginning in Italian which I, sadly, don’t
speak. Anyways, the gist is – as mine
ends, yours begins, with you and me together, that’s how the stream goes on. Life, in other words, is a relay race. Enjoy!
Finally, my reflections on this landmark tenth A-Z Challenge. As usual, all yer who enters here, if yer gets this far, yer deserves and gets yo' choize -
The short version
I started this Challenge way less prepared than the
other years. But no complaints, no regrets. In the end things fell into place, I
survived and I had plenty of fun. A big, fat thank you to all those who read,
and a big, fat thank you to the A-Z team for creating this space, for all the hard
work to keep it going. Congrats! - on a super celebration of the decadal anniversary.
See you next year same time, same place!
The lo-o-o-o-ng version
This blog is a duck. What a visitor sees from the lakefront
is a bird gliding over water. More or less serene. Dipping her beak into the waves
from time to time and bringing up a post. Poetry or fiction, or even creative
non-fiction entries, either weekly or daily, go up here on a regular routine. The
visitor gets no whiff of the mad-paddling that is going on underwater, out of
sight.
The blog is also the lake itself. Where I come to relax and
detox, and I consciously write about things here disconnected from the fuss and fury going on elsewhere at that moment, keep it all separate and tidy. Madness below, sane
above. Simple formula. Makes me feel I’m in control. Of course, that’s also an illusion, all a
load of maya. But let’s not get into
Vedantic philosophy here. Things are complicated enough without that.
For reasons various, life has been chaos since last
December. As someone I know put it pithily – ‘hamster wheel tenterhooks combo.’ ‘Write it as it comes’ – hasn’t worked…what’s come to mind hasn’t always been worth
writing down. But fortunately,
I’ve been able to keep it from spilling over to the lake, or affect the duck, she’s
had to mad-paddle extra-hard but she’s managed somehow to keep on swimming.
Why I’m saying this now is because every cloud is pure
silver if turned inside out - my A-Z this year has been massively different
because of this, underwater if not above. For a time, I considered not
participating at all. But then it was the tenth year anni…fomo, I understand the youngsters call it…Then I toyed with the idea of the shortest possible
posts – a photo and caption, a mini-essay, but short’s not really my thing, except for poetry. It felt half-hearted, low-involvement, and I don’t like doing half-hearted, I’m so not good at low-involvement, especially with writing. The
upshot of all this stumbling around was that nothing much got decided, not much researched, even less got written.
So. I started this Challenge way less prepared than
the other years, I forgot the sign-up date, I plunged in with a fairly complex
theme without a drop of due diligence, I did not check for the ‘QX-test’ which is
my gold standard for any theme. I had just about half the posts written on 31st
March, all the tougher letters were supremely unready, unresearched even, the music was all over
the place, it was just anarchy exponential.
But no complaints, no regrets. My A-Z was more
spontaneous because of the mess, though I had moments of blind panic as I flailed
around for letters which I'd have thought wouldn’t be so hard to write to – U and Z,
for instance. But…once you’ve set your mind on something, the universe conspires
to arrange it for you. It miraculously conspired for those letters
too, I found my topics, I posted in time on the day, even if it was by the skin
of my teeth. I scraped through, I survived. The sixth time for me. The tenth anniversary of the event.
In the end things fell into place and I had plenty of fun.
Possibly more fun than if my posts had been scheduled to the gills, because I’m
really a pantzer at heart. The final takeaway? – scheduled is great, but unscheduled is not
always as hopeless as I’ve allowed myself to believe. Why have I lured myself
into this belief anyway? Why get into a mindset where only one way of doing
things, of surviving challenges, is the valid way? Not a good habit to fall
into. The brain knows it, there’s no right or wrong way of being on the lake and/or
the lakeside, yet the heart panics and flaps around, such a waste of energy and
emotion. Take it easy and be bindaas
boss, it will pan out if only you jump in. A thing half-done can also be well begun. Bas lagi raho Munnibai!
A big, fat thank you to all those who read my overlong
posts (including this one! You’d have thought not being scheduled would mean
less of the megarambles, but no, it didn’t work that way, not quite sure how it
does work, but there it is. Less time
for the ruthless big chop, I guess.)
And an equally big, fat thank you to the A-Z team for creating
this space and for all the hard work to keep it going. Congrats! - on a super
celebration of the decadal anniversary. Here’s to many more.
I shall be, as in all the other years, reverting back
to my bloghopless self forthwith, to my weekly poetry/fic business as usual. Except
WEP/IWSG of course. See you next year same time, same place! As the Bengalis
say – aschhe bochhor abar hobe! (Lit.
will happen again in the coming year). And who knows? - maybe I’ll learn to chop
and edit better meanwhile.
Well, hasn't the month just zipped past? Always a mixed feeling to get to the last post...
Zinga
Goshty was Bangladesh’s pioneering pop band, formed a decade before Bangladesh
was independent. Here is one of their hit tracks from 1982 – Dhaka, sung by Nazma Zaman
on Bangladesh TV.
The
following track is from an album called Beche Thakar Mane (The Meaning of
Survival) sung by Nachiketa from West Bengal. The lyrics are by Zulfiqar
Russell, a Bangladeshi lyricist, poet and journalist.
Mitthe
is from Ekla Prothom, the first album by Zooel Morshed, known simply as Zooel.
He is a sound engineer and artiste from Bangladesh.
And the final track for this A-Z series on Bengaliana - is from Miftah Zaman, a Bangladeshi singer-songwriter and musician with a title called Dujon Dupothe (Two people on two paths) about drifting apart, about divergence.
Zamindari...under the Mughals and the British...
Zamindar,
from the Persian zamin=earth/land, dar=suffix indicative of possession,
means a landlord. The zamindari
system was first set up by the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605). In those
times, the zamindars were tax
collectors in charge of the land cultivated by peasants. They belonged to the
nobility and were mansabdars (mansab=
position in Arabic - commanders in the military with a fixed number of troops,
varying from ten to over 10,000. Higher mansabs
were granted to the princes of royal blood and to the non-Muslim kings who
accepted Mughal suzerainty). The collection rights given to these collectors were not
necessarily hereditary, the Emperor always had the final say and could allocate
the office to another more favoured nobleman, all land belonged to the Empire. The zamindars were also responsible for certain policing, judicial and
administrative duties in their domains.
Akbar put in place a taxation system which was
thorough and generally fair to the farmer. Though it was not that abuses on the ground
did not happen. But by and large the system was based on the fertility of the
land, and actual yield potentials. The tax amount varied from 1/3rd
on top grade fertile land to 1/26th of the yield on poor quality
land. Extortion and abuses, if complaints were brought, were dealt with very
severely. Seeds were made available to the farmers by the state, wells were
dug, loans were given also. In the case of droughts or famines, taxes were
remitted on a case to case basis. Not necessarily a cushy life for the
farmer, but it wasn’t a total write off either, crushed by taxes and the state.
This system served the Mughal Empire very well. Consider this, the land revenue
at Akbar’s time was Rs 175 million; it rose to Rs 211 million under his
grandson Shah Jahan, and finally to nearly Rs 300 million during Aurangzeb’s
reign. Things kind of fell apart for the Mughals after Aurangzeb and that is
when the EIC made its move on Bengal/India, as we have seen earlier in this
series.
Some
zamindars came to wield enormous
power at the grassroots level and sometimes ran their zamindari almost independent of the Empire. Notable examples of
such zamindars were the Baro Bhuiya
(Baro=Twelve/Several; Bhu=Land, Bhuiya=One with land) of Bengal, around the
Bhati or the Delta region in the late 16th century. The Baro Bhuiya
included both Hindu zamindars such as
Raja Pratapaditya of Jessore, and also Muslims such as Isa Khan. These formed a
confederacy that repulsed attacks by the Mughal Empire itself, through superior
use of naval power and strategies. The Mughals were pathetic at naval warfare
and the navy was the weakest branch of their defence forces. While any ruler of
lower Bengal clearly had to be conversant with a riverine warfare regime – the
Bhati/Delta region of Bengal is really more water than land. It was only in the
reign of Jahangir, Akbar’s son, that Bengal was finally and properly brought
under Mughal control. And incidentally it was during his reign also that the
first firman granting the British the
right to trade was issued.
Getting
back to the Bengal zamindars, they were great patrons of the arts, built
many monuments, promoted cultural, educational, and economic developments,
played key roles in the Bengal Renaissance and the First War of
Independence/Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. However, they were also known for developing
the urban centres at the cost of the rural masses and exploitation of the
peasant farmers. Both Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Rabindranath Tagore, two monumental figures
of the Renaissance, were connected to zamindaris, the Raja was himself a zamindar and Tagore was the youngest son
of one. Both were vocal in condemning social evils of their time and advocated for social reform.
After
the British gained control, Lord Cornwallis put through the Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1790's, as part of the Cornwallis Code. This affected life in
Bengal on many levels and created a powerful landowning class that initially supported
the British. In the Mughal era, the zamindars
were functionaries of the Empire reporting to the imperial Diwan, whose
responsibility it was to make sure that the system did not tax farmers so as to
jeopardise future tax collections.
When
the EIC took over the Diwani of Bengal in 1764, it found itself short of
trained manpower well-versed in the local customs and laws and agricultural
practices. (The setting up of educational institutions to train local Bengalis
to serve in the British administration, and also the interest in local
languages and systems so that Britishers could run the province, were direct
by-products of these.) As a result of this gap, zamindars remained unsupervised and/or reported to
unscrupulous/clueless/corrupt officials – farmers were taxed without any
thought for local welfare or future income.
Once
the British took India, many zamindars
were granted/assumed the titles of Raja, Maharaja, Rana, Rai and Nawab, all
meaning ruler, king or viceroy. While the British retained the zamindari and its associated systems, they
changed the land revenue calculations, withdrew the facility of loans without
any thought for the future or farmer. The landlords were given lifelong tenure,
the zamindari became hereditary,
effectively the zamindar became the
landowner. However, they were no longer allowed to maintain their own troops
anymore. Under this system, the zamindars
were liable to pay a fixed sum to the British, pegged at 10/11 parts of the
amount realised from the land, and retain one part for themselves. They were
free to set the taxes due from farmers to the zamindari. The zamindars thus
brought in a certain amount for the British irrespective of weather conditions,
fertility of land or any other considerations. Absentee landlords who bore no
burdens of the cultivation but claimed the lion’s share of produce appeared as
a consequence of this policy. A switch to cash crops like sugarcane, jute,
cotton was forced through at the expense of food crops, ultimately resulting in
food insufficiency and famines. No-one, neither the British nor the zamindars did anything for the peasants
during famines. Not exactly a great system - what had survived under the Mughals for
200 years, did not complete even a century under the new rulers.
Though
the British had sought to create a class of native Indians loyal to the
Company/Crown through this system, the zamindars
ultimately formed a separate, powerful, elite interest group, caring nothing
for the cultivators and often at loggerheads with their British masters. The zamindari system was abolished after
independence in the early 1950’s in both Bengals in major agrarian reforms.
~~~~~~
So.
Zat complete’s my A-Z Challenge 2019… Heartfelt thank yous to those of you who came along on this heady trip home, I hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as I did. Off for some much needed zzzzzz now...see you
next month!
Here's a track from a band called Yonsample. They are one of the most prominent metal bands out of East India/Bengal. Have a listen - a very different sound -
The next two
tracks are from multi-award winning playback singers Sabina Yasmin(Bangladesh)
and Alka Yagnik (India). Sabina has been singing for more than 50 years and has
been awarded the highest civilian honours of Bangladesh. Alka Yagnik is a
Bengali by domicile, also an award-winner and a very highly regarded singer
from the films, mostly of Bollywood. Here she is singing Bengali Adhunik
(modern). Two different voices from two parts of Bengal.
Yen...n...Yonder, preferably blue... The Bengali is an indefatigable traveller (=yatri). According to a BBC estimatein the late noughties,
more than 50% of Indian domestic tourists were made up of Bengalis.
Though the percentage might have moved as incomes and standards of living
improve in India, I don’t think the essential conclusion of that exercise has
changed majorly in ten years. Travelling, like politics and poetry, is a
Bengali passion.
Famous poem by Tagore on mindfulness and nature
(translation by yours truly). But why I am putting it
up here are the opening lines - that even a hundred
years ago there was much travel and much money
spent on it by Bengalis. Needless to mention,Tagore
here is assuming a persona, that of the ordinary,
middle-class Bengali, an inveterate leisure traveller.
I have elsewhere in this A-Z series mentioned about Atish Dipankar
travelling to Sumatra and Tibet and Sri Chaitanya travelling all over India
with their respective spiritual messages and missions. Similarly, a 19th
century monk, Vivekananda, took the message of the Vedanta as far as America. Travel
in Medieval and Ancient Bengal was primarily religious tourism – the few who
could afford to do so, went on pilgrimages to the Himalayas, or to Varanasi.
Majority of the people who travelled were religious scholars or monks – both Buddhists
and Hindus. Muslims were obliged to go to Mecca once in their lifetime as a
religious duty and some surely did, but many did not - both the Emperor and the
pauper for obvious reasons. The sea route to Mecca was pirate-infested and dangerous, so much so that the Haj pilgrimage was declared non-mandatory at some point by the Mughal court. But apart from that deviation, it was common for affluent Muslim men, noblewomen and royal consorts to go to Mecca.
Leisure travel, like many other things, arrived with the foreigners. The Anglicised
Bengalis would travel by horse carriage for a ‘change of air’ to the ‘dak bunglows’
even before the railways started. Others took more conventional routes. In
1850, Ishwar Chandra Gupta recorded his journey by boat to the Sunderbans and
published it in his newspaper Sambad
Prabhakar - this was the first travelogue in Bengali. Incidentally, he was
primarily a poet and used the penname ‘Bhromonkari Bondhu’ which translated
means Travelling Friend.
Once the
railways were introduced, travel got a major fillip. And Bengali literature, where
the first slew of super-creative, innovative Bengal Renaissance writers were
beginning to pen the first Bengali novels, magnified the effect through heroes
who took the train ‘West’ at the drop of a hat. As the century turned, this trend of traveller-heroes continued. From Ghona-da to Teni-da to
Felu-da the fictional characters were always going off on adventures - to Dooars, to Lucknow, to Gangtok, to
Rajasthan, to Mars even! And of course their fans had to check out for
themselves what the forts and forests and the general terrain looked like. The tradition
of travel writing and essays continued too, to motivate Bengalis to pack their
bags and hop onto the nearest train.
The long summer
vacation for schools and the court got institutionalized, and the fortnight’s
break during Durga Puja. In 1864, the British formally moved their summer
capital to Shimla, a thousand miles away from Calcutta, to escape the
relentless heat of the plains. This break was another opportunity for the
Bengalis to travel - more ‘hawa bodol’ (change of air) at places with restorative properties. Many of the more affluent
Bengalis acquired vacation homes in Darjeeling, in Puri, in Giridih, even as
far as Benares. The landowning families such as the Tagore’s acquired or built
properties up in the hills and/or at the waterfront. In time, the lower income classes joined the wanderlust
club. Both the mountains and the seaside started offering less exclusive accommodations
for the Bengali tourists.
By 1933, one of
the oldest Indian tour operators had started up in Calcutta – Kundu Special.
They have been organising package tours for over 80 years now. Particularly
popular because they cater to all the food quirks and culture-specific
requirements that middle-class Bengalis have.
Outside the
five-star luxury orbit, Bengalis remain the most well-travelled community in
India. Wherever one might look - from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Ajanta to
Kamakshya, there will be Bengali travellers
out to improve their health and broaden their horizons. With rising incomes and
better air connections, Bengalis have now started venturing out of India as
well. The Bengali travel-maniac has crossed
the seven oceans. Read more here and here.
Like Q, there's no X in Bengali so I thought there won't be much choice today, can’t be picky or anything, but even so…managed
to find some nice numbers. Quite surprised frankly, phew!
Starting off today with this lovely track – Tomar jonno (For you). For you. It's from X-Factor, a fusion rock band from Bangladesh.
Next
is a modern rendition of Karar Oi Louho Kopat (Those Steel Prison Doors, 1924) by
the Bangladeshi group Xodiac. The original was written and composed by Kazi
Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) during the Independence Movement against the British,
reportedly while Nazrul was himself incarcerated. It is an incredibly powerful revolutionary song
and has been sung by heaps of professional artistes as well as in rallies and
protest marches by ordinary people. Forget the exact meanings of the lyrics, the internal rhymes and the robust marching beat can be felt by everybody. The song played an important role in the both the Indian Freedom
Struggle and Bangladesh’s Liberation War decades later. Nazrul, Bangladesh’s
National Poet, combined both Hindu and Islamic imagery seamlessly in many of his compositions, drawing upon his own vast knowledge of both faiths and the syncretic
traditions of Bengal. Enjoy!
Finally,
here’s Chronic Xorn featuring Lakkhichhara with Paliye Berai (I’m on the run) in a
live performance. Both bands are from West Bengal, and both have been featured earlier in this A-Z series.
X
is for… eXactly Xilch...n...Xero in Bengali
What
do you do when you can’t dredge up an X-word from your own alphabet? You call
upon your neighbours for help. That’s what I’m doing, and I’ve gone
to them in the past too…they’ve never turned me down yet. China has Xplorers
and poetry and pilgrims and monks for the most challenging of the Challenge
letters. Ask and you shall receive.
So.
Today I’m talking about Xuanzang, a Chinese traveller/monk who literally helped write Bengali history. Xuanzang,
also written Huan Tsang, (602-664) was born in Henan province of China during
the beginnings of the Tang dynasty. Born into a scholarly, erudition-crazy family, he was given a
Confucian education. He had a keen interest in Chinese classics and the ancient
sages. Encouraged by his elder brother who was a monk, Xuanzang became a monk
himself at thirteen, was ordained at twenty and his interest turned to
Buddhist subjects. He travelled in his early years in China’s different provinces
to collect and study old Buddhist manuscripts. However, he came across many
discrepancies and conflicting ideas in them which his Chinese teachers could not
resolve. Xuanzang therefore decided he would travel to India, to the very
fountainhead of Buddhism, study and figure things out for himself.
But…not
so fast! The then Tang Emperor came to know of his wish and promptly forbade
his trip on security grounds, since the Tang were at war at the time with the
Gokturks, the Eastern Turks. Xuanzang was not discouraged though, he made his
plans in secret and fled, travelling by night and hiding by day, without guide
or companions, facing the hardships of the road and the Gobi desert alone. In 629 he finally reached the western border
of the Chinese Empire, the start of the Silk Road, where the local ruler
invited him to the court in Turfan. Though the ruler’s plan was to detain
Xuanzang indefinitely as the ecclesiastical head of the court, the monk was
able to persuade the king to let him leave. Xuanzang was sent on his way with
letters of introduction to all the kings and kingdoms en route, down to the
formidable Turkish Khan on the borders of India, so that he was no longer a
fugitive fleeing the country, but a scholar and pilgrim.
Xuanzang
reached India in 630. He travelled widely within the country to various Buddhist
monasteries and centres of learning. In all he spent some 16 years in India spanning
the length and breadth of the land from what is now Pakistan to modern day
Bangladesh, Assam, Bihar and West Bengal. His entire itinerary is super
interesting but may not be relevant here, so I’m going to restrict the focus to
Bengal/the Delta region alone. He reached Bengal in roughly 638 and spent around
half his time in India in travelling the various regions of the Delta.
He arrived in Bengal during the reign of Shashanka, one of the early rulers of great importance. Shashanka is thought to have been in power from roughly 600 to 625, a major political figure of his time. Xuansang's account of this kingdom form a significant source in understanding Bengal's history. However, Xuanzang painted Shashanka as anti-Buddhist, recording his religious persecution of specific Buddhist leaders. Though Xuanzang himself studied in Nalanda with thousands of other Buddhist scholars in Shashanka's domain and noted the flourishing presence of other Buddhist monasteries within the kingdom. Therefore, several eminent historians believe that Xuanzang was partisan (he favoured Harshvardhan, Shashanka's rival and a Buddhist as opposed to Shashanka who was a Shaivite Hindu). Okay, let's forget the partisanship issues, what did he actually say about Bengal? He recorded
that Shashanka's kingdom was “rich in all kinds of grain-produce.” And that it was
thickly populated. The people valued learning and scholars. There were around
20 Buddhist monasteries close to the capital with a 3000 strong community of Buddhist
monks and scholars. (How this is possible if Shashanka was anti-Buddhist beats
me!) He also remarked on the presence of Jains and Jain temples. Passing from
the northern areas to southeast and into the lower coastal region, Samatata, he
observed “the land lies low and rich and is cultivated with many crops.” That
the climate was mild and the people agreeable. Here too they valued scholarship
and learning. There were 30 Buddhist monasteries with 2000 priests.
In Tamralipta,
to the west of Samtata, Xuanzang found Buddhists and non-Buddhists living side
by side (early evidence of religious tolerance in Bengal). There were 10
monasteries and a sangha of 1000 Buddhists there, and Brahmanical temples there
numbered around 50. “The coast of the country is in a recess of the sea; the
land and water embrace each other. Wonderful articles of value and gems are
found here in abundance, and the people of the country are very rich.”
The main
impression of Bengal he creates is that
of a prosperous, populous agrarian economy, keen on education and scholarly
pursuits. Xuanzang also, very helpfully, gives the exact areas and distances
between the kingdoms and their capital cities which I am not recapping. Read
more about his travelogue here.
Xuanzang went
back home to China in 645, he was received by the Emperor with great honour and was offered an imperial position. He
declined the job and went into a
monastery where he, with the help of a team of translators, translated the 600-odd
Sanskrit texts he had collected from India. Many original Buddhist texts which
were subsequently lost in India, were recovered from their Chinese translations
that Xuanzang did. He also translated Lao-tzu’s works into Sanskrit and sent
them to India.
On the request
of the Emperor, he wrote his travel experiences in the book Great Tang Records
of the Western Region, which became one of the primary sources for
understanding the early medieval history of South and Central Asia. His
influence on Chinese Buddhism was far reaching. He died in 664. Read more about his contributions to Buddhist philosophy here. Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019
First track today is from Habib Wahid -
a musician, composer and singer from Bangladesh, with Beporowa Mon (Reckless
Heart) -
Next
I have for you Wrong Tuli with a modern version of a golden oldie folk number Tomar
Ghore Bosot Kore Koi Jona (How many live in your home). Fun fact - wrong
(conventionally transliterated as rong) means colour/paint in Bengali. Tuli means a brush. Some sublime flute playing in there!
Finally
here’s Warfaze, among the top ten Bengali bands from Bangladesh, formed in 1984. Take a listen to their Purnota (Fulfilment) -
West Bengal...n... five honest serving men
Recently
while on a break back home, colonialism and Calcutta came up during a family
chat. The sum of it was that the Raj affected
all regions equally. The city actually had an advantage in being the capital.
Other places in India have recovered and moved on, why hasn’t Calcutta? A
glorious past, great infrastructure, brilliant, progressive minds, passionate
people. Four Nobel Laureates. Trail-blazing entrepreneurs. All manner of
creative output. Why then is the present
so dim? What’s happened? Is West Bengal stagnating and why?
The
questions are not new – I’ve heard them in various avatars since childhood. In
the late 70’s, my father had written to the Dean of a prestigious institution
in Calcutta, his alma mater, exploring the chances of his daughter’s admission.
The Dean had written back lamenting that Calcutta was
not the best place to get an education anymore.
In
the mid 80’s, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called it ‘a dying city.’
This caused a furore, the Calcuttans were livid – sure, it was a superdumb,
foot-in-mouth remark for a PM to make, but all the Bengalis could do was to
trot out the usual dead greats.
From
1948 to 1962, Dr Bidhan
Chandra Roy, a follower of Gandhi and
also his physician, a Congress Party stalwart, was the Chief Minister and the
architect of modern West Bengal. During his tenure cities like Durgapur,
Kalyani, Salt Lake, Ashokenagar and Habra were established.
When
Dr Roy died in July 1962, West Bengal had recovered from the Partition – land reforms, the smooth
accession of princely states, the setting up of a large number of infrastructure
schemes like the Durgapur Steel Plant, Damodar Valley Corporation, Chittaranjan
Locomotives and a host of other industries, premier educational institutes –
all in place. West Bengal was still the
leading industrialised state of an independent India.
One
issue that remained unresolved was that of the refugee resettlement. Millions
had migrated to West Bengal from East Pakistan at Partition.Various
resettlement proposals had been mooted by the Roy government but were opposed
by the leftist parties. Another pending issue was land redistribution.
In
the early 60’s, a thoroughly unprepared India was attacked by China. The
Indo-China War, which was a spectacular defeat for India, affected the economy and the morale.
Illusions of a Sino-Indian ‘brotherhood’ nurtured by a naïve Indian leadership
vaporised- the need to beef up the
Indian defence became plain.
Then
a relic of Prophet Mohammad went missing from the Hazratbal shrine in faraway Kashmir. Some
East Pakistani politicians called it a Hindu conspiracy and sparked off communal
riots there. Hindus were slaughtered in major
cities. Sporadic incidents of revenge attacks took place in West Bengal,
escalating the violence across the border manifold. As a result, waves of East
Pakistani Hindus came into Calcutta again. In the 1967 elections, for the first
time in twenty years of independence, a fractured Congress lost West Bengal to a
coalition of leftist parties called the United Front. But Congress, albeit weakened, was returned
to power in Delhi. The Centre-State relationship dynamic shifted. And then a
few months down the line, the Naxalbari uprising happened.
The
Naxal movement was an armed uprising which drew inspiration from Maoist
philosophy and sought to annihilate ‘class enemies’ in order to achieve an
equal society. It found strong support among the students in Calcutta. Thousands
joined, the schools in Calcutta were shut down. University machine shops and
departments were taken over by the Naxalites to make pipe guns and plan their
revolutionary operations. The law and order situation deteriorated to abysmal levels.
The
UF government was dismissed and President’s rule was imposed. In fresh
elections, the Congress made a comeback in 1972. The new Chief Minister, mirroring
the attitudes at the Centre, treated the Naxalites as terrorists. The police
crackdown was brutal, many young people were tortured and killed, and the movement
was crushed by the mid-70s. The best of a generation was lost to this violence
and counter-violence. People were killed, infrastructure was damaged, militant
trade unionism strangled many industrial units. Meanwhile, the violence in the Bangladesh
Liberation War had sent further waves of refugees into Calcutta. West Bengal
reeled. Several businesspeople, the main target of the Naxal movement,
relocated taking the businesses with them. Growth plummeted.
Wrongheaded The
Left Front, a coalition led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), came
to power in 1977, but nothing changed. Strikes and lock-outs continued, the government
carried the baggage of their anti-industry bias. CPM-led trade unions refused
to let business owners operate freely. The tools of ‘gherao’
and ‘bandh’
became overused, and a hierarchy of henchmen
became the facilitators to the political elite – a culture of thuggery
prevailed. Well-known companies like Philips India, Shaw Wallace, Brooke Bond,
Britannia, some of which had been born in Calcutta, gradually left.
The
Left Front ruled West Bengal for thirty years on the back of their focus on the
agri-sector, but did little to attract industries. In fact, the long-serving Chief Minister,
Jyoti Basu, once famously told a businessman that ‘capitalists were class enemies
and should expect no sympathy.’ A confrontational stance towards the government
at the Centre did not help either – industry was regulated through licences by
the Central government. The state continued to flounder and got deep into debt.
The
West Bengal government put together an industrial policy and went scouting for
investment only after the Indian economy was liberalised in the early 90’s. But
by then it was altogether too late, West Bengal’s reputation was in tatters. The
joint debacle of the Tata Nano automobile project at Singur and the Nandigram SEZ were the final nails in the coffin. The government had tried to acquire agricultural land for these
projects but local villagers opposed it. The protests were supported by many
activists across India. Trinamool Congress (TMC), a breakaway faction
of Congress, took up the cause. After much bitter wrangling and violence, the
Tata’s withdrew and set up their plant in North India. The Nandigram project did
not materialise either. The CPM government was duly booted out in the next election,
TMC came to power in 2011.
Since
then, the TMC leadership has tried to woo industrialists. However, given the
population density and that the major part of the state is farmland, land acquisition
for any project remains a constraint. The work ethic continues to be an issue. The
debt situation is still a concern. The politician-middleman-thugs unholy nexus continues unabated. More and more young people break away from Kolkata and go elsewhere to pursue studies, jobs and dreams. The whole of West Bengal increasingly resembles a retirement home. Overall growth in GSDP has seen some modest
progress, but really there is an entire Everest to climb still. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...I guess I'd be happy to see baby steps, they are better than no steps at all. Read more here and here.
The first track I have for you today is from
Bangladeshi band Vikings. They got
together in the late 90’s, went dormant for a decade in the middle and then the leader made a
comeback with a difference – in film music. Take a listen to one of their old 90's numbers – Valobashi jare (The one I love).
Next
there’s Vabnar Lamppost from Feelings,
vocals by James, again a 1990's track from the album Jayl theke Bolchi (Speaking from the Prison).
Take
a listen to Vibe, one of the alternative rock bands from Dhaka active in the
noughts. Chena Jogot (Known World), their first full length album was released in 2007. The
following year they disbanded. Some of the members are making music still, having
moved to other popular bands in Bangladesh.
Last but not the least, here’s a track from an album called Voyankor Sundor(Terribly Beautiful) by
Bangladeshi band Chirkut, which is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning fusion
band. They have performed in concerts in USA, India and Europe. Ei Shohorer Kaktao Jene Geche (Even the Crow in This City Has Come to Know) - enjoy!
Voyagers. Vision. Vedanta.
There
have been many spiritual leaders in Bengal’s history who have travelled widely,
added to, and broadened the religious discourse in South Asia and the wider
world. Atish
Dipankar (980-1054) took Buddhist learning and
philosophy to Tibet and Sumatra. Sri
Chaitanya (1486-1534), one of the most prominent
Bengali saints, travelled all over India and popularised the Vaishnav cult. Voyagers like the founder of the ISKCON
(International Society for Krishna Consciousness) movement in modern times. Born
Abhay Charan De in Calcutta in 1896, A.C. Bhaktivedanta
Prabhupada circled the globe six times
taking the teachings of bhakti yoga to the world. But long before him, another Bengali monk
mesmerised the attendees at the Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago.
This charismatic sannyasi introduced the
Vedanta and its precepts of tolerance and assimilation to the Western world for
the first time. His name was SwamiVivekananda.
What
can one say about Vivekanada in a blogpost? He was born Narendra Nath Dutta in
1863 in Calcutta, his father was an attorney, the family well established.
Narendra got a western style education at the premier institutions of the
Bengal Presidency. He was a brilliant scholar and a voracious reader with a
photographic memory. He was early on exposed to Indian spiritual teachings
through his family and Western philosophy, Christianity and science. He read
widely in English, Bengali and Sanskrit.
Social
reform was his main interest and he joined the Brahmo Samaj, which advocated
the elimination of superstitions, caste-barriers, illiteracy and evils like Sati
and the social isolation of widows. He later met and became a devotee of
Ramakrishna Paramhansa who was a prominent mystic of the times and demonstrated
the essential unity of all religions. Vivekananda formally became a monk in
1886, after Ramakrishna died. In 1888, Vivekananda left the monastery as a parivrajaka
– a wandering mystic, and travelled to many parts of India, bringing the
teachings of the Vedas and Upanishads to people, always stressing service over
dogma. During his travels he came to hear about the Parliament of Religions to be
held in Chicago in 1893 and became interested in attending it. He set off for USA
in May 1893 and landed in July after a difficult voyage.
He
started his address to the
Parliament with “Sisters and brothers of America” which got him a standing
ovation that lasted for two minutes. In the address he demonstrated the
essential tolerance that Hinduism had towards other faiths because of its
pluralism. He went on to found the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894. He
travelled to other parts of USA and also to UK preaching the Vedanta and
introducing the West to Hindu ideas and philosophy. He was acknowledged by the
public and the foreign press of the time as a powerful orator. Back in India,
he founded the Ramakrishna Math – the order of the monks of Ramakrishna, which
worked towards education for the underprivileged and social service. He passed
away in 1902 after singlehandedly changing the perceptions of Hinduism in the West. Read more about his life and workshere. The order founded by Vivekananda in Bengal - The Ramakrishna Math & Mission, has completed more than 120 years and continues to work towards his vision. Read about more them here.
I'm travelling for the rest of the week and will catch up with you as and when I can, but definitely once I'm back.
