H is for...Herodotus... Handlooms...n ...Hub...

Here is Haider Hussain from Bangladesh singing Abujh duti chokh (Baffled pair of eyes) about the  Rohingya refugees. Some of the images are graphic so skip this one if you find such content distressing, and go onto his next, Ami Faisa Gechi (I've got entangled) - a lighter track.

The next track, a golden oldie - Hey Dola (O Palanquin), is from Bhupen Hazarika, a well-known singer-songwriter-composer from Assam, who sang in multiple languages including Bengali. 

And lastly, a track from the film Hemlock Society, Amar Mawte Tor Moton Keu Nei (In my opinion, there's no-one like you), playback by Lopamudra Mitra, composed by Anupam Roy.

Handloom Hub

The origins of Indian handloom cloth go back into deep antiquity – the handwoven sari has an unbroken history of nearly 4000 years in the subcontinent. Ancient India was known for its excellent textiles the world over.  Pliny the Elder (1^st century CE) once complained in the Senate that too much Roman wealth was being spent in the import of Indian cloth. Mummies wrapped in fine Indian muslin have been dated to 2000 BCE in Ancient Egypt. Herodotus wrote in 450 BCE that in India he saw fruits bearing fibre burst open when ripe, from which the people spun and wove their garments.

Bengal was one of the main textile hubs of ancient India. Chanakya (350-275 BCE), the Prime Minister to Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, mentions in his Arthashastra a textile sector already fully developed in Bengal at the time of writing. Old Bengali literature records foreign traders coming to Bengal to pick up fabric at Saptagram in the middle ages.

Chinese pilgrims and monks coming to Bengal from the 13^th century onwards have noted that ‘there was an abundance of gems and cotton stuff.’ Subsequent travellers have listed various types of textiles that were imported into China from Bengal. A Bengali encyclopaedia compiled in the 19^th century lists around 25 subcastes and castes of weavers dispersed through different regions in Bengal showing the extraordinary diversity and numbers engaged in this occupation. In other words, there is no dearth of evidence to show Bengal had a thriving handloom industry more than a millennium old. Dhaka in East Bengal was the centrepoint of the Muslin trade, the superfine, translucent cotton fabric so prized all over the ancient world. And in West Bengal, Murshidabad specialised in silks of rare fineness and the most delicate weaves.

Bengal came to dominate the Indian Ocean trade from the very beginning. But the muslin described by foreign writers as ‘light vapours of dawn’ and ‘garments of the winds’ was a small, niche market, the cotton grew only in East Bengal in restricted localities on the banks of river Brahmaputra and in tiny yields. The art and science of growing, combing, spinning and weaving those yarns finer than a baby’s hair was limited to a few textile artisans/weaver families too. Less than 10% of the overall cotton yield was of the type, phuti kapas, which was made into the finest Muslins.

The Mughals, those indefatigable patrons of arts and beauty, conquered Bengal in the 16^th century and elevated the best quality Muslin further by reserving it for royalty alone. Ain-e-Akbari, the biography of Emperor Akbar records the imperial Muslin with a thread count of 2400 per sq inch, so fine and so light that it could reportedly be packed into a match box. The names of those fabrics themselves are so evocative as to conjure up their delicacy and translucence – Nayansukh (eye-pleasure), Tanzeb (body-ornament), Abrawan (flowing water) Shabnam (evening dew), Bakthawa (woven webs of winds) and more. But fabrics with lower thread counts also continued to be produced and worn by commoners. And all kinds of Bengal cottons continued to be traded across the world.

The story of Bengal is inextricably woven with its political fortunes. The British displaced the Indian rulers, colonised India and prosperous Bengal became their trade hub. For a couple of centuries, they took shiploads of Muslins back to Europe to meet the ever-growing demand. At the beginning of the 18^th century, around 40% of the cargo shipped to Europe by the British and the Dutch East India Companies consisted of textiles from Bengal, both muslins and calicoes.

But all that changed when the first textile mills were set up in Manchester in mid-18^th century. The Brit output was coarser and rougher than Bengal Muslin. Naturally, no-one was falling over themselves to buy the mill products.

There’s a story on which every Bengali is raised, I was too - that the British solved this problem by cutting off the thumbs of the Bengal weavers to stop the production of the fabric. While this is largely apocryphal, it is an apt metaphor for the way they killed the competition – they just set a crippling tax on the handwoven cloth Bengal had made for centuries with such passion, precision and profit. The milled British cloth was of course pegged at a lower price point than the indigenous Muslin. Looms in Bengal fell silent after a thousand years and whole families starved. In a double blow, the specific type of cotton, phuti kapas - that gave the fabric for those ‘woven winds,’ went quietly extinct in a famine, and then growers turned to other crops which were more profitable. The pool of formidable weaving skills to make those ‘flowing waters’ that ‘pleasured the eye’ were gradually lost. But it wasn’t just the textiles - a whole slew of colonial policies gradually deindustrialised Bengal. However, all is not doom and gloom - the good news is there are studious efforts to revive Bengal Muslin in both in Bangladesh and West Bengal as of now, read about that here and here.

Like the legendary muslins, the origins of the silk handloom industry in Bengal is also lost in antiquity. Silk was a part of tribal culture in Bengal and the Ganges Delta region for centuries, silk spinning in Bhagalpur in modern Bihar can be traced back for more than a thousand years among the forest dwelling tribes. Tamralipta, the ancient city in the Bay of Bengal was part of the Silk Route in Mauryan times (3^rd century BCE). Sericulture, unlike cotton, was limited to the spinning of yarn till recent centuries. Most of the European trade of silk the 16^th/17^th century consisted of raw silk yarn rather than woven cloth. The Bengal silk handlooms started during the times of Nawab Murshid Quli Khan (1660-1727) who moved the capital of Bengal from Dhaka to Murshidabad. The most well known among the silks was the Baluchari sari – woven with narrative motifs from the mythologies and epics of Hindu, Buddhist faiths, and other scenes depicting contemporary life including the lifestyles of the nawabs and the Europeans. The Baluchari saris were woven from the early 1700’s onwards till about the 1900, when the craft was lost due to the last Baluchari artisan’s death without a successor. These weaves were researched and restored, the motifs reimagined in the 1950’s under a government initiative. Read more here.

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019

G is for... Great... Grub... n... Geeti...

Take a listen to Goshai Gang with a track called Maya (Illusion) and then a softer number from the Grooverz. 

And now for a throwback to a different, more traditional number, rendered by a well known singer called Poulomi Ganguly - Ami Banglae Gaan Gai (I sing songs in Bengali) lyrics and composition by Pratul Mukhopadhyay. 

Geeti is a Bengali suffix used to denote the canon of a lyricist/composer, as in Nazrul-Geeti, meaning songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam. Here I must mention that I have deliberately restricted the tracks for this A-Z to a select few, mostly the rock bands, because otherwise the entire array of music spirals wholly out of control. If I start bringing in individual lyricists, singers, composers…Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Rajanikanta Sen, Atulprasad Sen, Dwijendralal Roy, Salil Chowdhury and a hundred others among the lyricists/composers, Shreya Ghosal, Rezwana Chowdhury, Suchitra Mitra, Debabrata Biswas, Hemanta Mukherjee… - the names of the singers are legion obviously. Nazrul alone wrote and composed 4000 songs, Tagore over 2000, Salil Chowdhury probably over a thousand…that’s just three of the musical Giants…Then there’s the folk music, where many of the composers and lyricists are lost in the mists of history.  There’s the whole category of film music, sheesh, I’m not even going there. We could probably do ten years of A-Z just on this one topic. So most of the tracks presented here are from the 90’s onwards and the choice is highly subjective and narrow – for the Bengalis who may be reading these posts and gnashing their teeth at the lack of representation of the other genres - sorry, I'm fully aware of the limitations but nothing I can do, folks!

The last word in is...Grub...

The average middle-class Bengali is a serious foodie. If I’m being dispassionate, I have to say he is also a strange mass of refined and earthy.  

For instance, he eschews the use of utensils to transport food into the piehole - uses his hands instead. But then he also follows a strange etiquette whereby the morsel must be handled only with the fingertips all the way from plate to mouth, the palm must never be sullied. Bengalis will go to the greatest lengths to get the freshest, most delicate of fish. But then they will also make the humble peels of vegetables into a dish. They will eat fish head, flowers from the pumpkin vine, shoots and leaves, use crushed poppyseed paste as a base for curries, sprinkle a characteristic combo of five spices (paNch phoron) to flavour their gravies. They’ll wrap fish pieces in banana leaves or plonk them into a green coconut for steaming - take uncommon amounts of trouble with food. 

A complete Bengali meal starts with bitter vegetables and greens, followed by lentils with a fried item, then the vegetable courses, followed by the main dish of fish and/or meat, then a tart-sweet chutney with papad and finally a couple or more of desserts. Except the chutney and the dessert, all are served with steamed rice for a regular meal, or pulao (spiced rice, sometimes with cooked vegetables/cottage cheese/meat/fish).  Flour is used to make luchi and parota, the dough kneaded with a shortening of ghee and rolled out flat, then deep- and shallow-fried respectively. Courses must be eaten in a fixed sequential order, as I’ve mentioned before. A proper Bengali meal must cover the entire gamut of chorbyo-choshyo-lehyo-peyo – nourishment that must be chewed, sucked, licked, and drunk. Just being ‘edible’ is not enough for Bengalis.

The cuisine is probably the most elaborate in the subcontinent both in terms of the range of ingredients used and their preparation. It is different from its northern and southern counterparts in that there is no obligation towards vegetarianism for Bengali Hindus (except the widows, who’re treated abysmally, but that’s another story). While most of India uses knives and cleavers to prepare vegetables, Bengali kitchens have a special implement – the bonti, used while sitting on the floor. Traditionally, Bengali meals were eaten seated on the floor, on individual square rugs/carpets called ashon (meaning seat), on bell-metal plates or banana leaves. Prior to mid-seventies all meals were served this way in my grandparental house in Kolkata.

Credit

There is evidence of rice cultivation in the Delta region from prehistoric times. It is also crisscrossed by innumerable rivers. Therefore, rice and fish have naturally evolved to be the Bengali staples.

Rice, particularly, is central to Bengal – there are individual words in Bengali for paddy (dhaan), uncooked rice (chaal), cooked rice (anna, bhaat) apart from puffed rice (muri, khoi) and beaten/flattened rice (chiNRe). The weaning ceremony is called Annaprashan (the eating of rice) formally or mukhe bhaat (rice in the mouth) colloquially, the harvest festival is called nabanna (new rice), the Bengali rice pudding is known as paramanna (ultimate rice!).

Rice grains in some form are offered up to deities and dead ancestors, in weddings, in coming of age rituals, in the last rites. Idiomatic Bengali is dominated by rice – koto dhaane koto chaal (how much paddy gives how many husked grains) annabhaab, annachinta (lit ricescarcity, riceworry). What the Inuit do with ice, likewise the Bengalis with rice.

The most ancient literature of Bengal mentions rice, vegetables, milk, butter, ghee and yoghurt, and fish, of course. No lentils or wheat products, no cottage cheese, no chilis or potatoes.  These were introduced by outsiders – by the Islamic ascetics who came to Bengal in the 11^th century, by the Mughal governors who came to rule in the Emperors’ stead and brought in an entire cuisine with them, and by the Portuguese and British colonisers.  Bengal has been a melting pot and Bengali cuisine has evolved to reflect just that.

However, the diet and habits of Bengali Hindus and Muslims remained exclusive to their own communities till a century ago. From the 13th century onward Bengal was ruled by successive Muslim rulers. The Hindus maintained strict taboos to differentiate and preserve their cultural and religious identity. The Bengali Hindus were an elite, economically and educationally privileged minority in undivided Bengal by the early 20^th century. Bengali Hindus ate fish and goat and a range of game like turtle and deer. There was a strong tradition of animal sacrifice in the Shaivite segment of the Bengali population, and unlike the Islamic tradition, animal sacrifice required decapitation at a single stroke. The eating of beef was taboo among the Hindus. They eschewed onions, garlic and chicken as well, as these were used by Muslims.  Food cooked by a person of a lower caste or of a different faith was not permissible for higher caste Hindus.

Muslims on the other hand did not consume pork, slaughtered animals as per the halal Islamic practices, salted their rice while cooking pulaos and used yoghurt to make a non-alcoholic drink. Both communities followed mutually exclusive practices, culinary segregation and coexisted mostly amicably. Muslim practices and customs were gradually adopted where they did not contravene the taboos – for example Bengali Hindus used asafoetida, a plant resin used as spice, first brought in by Muslims. More than 70 years after the Partition made West Bengal a Hindu majority province of India, there is no legal prohibition on the consumption or sale of beef in the state, one of the few states in India where it is not banned.

From the 17^th century onward the Portuguese brought in a whole new range of vegetables and fruits, which the Bengalis gleefully adapted to suit their tastes. Instead of the locally available banana flower and squashes and gourds, now the cabbage was shredded into the ghonto, sometimes on its own, sometimes paired with shrimps or fish parts for added scrumptiousness. The indigenous pointed gourd, seasonal to summer, was replaced by cauliflower florets for the dalna in the winter. The Portuguese also introduced cottage cheese (Chhana) to Bengal. Chhana became the basis for a whole range of Bengali desserts, which got added to the already existing rice, lentil and milk-based sweets.  The Portuguese were also the first Europeans to introduce the Western style breads and cakes.

The British brought in the now ubiquitous potato, and the Bengali housewife incorporated it into her fish and vegetable preparations, apart from serving it mashed (seddho), fried (bhaja), and slow cooked in a rich, thick gravy spiced with cumin and asafoetida (alur dom) whole or halved, or boiled in a thick paste of crushed poppy seeds (alu posto). The tomato was also introduced by the British, and was known as Biliti begoon, or the British eggplant. The European colonisers brought in their own modified recipes for various dishes which trickled into the Bengali repertoire (kobiraji cutlet, mangsher stew).

The independence struggle brought about a certain egalitarianism in the Bengali society from the 20th century onwards. An avalanche of social changes and a wave of liberalism stripped away many of the earlier religious and cultural taboos. The post-independence generation no longer cared about segregation at meals - who cooked their food or the faith of their dining companions. The two separate strands of Hindu and Muslim Bengali cuisines increasingly twined together. Because of this confluence, the Muslim Bengali cuisine went mainstream in West Bengal, with a range of kebabs and biriyanis adding to the already existing lavish spread.



Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019

F is for...F l ick...Formula ...n... Friction

Untangle your headphones today for a marathon Bengali folk music session. 

First, here is a folk band called the Folk Diaryz with Golemale Golemale Pirit Koro Na, presented by Folk Studio Bangla. 

Much of our folk music has been 'repurposed' in recent years to appeal to the more globalised Bengali taste, younger, more demanding, more fickle, and more exposed to Western orchestra style accompaniments. 

Purists of course argue that Bengali folk is not meant to be accompanied elaborately - an ektara/dotara (lit one-stringed/two-stringed) and a pair of cymbals or a special pointed drum were traditional, even a cappella. Others lament the loss of the robustness of the dialects/regional pronunciation which become unnecessarily refined and urbanised in these modernised versions. But I am okay with the newer singers mixing and matching instruments and the urbanised, 'softer' pronunciations. The songs live on - that's the most important thing.

The next one is a band called Fakira with a track called Bhromor Koiyo Giya (Oh Bee, Go Tell...). That's followed by Tomay Hrid Majhare Rakhibo (I'll keep you centre-heart) by Lopamudra Mitra.

Every generation reinvents its music to suit its own taste, that's how it should be, otherwise the songs which have come down through centuries, would be lost, and that would be a true shame. There's no shame in a keyboard or guitar being played with a folk song. Though I have to say I'm fossilised enough myself to like the traditional formats also.Here's the last song from Folk Band Proyas, Manob Jonom, written and composed by Fakir Lalon Shah.

And finally I have for you a different style and a vibe  that's contemporary as compared to the timeless ones above - the football song Friendship Chai (Want friendship) by the very popular band Fossils.  Bengalis are somewhat football-mad and of course as cricket-crazy as the rest of India.

Flick...Formula...n...Friction

It irks me not a little that the term ‘Indian film’ has come to be synonymous with Bollywood. Bollywood is undeniably a great mass entertainer, it produces more than 800 films annually, double that of Hollywood, its closest global counterpart. Many of those formula films are viewed worldwide because they are easy on the eye - slick sets, simplistic storylines, lots of music and dance, melodramatic acting - generally totally divorced from reality. They are nice to relax with after a hard day when you don’t want to strain the brain.

But they are not the only films that are made in India. There is a strong tradition of regional films in other parts of India, including West Bengal, dating back to the first decades of Indian cinema. The Bengali film industry, located in a Calcutta neighbourhood called Tollygunge, has been known as Tollywood since 1930’s. It has always produced a fraction of the output of Bollywood, but the films have been far more nuanced, of varied genre and wide-ranging themes, and technically innovative.

The first ‘bioscope’ show was screened in Calcutta in 1897, within two years of the first commercial screening in a Paris café. The first chain of Indian cinemas, Madan Theatres, was owned by a Parsi theatre/film magnate, J.F.Madan, who set up the Elphinstone Bioscope Co in 1905. Elphinstone formally merged with Madan Theatres in 1919. It produced the first silent Bengali remake in Calcutta – Satyavadi Raja Harishchandra in 1917, followed by the first Bengali feature - Bilwamangal in 1919.

Silent films gave way to the ‘talkies’ and the first Bengali ones, Jamai Shashthi and Dena Paona were released in 1931. More than 50 Bengali films were produced in the years till 1947, when India became independent. This growth was underpinned by Bengal’s unusually rich literature, with many well-loved literary gems being adapted for the silver screen.

In the fifties, three young thirtysomething directors burst upon the Bengali cine screens and changed film making forever. And one of them made his impact felt not just in Bengal but across the world. The trio of Ritwik Ghatak-Mrinal Sen-Satyajit Ray created classics and cinematic milestones, spearheading the parallel cinema movement in Bengal. They portrayed social realities with a spare perspective and clear eyed nuance quite removed from the more melodramatic offerings of Bollywood.  

Ray was a polymath – a graphic artist, music composer, cinematographer, calligrapher, science fiction, crime fiction and children’s writer, script-writer, editor, designer, illustrator, and also a giant among filmmakers everywhere. He won accolades nationally and internationally in his 40-year career and multiple awards at Venice, Cannes and Berlin film festivals, ending with an honorary Oscar from the American Academy and the Padma Bhushan just before his death in 1992. His first feature film – The Song of the Little Road (Pather Panchali) is an acknowledged cine classic lauded by his contemporaries like Akira Kurosawa and by directors who came after him such as Martin Scorsese. He made some 35-40 films, mostly black and white - each one is worth watching. When he passed away, the entire city of Calcutta came to a virtual standstill. The next day, April 24^th 1992, the New York Times headline read Satyajit Ray, 70, Cinematic Poet, dies. 

Ritwik Ghatak is less well known outside Bengal, but totally should be. Ghatak came to film-making from theatre, he was part of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, and he created some landmark films during the 50s and 60’s. He struggled with alcoholism and died untimely in 1976. Of particular importance are The Cloud Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) and A River Called Titash (Titash Ekti Nodir Naam). He won awards in India and Bangladesh, but most of his films were commercially unsuccessful and he could not work the world cine circuits either. Ghatak taught at the Indian Film Institute in Pune briefly. Of late there has been a revival of interest in Ghatak’s work, and his films have finally got the acclaim they deserve.

Mrinal Sen, like Ghatak, came to the film industry via the IPTA. His directorial debut was commercially unsuccessful, but by his third film 22^nd Sravan (Baishey Sravan, the day Tagore died) his talent had earned him a local reputation. His films are more ambivalent than Ray’s, often with open endings. Sen’s work is majorly influenced by the Marxist philosophy he was exposed to in IPTA, though his themes and subjects are wide ranging. He has won international acclaim and awards at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Chicago, Moscow, Montreal, Karlovy Vary, and Cairo Film Festivals, apart from winning honorary degrees and awards from institutions and the governments of India, France and Russia.

Other Bengali directors such as Bimal Ray and Tapan Sinha blurred the lines between parallel and commercial cinema in Bollywood, which itself came to be dominated by Bengali directors such as Shakti Samanta and Hrishikesh Mukherjee in the decades immediately after Independence.  Some of the best films from Bollywood have come from the Bengali film makers working there – then and now (Basu Bhattacharya, Anurag Basu, Shoojit Sircar, Sujoy Ghosh). Ditto acting performances, music direction, playback singing and cinematography.

Notable directors who have taken parallel Bengali cinema forward after the Sen-Ghatak-Ray trio include Gautam Ghose, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Anjan Dutta, Rituparna Ghosh and several others. But quality Bengali cinema has never been restricted to only indie, low budget arty-farty films alone. Alongside the parallel cinema movement, there has been a steady output of robust mainstream films which have featured great storylines, nuanced artistic performances and have been commercially successful without the typical loud acting and crude formulas traditionally employed by Bollywood. The first name that comes to mind here is Tarun Mazumdar – he has made some major box office hits over a career spanning forty years. There are several others (Salil Sen, Sudhir Mukherjee, Nirmal Dey etc).

In fact, it is when Bengali cinema moved to blindly copy the Bollywood formula in the 80’s and 90’s, that’s when the audiences thinned. Though the advent of satellite TV and 24-hour channels has also impacted the film market. And since the 2000’s there has been a steady revival and an uptick in film production both quality and volume. Here is a list of the greatest Bengali films of all time, subjective and incomplete as all such things are, but still representative of the range.

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019

E is for...Estado...n...Europeans

One of the issues faced in this search for music this time around is that many of the Bengali bands do not have much of a presence on Youtube, they are more active on India-oriented sites which are not so seamlessly shared on the Blogger platform (or maybe that's just me?!).  Some of the YT videos are often cringeworthy quality because they're uploaded by some fan like yours truly, with great love but zero technical knowledge.

Okay, whinge over, back to the day's business and letter - first I have for you Ekalabya, a band from Kolkata, with E Mon Okaron. These guys have been singing for the last 20 years, debuted late 90's sometime on television. They've cut 5-6 albums since then. 

The next one I'm giving you is from Escape Velocity, formed in 2001 in Kolkata. They sing both in English and Bengali, here they are with Firiye Dao (Give it back) - take a listen.

Lastly this rather Dylanesque track from Anjan Dutta …Ekhono Tai (Even so). Dylan wields an Extraordinary influence on Bengali contemporary musicmakers and songwriters, maybe he does so on other non-English  speaking, South Asian cultures also and I'm clueless.

Estado Portuguesa da India...European influences

The first European explorer to arrive in India was Vasco da Gama in 1498, making landfall in Calicut on the Malabar Coast. By 1517, the first Portuguese ship had sailed into Chittagong in present day Bangladesh. They called it ‘Porto Grande’ or the Great Harbour. In the mid-1530s, the then ruler issued a permit for them to establish a trading post. The port grew to be a major trading hub.  By the closing decade of the 16^th century, the Portuguese had established their presence in settlements further north sailing upriver at Hooghly, Bandel and Satgaon.  These, together with other settlements became the Estado Portuguesa da India, the overseas empire of the State of Portugal, the capital of which was at Goa on the Western coast on India. 

The Mughals subsequently subdued the Portuguese and won back the Bay of Bengal settlements, by the mid-18^th century the latter had lost control of the region. But for 150 years, the Portuguese ships plied between Africa, America, Europe and the Bay of Bengal, and Bengal became an entrepot in Portuguese trade. The impact of their presence on Bengalis is widespread and enduring. Unlike the later British colonisers, the Portuguese mingled and married more freely among Indians, taking Christian converts along the way and building some of the oldest churches in Bengal. The Bandel Church was first established in 1599 and rebuilt in 1660, it still receives pilgrims today. Many Bengali Christians (who make up less than 1% of the Bengali population) have Portuguese surnames.

Portuguese contribution to both language and cuisine of Bengal has been profound. Several fruits and vegetables, an integral part of the Bengali kitchen today, were brought in by the Portuguese – chili, groundnuts, cashew, pineapple, pawpaw, sweet potato, cauliflower. They also introduced cottage cheese to Bengal, which is the basis for those most delectable Bengali desserts, famous the world over. Prior to the coming of the Portuguese, curdling of milk was considered inauspicious in Bengal. The Portuguese were the first to offer European style baked goods and chocolates to Bengali. Loanwords from Portuguese are common too – the Bengali words for wardrobe, nail, steel, soap, bucket, basket, window, balcony, button, chair, church, guava, bread (Western, leavened) and many more come from Portuguese. There are lingering influences in the arts and architecture as well.

But it is not just the Portuguese whose left their prints on Bengali culture. The French, the Danish, the Dutch – they all came to trade in Bengal and each of them made an impact.

The Dutch first arrived roughly a century after the Portuguese, made their base at in Chinsurah and stayed more than two centuries. There is the riverside promenade in Chinsurah and inconspicuous architectural details in derelict buildings here and there. The Dutch were the first set up a European style school and orphanage in Bengal. Dutch sailors have left their influence behind in the trick taking card game 29, played widely in Bengal and the wider delta region even today. As an offshoot, the words for card suites – heart, spade, diamond, and trump have come into Bengali from the Dutch. Interestingly however, the Bengali word for Dutch itself (Olondaj) has been adapted from its French counterpart (Hollandaise).

The French landed at the end of the 17^th century – and established a base at Chandernagar (present day Chandannagar).  They lost it to the Brits in 1757, regained it again in 1763 and lost it again in 1794. It was restored to the French again in 1850, but by then the city of Calcutta downriver had completely eclipsed its importance. It remained part of French India and was administered from their Indian capital at Pondicherry. Chandannagar was ceded to the government of India five years after India became independent.

But the French impact on Bengal is harder to pin down. There is the French Governor’s residence, of course, now converted to the obligatory museum, and French is still taught from the same premises. There are the old bungalows, buildings with pastel walls in the Franco-Bengali style – they have French architectural features combined with an essential Bengali staple – the courtyard. The Sacred Heart Church with its vivid and beautiful stained glass, imported from France. There is the waterfront Strand, with a graceful French style edifice vaguely reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe – on it is a plaque dedicating it to the memory of Dourgachourone Roquitte, who was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1841. The arch was built by Shamachourone Roquitte his son, the names being rendered in the French style – very uncommon.

Since 1980’s Chandannogore has emerged as a hub of electric lighting for festivals. Light artists from Chandannagore create the complex lighting displays for the communal marquees at Durgapuja – Bengal’s main festival. They also supply ‘animated lighting’ for other festivals around the country. Now, the Son et Lumiere is originally a French invention of the 50’s – food for thought, hmm?

Another commonality between the Bengalis and the French is their attitude to food. Bengalis are the only Indian community who serve a la russe as the French do, i.e. they take their meal in a fixed sequential order - course by course. And my word, do they both take their food equally seriously!

Apart from food, Bengali-French uncanny parallels extend to other aspects of life too - such as politics, and literature and films. Read more about the Bengali-French similarities here.

Lately renovated. The Denmark Tavern. 

The Danes landed up at Frederiknagore (Serampore/Srirampur) in 1755, and remained there for nearly a century. Under their watch nearly a hundred buildings were put up, including the Lutheran church St Olav’s, known locally as the Danish church. The seal of the Danish king Christian IV and an inscription on the bell testify to the origins. Recently, the church has been restored by an initiative of the Danish government. Serampore College was established here and recognised by the Danish king in 1827, becoming the first European style degree granting university in India. There are also cemeteries with Danish/European graves. Further restoration is on-going. Read about the initiatives here.

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019

D is for...Devotional ...Durgapuja ...n... Drama

Anjan Dutta with 2441139 Bela Bose is today's first offering - Dutta was one of the artistes who was a key player in the alternative West Bengali music scene of the 90's. Bela Bose was part of his album Shunte ki chao (Do you want to hear) released 1994. Dutta is not just a singer/musician, but also an actor and film maker with multiple awards to his name.

And here's Dalchhut, a band from Bangladesh, with a very popular track called Baazi from their 2000 album Hridoypur. The lyricist and one of the founding members Sanjib Chowdhury, sadly passed away untimely in 2007. Bappa Majumdar, the singer and the other founding member, continues to pursue his career solo.

Dramatic Delights

One of my abiding memories growing up was the all-night theatre-binges organised during the Durgapuja festivals every year. We watched plays staged on a temporary wooden dais  and came home only in the wee hours. For me and most of my generation who grew up without satellite TV, theatre is a recurring motif in the memory mosaic.

Theatre in Bengal has a very long and deep history. Bengali theatre evolved from a form of folk opera called Jatrapala (lit journey play) often shortened to Jatra. The first recorded performance of Jatra is of Rukmini Haran (The Abduction of Rukmini) on a night in 1507, the role of Rukmini - the abductee princess, was performed by none other than Sri Chaitanya Dev himself. Sri Chaitanya was a preeminent religious reformer and spiritual leader.  However, it is likely the origins of Jatra as a folk art form go back far more than 500 years. (Indian classical theatre dates back to around 5^th century BCE. The translated versions of those Sanskrit plays are still performed today, in India and the West.)

Traditionally, Jatra was performed by travelling troupes of actors and entertainers in village squares and open spaces, the audience gathered around in a circle. The plot and characters were usually based on the religious epics, a smorgasbord of music and dance and recitation, dramatic monologues and dialogues. The narrator was often Bibek (Conscience) or Niyoti (Fate). There were no props or sets, but costumes and sometimes masks. The actors entered and exited through the audience, there was no separation between the performers and viewers. Women did not perform, therefore all female roles were played by suitably clad, cleanshaven men. This remained a much-loved form of entertainment and its popularity rose to a peak in the 18^th /19^th centuries with the rich landed gentry of Bengal being major patrons.

Modern interpretations of Jatra still exist, there are some 50 odd troupes living by their art in the Jatra Para of Kolkata. The combined output of this tiny entertainment industry is about USD 2-2.5 million every year. However, the art and artistes both are under threat from TV and cinema. The demand for Jatra performances is mostly from rural audiences, the urbanites being too refined for the loud acting, melodramatic diction and exaggerated makeup characteristic of the form. Demand is also highly seasonal, restricted to the period between the autumn festivals and spring. Naturally, nothing open air can be performed during the summer and monsoon months. Click here to read about the fortunes of some once famous Jatra artistes.

With the coming of the British colonialists in the 18^th century, the entire Bengali society was upended. The traditional mythological plays no longer resonated with the audiences, exposed, on the one hand, to Western ideas and oppressed under their rule, on the other. As with other things, theatre in Bengal diverged from Jatra soon after the British entered the scene. On 27^th November 1795, the curtain was raised in Kolkata on a production of a Bengali play translated from a comedy by Richard Jodrell. With an ‘all native’ cast and a Russian producer. This was the first time a Bengali play was performed on a proscenium stage – where the actors faced one way and did not move around to entertain a 360-degree audience. By 1865, Dhaka had acquired the first proscenium stage. By the end of the century the front facing stage had percolated to smaller urban centres like Barisal in present day Bangladesh.

As the British colonised Bengal, Bengali poets and playwrights such as Michael Madhusudan Dutt experimented with Western dramaturgy and wrote farces such as Ekei ki bole Sabhyota! (So, is this what’s called civilisation!) in which he lampooned young people too keen to ape the West. Socio-economic conditions and British atrocities wound their way into plays like Neeldarpan by Dinabandhu Mitra – reflecting the plight of the indigo farmers and workers, predictably banned by the British authorities.

The European inspired proscenium stage came to the forefront in urban Bengal, while Jatra continued to thrive in the rural heartlands. The plays graduated to contemporary and socially relevant secular subjects. The front facing stage drove a wedge between the urban elite and the rural masses which have been diverging ever since.

By the early 1870’s Girish Chandra Ghosh had cofounded the first professional theatre troupe of Calcutta. He went on to write, direct and act in nearly 40 plays of his own and in many more written by others.

Rabindranath Tagore completely reshaped the theatre landscape of Bengal in the latter half of the 19^th century. He adapted Western dramaturgy into a profusely musical and non-classical form of Indian theatre known as Rabindra-natya. Initially, limited to small invited audiences at Tagore’s residences, they were brought to the stage by Shombhu Mitra, another theatre pioneer, in the early 20^th century.

By the 1940’s Bengali theatre, driven by the formation of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, a cultural wing of the Communist Party of India, had taken on political themes and was driving political awareness against British rule. Nabanna, written by Bijan Bhattacharyya, was set in a Bengal broken by the terrible famine in 1943, and performed by the IPTA artistes.

IPTA was disbanded soon after Independence in 1947, but the Bengali IPTA artistes formed their own ‘groups’ and carried on. Prominent among these were Utpal Dutt, Shombhu Mitra and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay - said to be the holy trinity of Bengali theatre.

During the 70’s, Badal Sarcar took Bengali theatre from the proscenium stage back to 360-degree audiences through street theatre, in a Bengal heaving with political unrest and the Naxalite movement. His plays remain the most translated/performed worldwide among all Bengali playwrights.

The Indian economy was liberalised in 1991 followed by the privatisation of TV channels. The entire entertainment scenario of the middleclass Bengali changed practically overnight and predictably, theatre declined. However, there remains a core group of diehard fans among the audiences still, and Bengali theatre still caters to them.




Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019

C is for...Charnock ...Calcutta...Controversies ...n... Court rulings

Put your headphones on for Chandrabindoo, a Bangla band from Kolkata with one of their popular tracks Ebhabeo phire asha jaye (Possible too, to return this way)

And then keep them on for Holud pakhi (Yellow bird) by Cactus -

Finally here's Chronic Xorn, a metalcore band from Kolkata, for a very different sound.

Charnock the Creator of Calcutta

When I was little, I was told a British chap called Job Charnock had magicked Calcutta into being on the banks of the River Hooghly. He came, he saw, and he created. It’s got the right mix of romance and adventure, the elements that make for an indelible story.

Job Charnock was an employee of the east India Company, and a fairly controversial figure even in his lifetime. He arrived in India in 1658 and was first posted to Cossimbazar, a major trading centre on the River Hooghly, some 200 miles north of Calcutta.  The entire Bengal operations was under the oversight of the Madras factory at that time.

Inside the Currency Building, built 1833

He was said to be a morose but scrupulous man, faithful to the Company and against the rampant smuggling that went on among his colleagues. He moved to Patna in 1659 where he was appointed the chief procurer of saltpetre. While in Patna, he rescued a Hindu woman from being immolated on the funeral pyre of her husband, a reprehensible Hindu custom known as the ‘sati,’ renamed her Maria and took her as his common law wife. Though he remained a devout Christian all his life, this relationship gave rise to much gossip and created the impression of moral laxity and conversion to Hinduism, which his enemies exploited.  He was anyways not a particularly loveable character – cruel, mean, brutal to his prisoners and often at loggerheads with both his superiors and the Indian rulers.

Charnock rose to become the longest serving and most trusted administrator of the Bengal operations. He was promoted to second in command and went back to Cossimbazar in 1680.  By the mid-80’s he became the Bengal chief. By then, the relations between the Mughal rulers and the Company had deteriorated to a large extent. The Nawab of Bengal had revoked the grant exempting the Company from customs duties and imposed a 3½ % tax. Cossimbazar was under siege when Charnock assumed his duties. Chased by the Nawabi troops, Charnock fled downriver to the south, to Sutanuti.  But the soldiers followed him there and razed the village down. The Company’s trade in Bengal continued to be beset by skirmishes from 1680-86.

By 1686, the Directors in London had arrived at the decision to separate the Bengal operations from Madras, despite some resistance from the latter. Charnock persuaded Madras to consider Sutanuti for the site of the new factory. Strategically it was a good defensive position, also a great deep-draught riverine port.

By early 1690’s, Aurangzeb - the then Mughal Emperor in Delhi, reissued the grant for the Company to trade freely in Bengal. Charnock made landfall at the site on the 24^th of August 1690 and set up the new Bengal factory on the lands he bought - three villages called Sutanuti, Kalikatah and Govindapur, and called it Calcutta. In time it grew to be the capital of the British Raj, a vast, elegant, cosmopolitan city with neoclassical buildings and luxurious marble palaces. For centuries, Calcutta was at the forefront of Indian literary and cultural advance, the nucleus of Indian Revolutionary thought and the freedom struggle.

Calcutta’s importance diminished in the 20^th century - first when the British moved their capital to Delhi in 1911. After independence in 1947, Calcutta absorbed waves of refugees from the violence of the Partition to Bangladesh’s War of Liberation in 1971, and it continues to absorb economic migrants even today, placing the infrastructure under severe stress. Poverty and squalor became synonymous with the city, unemployment skyrocketed.

The tide however turned in the 1990’s and today Calcutta, now renamed Kolkata, is taking baby steps towards a much less squalid and more dignified future.

Concluding Chapter - Claims & Cancelled lines

And what happened to Job Charnock? He lived out his life in Calcutta, served the Company and died in 1692/3. His mausoleum is in the garden of St John’s Church, one of the first churches the British built in Calcutta. It was erected by his son-in-law and one of his daughters is buried at the same spot.

Credit

In early 2000’s a legal case was brought by the descendants of the landowning family which had sold the three villages to Job Charnock. They claimed, based on centuries old deeds held in/recovered by the family, that Charnock had not bought but leased the land on which he later developed the factory. A committee of eminent legal and academic scholars investigated Charnock’s role as the founder of Calcutta. Their report concluded that - ‘a highly civilised society’ and a ‘well-developed trading centre’ existed at the site of modern day Kolkata, ‘long before the Portuguese and the British sailed down the Hooghly.’

The court therefore ruled in 2003 that Job Charnock was not the founder of the city and ordered that his name be purged from the records. Accordingly, Charnock is no longer officially regarded as the founder of Kolkata.

Officially. As far as my highly unofficial and unlegal brain is concerned, this is revisionist history.

Calcutta’s story arc includes some 250 years as the capital and main trading hub of the British Raj – for better or worse. I don’t see what is gained by denying that. I’m not saying that colonialism did any good to anyone apart from the colonisers. Not saying that Charnock built what he did for the benefit of the Bengalis. But what’s happened has happened, facts are facts. Whether the land was bought or leased, whether a trading centre and a civilised society existed before or not, it’s irrelevant.

Of course there was a thriving Indian civilisation 5000 years ago when Portugal and Britain both were far less advanced – this is established. Any reader of history knows that civilisation started in the eastern hemisphere and that India was civilised for millennia before the English turned up. But that’s neither here nor there.

The truth is we don’t know how Kalikatah would have developed if Charnock had located his factory elsewhere. Calcutta exists in its present form because Charnock chose that particular site and that site only.

There is an alarming trend in India towards tinkering with any facts that don’t suit the narrative of the present powers.  The Moving Finger writes and having writ and all that. Neither Piety nor impiety can lure it back to cancel half a line. Never mind an entire chapter. All history, even that which shows us Indians/Bengalis in a so-called negative light, deserves equal respect. Trying to lure that Moving Finger back is not just silly but also downright dangerous.

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2019