I recently felt a sense of being alienated in what I have always considered my own city, and supposedly my own country. Even as Hindi-speaking pracharaks at a BJP rally somewhere in south Kolkata were lecturing us on “Bengali pride”, goons attached (or not-so-attached) to the convoy of Amit Shah’s roadshow in north Kolkata, allegedly imported from “outside”, were busy smashing Vidyasagar College and Vidyasagar himself to smithereens.
Vidyasagar is as integral to “Bengali pride” as Tagore, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Satyajit Ray. Most young Bengali kids grow up learning that Vidyasagar was one of the earliest reformers of Bengali Hindu society (mostly upper caste, though this is not what is explicitly taught) who campaigned to legalize widow remarriage, and also championed for the education of girls at a time when an ultra-conservative Hindu society regarded such subjects as taboo. He also refashioned Bengali grammar to make it learner-friendly, and grammar texts written by him are used in one form or another even today by learners of Bengali.
It is being alleged by Amit Shah that clashes near the Calcutta University were initiated by “anti-social elements” hired by Trinamool Congress, and BJP’s violence was in retaliation (the idea that retaliation/”reaction” to violence, real or imagined, present or past, is legitimate is very popular among Hindutva ideologues).
But how can the vandalism inside the University premises, and the demolition of Vidyasagar’s statue be justified? One can only wonder what the real motives were (to whatever extent one is allowed to wonder in the current political moment).
What we do know is that there have been concerted efforts from the Hindu far-right to destroy the idea of universities as spaces for discourse and the free exchange of ideas. We also know that as far as women’s rights are concerned, the Hindu far-right favours criminalising triple talaq but opposes the right of Hindu women to enter the Sabarimala temple.
Local newspapers report that vehicles in Amit Shah’s motorcade frequently veered off course, making it difficult for traffic police to control their movements. It was further reported that the mob passed Muslim neighbourhoods shouting slurs, probably with the aim of starting a riot. It appears that Shah needs to use delinquents from outside Bengal, to disrupt public order and buttress his (true) claim that “people of Bengal” want “democracy”.
Has Violence Always Been A Feature Of Bengal’s Power Struggles?
This is not to say there isn’t a culture of political violence in Bengal. Bengali movies, telefilms and literature of the 70s, 80s and 90s depicted the hardships faced by ordinary Bengalis due to political violence. For the more privileged kids like me, growing up in the 90s it was “normal” to hear news of party workers being attacked, Maoist violence or innocent people being killed as collateral damage in the hinterlands of Bengal.
Political violence has been common in the struggle for power in Bengal; heralded by Congress, and turned into an art form by CPI(M) after they came to power in 1977. The BJP’s bloodthirsty Hindutva cadre and political opportunists in Bengal are now hungrily eyeing the Bengali market for furthering their careers in gory hooliganism. An article by Aditya Nigam explains this well.
Shah says no one can frighten BJP with violence – it’s true because the Hindutva brigade has time and again shown its frightening capacity for atavistic violence.
Political violence, as we have seen, is nothing new in Bengal. But the recent wave of Hindutva-instigated violence in Bengal, apart from scaring me, has also saddened me. That’s because it was violence not just in Bengal, but also on Bengal. “Bengal” – unlike RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s disingenuous idea of “India” – isn’t supposed to mean some monolithic chauvinist entity, but the multi-hued tapestry that is Bengali culture. Bengali culture has its own rich, independent history, just like any regional culture of the South. It is, of course, not all fantastic.
But beyond the often conceited, insular, classist, racist and casteist Bengali bhodrolok‘s affectation of gentility that is often sought to be passed off as Bengali culture lies the product of centuries of miscegenation of ideas, peoples and cultures that reside outside the cities and urban agglomerations of West Bengal, and crosses over to the other side of the Indo-Bangladesh border.
This is why syncretism comes to it naturally, again beyond the contrived syncretism within the cultural cloisters of the consumerist bhodrolok. It is to be found in the folk music of the Adivasis in the forested west, in its terracotta temples and mosques, its art, its cuisine and not in the least its thinking. It glorifies intellectuals, freethinkers, religious reformers, revolutionaries, musicians, but never (known) bigots or warlords. One of the reasons communist politics found purchase in Bengal for so long is that ordinary people, Bengal’s vast underclass managed to express solidarity cutting across caste, religious, linguistic and ethnic barriers. They were driven by an ideological commitment to socioeconomic equality.
A section of the bhodrolok community – the intelligentsia – that was inspired by egalitarian ideals in the mould of Tagore or Subhash Chandra Bose would quite often support or even join them in their fight. But their numbers have greatly dwindled over the years for various reasons, one of them being the massive changes in the structure of India’s economy since the 1980s. Left politics has floundered in Bengal, and Bengali politics now faces an intellectual crisis. The political spirit of Bengali culture has, therefore, departed. It is this vacuum that has been sought to be filled by the faux-intellectualism of Mamata Banerjee’s politics, unsuccessfully.
Hindutva and its concomitant anti-intellectualism have now launched a murderous assault on what is left of the political spirit of Bengal. The beheading of Vidyasagar’s bust may well be the start of a project of barbarous desecration of everything the Indian Bengali has held dear.
Will Hindutva’s invasion into the heart of Bengal affect its electoral prospects in the State? It’s difficult to know. Are we even having a free and fair election? I have my doubts, no matter how much a spineless and seemingly biased Election Commission reassures cynical people like me. How did Hindutva even enter Bengal? After all, Bengalis are fiercely protective and even proud of their non-vegetarian diets. They are unlikely to be moved to renouncing fish and meat because of endless hectoring from veggie zealots.
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