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The First Calcutta summer
The first summer of Calcutta for a Non-Resident like me has been a great lesson in understanding suffering. The humid and hunting heat of Bengal troubled Babar who despised its rains and dampness, English Colonists who made lime their primary consumption and some as we know from some wordsmiths of Bengal – loved something very Non-English and very desi - panta bhat. English Ladies had a tougher time and suffered from veritable irritation. In their moments of folly and despairing heat, they might have thought that the Natives are responsible for the climate and the wrath that was to be directed against Apollo was directed against the Natives. The employees of Company and later, the noble and less-noble functionaries of the Empire – all suffered the heat, long before the place became a Revolutionary hot-bed. My bed, here seems like a mild furnace. The night, an oscillation in the self-generated fluid of perspiration. The sleep – half, plenty, heavy and high but without gratification. Like the very city which excites but gratifies not.
Very few cities in the world can claim to be such lucky in earning international fame in so quick a time. Within three hundred years, this place in Eastern India rose to great fame; it has seen the vicissitudes of its Fortune and in the last Episode, a study on Fortune itself. In the city of vanishing wealth, the political leaders experimented with great zeal on crushing any unequal distribution of wealth. The city was ruled by Babus just after its inception. Babus, in today’s terminology can be said to be Sparkling Consumerists. They consumed with a wonderful appetite things intellectual, sensual, political, moral, erotic and vulgar. The fertile and rich outskirts of Bengal was squeezed to enrich the Capital at Calcutta – came food grains, flowers and beauties. Babus reclined in their mansions, drank whisky and desi, flew kites, had cockfight, sang and danced and finally when the Great Sweepstick of history threw them to some Recycle Bin, they vanished. Their legacy remained. When the new ideas swept Bengal, this land was bereft of economic wealth, its craft and art almost destroyed and the default opportunity of becoming the Capital of a growing Empire was fast vanishing in real sense. The Economy was changing. India, itself was becoming a political power, instead of an Economic Colony of British on which Calcutta owes its birth, its rise and prominence and International Fame. While Political India was entangled in the local three body problem of China-Pakistan-Bangladesh, Bengal, always fascinated by novelty rather than of inner value embraced Communism. For last two hundred years, Bengal was a tropical conduit through which European Thoughts traveled, with necessary and inevitable distortion and dispersion. It was a kind of a logical conclusion of the Mind of a Bengali Bhadralok who finds greater pain in not being a Bhadra than Daridra. The lack of shrewdness of a Bengali Bhadralok’s mind was evident when it went against its entire historical whole and embraced something very incongruous to its cultural destiny. Communism in Bengal as a political idea highlighted that beacon light in understanding the cultural essence of Bengal – a passionate urge of not to be left behind in the realm of culture, to embrace the dominant culture of the time, to be always searching for New Culture, New Ideas. The noble manifestation of this essence came in the personages whom Bengalis love to decorate with the epithet of Viswapathik and the worst ones, as Tagore has once remarked – ".. From their speech, it was evident that they were smearing ink onto the face of English Culture and whitelime onto the face of Bengali Community." This Cultural aspect finds its echo in a character of Ms. Arundhati Roy, Mr. Chacko - an Oxford Scholar, a Marxist, presently a pickle manufacturer. The Author has captured by a single line the entire essence of Mr. Chacko, quite known to a Bengali – "He had a Marxist Mind and a Feudal Libido."
Kipling said about Calcutta – where the East and West cannibalize on each other. Is this assertion true? Or it is true still?
Wordsmith Content Vault (WCV) – editor@pentasect.com