Reflections

Bread and circuses were the raison d'etre of the Roman empire, particularly when it was in its long inexorable decline. The Roman citizens could be diverted from anything if they were fed and were provided the entertainment that wiled away the hours of leisure. Bengal, particularly during the Vishwakarma Puja to Saraswati Puja season increasingly resembles the Roman polity. The industrial landscape remains desolate. This is not to say that other regions of India  are flourishing notwithstanding the accha din rhetoric : a recent visit to Nagpur revealed long stretches of defunct “industrial” zones and empty real estate. However, the industrial scene seems especially desolate when viewed form a North Bengal prism: The tea industry seems to be in terminal decline, there is nothing to take its place.  I am not going into the statistics that were being bandied about in the newspaper advertisements and hoardings in late December and early January: the ones that showed Beng...

Communalism has been part of our existence for thousands of years. For those who associate communalism with the advent of Muslims in India (and forget that they came to India by sea to Kerala in the 8 th century, not with the Ghazni invaders), should remember that we had violent communal clashes in the seventh century when Brahmanism took over ground from the Buddhists and when the Saivites in Tamil Nadu fought the followers of Vishnu. However when we talk communalism, we mean what we used to earlier say in hushed terms, and now in louder voices, the “ Muslim question”. We are we, and they are Muslims and occasionally Christians and, not to forget, in the 1980s, the Sikhs. But let us take the Muslim question which, of course, is what seems to drive the discourse among the Bengali Middle class today. When we were young, our parents had seen the communal riots during independence, but mainly as children.  The Partition and its aftermath had coloured the visions of their parent...

The conventional history of Indian cinema states that the first Indian feature was made by Dadasaheb Phalke who in 1913 made the film Raja Harishchandra thereby inaugurating the Indian film industry . However there are reasons to doubt this narrative. It is well established that long before this, Mahadeo Gopal Patwardhan had filmed a Marathi feature “Shambharik Karolike” and exhibited it with the help of a magic lantern in 1885. This may not have used the standard moving picture technology, but even so, another filmmaker, Hiralal Sen has legitimate claims to be considered the first Indian film maker. In the Calcutta of the fading years of the nineteenth century an English entrepreneur named Stephens ran a flourishing business exhibiting short films entitled among others “A running train,” “Man washing streets by water pipe “and so on. Most of his exhibitions were at the Star theatre in Calcutta, but he also ran shows in the suburbs and rural areas of Bengal. At this time, Father ...

This picture of the Paddy fields of Bengal is borrowed from Wikepedia. Nessun maggior dolore, Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Ne la miseria. There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy In wretchedness In one of his collection of essays, “The Imam and the Indian,” Amitav Ghosh has quoted Dante from his Divine Comedy as the title of a moving essay on the pain of exile. Not the sort of exile that we face here in Malaysia, , brought on by ourselves, in the lure of a better life or some better working conditions, but of those men and women who have to leave their land and their memories behind as they are forced out of land which they considered their own. The plight of many Palestinians, and nearer home, the Kashmiri Pandits are apt reminders of this terrible fate that can fall on men and communities. As the Partition generation dies out in West Bengal and wherever the East Bengali diaspora dispersed, the memories of East Bengal slowly fade from our...

2011 has started badly for all Bengalis and lovers of Bengali culture. Yesterday, Suchitra Mitra, one of the greatest exponents of Rabindrasangeet passed away. It was not entirely unexpected as she was 86 years old. Apparently she suffered a cardiac arrest while having her lunch and died at home before any medical help could be summoned. The present status of Rabindrasangeet as the undisputed top of the pops in Bengal often conceals the fact that this was not always so. One of the group of singers who brought Tagore’s songs to every Bengali household and made them a part of Bengali existence was Suchitra Mitra. She was educated in Santiniketan, but she made Calcutta her karmabhoomi and her school Rabitirtha was one of the important centres for the propagation and popularization of Rabindrasangeet. She was beautiful, extraordinarily so, and had an imperious bearing; in later years the shock of silver hair which crowned her added to the distinguished look for which she was famous. We wer...

The month of Baisakh is always associated in my mind with our visits to my mamar bari (maternal uncle’s house). Back in my schooldays we used to have long Easter holidays and this almost always coincided with the Bengali New Year holidays giving us a week off from school and that was when we went to the village where my grandfather had built his home after he fled East Bengal during Partition. The house was built on a typical Bengali rural house plan; the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard. There was a tube well which was an innovation for those days inside the house and sanitary arrangements included a cesspit which too was unusual for those times. The house was surrounded by a large garden which extended to the banks of the Jalangi River which flowed past the village. When I say garden, please don’t visualize the formal garden of the English or even the Mughals. It was a typical Bengali bagan, which means a collection of fruit trees, a bamboo grove and many other types of...