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Home , Ashutosh Mukherjee, Bina Das, Girija Devi, Juthika Roy, Peary Chand Mitra

My Bengal

Kamala Lecture

January 10, 2013

It is a privilege to be asked to give the Kamala Lecture.

It would be, for anyone.

I offer my gratitude to my esteemed friend Shri Justice Chittatosh and to Vice Chancellor for affording it to me.

In my case, as notable as the privilege, is an accompanying presumption.

I will explain both.

The privilege first.

That comes not just because the endower is the unparalleled Sir , in width of vision panoramic, in depth of insight oceanic, in height of stature Himalayan, in length of service to society, epic. As also, in richness of interests so wonderfully eclectic as to collect rare works encompassing calligraphy, iconography, photography and , with equal panache – pornography.

Not just because the endowee (if such a phrase exists) is the distinguished Calcutta University.

Not just for those reasons sufficient unto themselves as they are , but because the endowment comes from the most precious, the tenderest, the purest relationship on earth – that of a father and his daughter.

Janaka and Sita, Kanva and Sakuntala, Asoka and Sanghamitra, Shah Jahan and Jahanara, Alauddin Khansahib and but typify an equation that is made of the purest essences of Creation. Not that we do not have examples of that bond being rough-handled by fathers. 's life shows how that too can happen.

It only follows that the loss of that relationship or even an abridgment of it has to be one of the greatest, the cruellest and the most God-questioning deprivations in life. Lear’s death-indicting wail, presented this very winter in – as the scholar Dr Uma Das Gupta tells me – by the ageless Soumitra Chatterjee has been vivified in Sunil Chatterjee’s translation – Kaeno ekti kukur-er, ekti ashwo-er , eedur-er-i thakbey jiban ,aar tumi shudhu niswas rohito ?

Those who have read Bibhutibhusan’s immortal novel (which I am yet to do) and those who have seen ’s lyrical film of it can never forget Kanu Banerji’s portrayal of Harihar’s aortic scream at the loss of his Durga. Early into my five years’ stay in Kolkata, hearing a chance remark of mine, the then Chief Minister Sri Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had a special screening of the film done for me and my wife at Nandan. Did Bibhutibabu entrance us ? Did Satyajit-babu ? Or was it Rabibabu’s soul-churning theme tune that keeps step with Apu’s trundling, Sarbajaya’s anxious arrhythmia, old Indir’s indignant exiting and redemptive returning and, last but not the least the sinking, slowly, of the missing beads, in the village’s moss-laden pond of memories ? Shob, Rabibabu’ r ek tune-er bhitar.

As we left the small theatre , Buddhababu joined us in the foyer. Who was Governor, who was Chief Minister ? We were shudhu digits , helpless, perhaps hopeless, voiceless grubs, inching towards some sense, some meaning to be found in the alphabet of life, its howling vowels , stuttering consonants.

Death is the ultimate extinction of bonds but there can be other infractions as well, such as seeing one’s daughter leaving her parental home after her wedding. Like the nectar of its seed in an almond’s tiny casement , Tagore fills his short story ‘Kabuliwala’, with that particular pain. The story of the nut seller Rahmat’s love of his daughter in far-off Afghanistan and his transposing of that, across sand dunes and rocky escarpments, on to Calcutta’s little Mini is not what Tagore got his Nobel for. But it is for me what no Nobel can measure. In the Bimal Roy film , Mini, not so little now, is to be married. Vermilion has climbed on her forehead, coloured the ridges of her feet. as Rahmat , fresh out of prison, says to her in an unmistakable Hindustani accent : “Khoki, tomi ki soshurbari jabish? ” . Those words have in them the humour that hammocks pain, the pain that cradles philosophy.

Tagore has Mini’s father, very bhadra, very compassionate, advise Rahmat to return to Afghanistan and to his daughter. “Rahmat, tumi deshey tomar mey-er kachhey phiriya jao; tomarder milon-sukhey amar Mini-r kalyan ho-ouk ”. Bimal Roy’s Hindustani film has the father give to the Kabuliwala the money he might need for the journey. This is the money he has set apart for the wedding illuminations. He gives it with the words : Ek baap ko uski aankhon ka noor mil jaye, toh yehi sabse badi roshni hogi. What is Bangla, what is Hindustani before the truth of a father’s jnana ?

Sir Ashutosh was being all of ‘father’, a father of some means, when he sought to sublimate the loss of his aankhon kaa noor , and metamorphose it into an after-life roshni . It is a privilege to salute him.

Coming to my presumption, a little historical exegesis will explain it :

Eighty four years ago, about five years after Sir Ashutosh’s demise and some three or four years into this lecture series, a dashing physician and Congress politician in this city was in discussion with the Calcutta University authorities of the day. Together they decided that – none other – be invited to deliver the Kamala Lecture, that year. The physician – Dr B.C.Roy, 40 years young – was the one to , shall we say , bell the goat . And in a hand-written letter he asked Gandhi to deliver the Kamala lecture and even suggested the subject – “The Future of ” – no less. At that point in time, Gandhi was the future of India.

The of the day , strong and imperious, was as alienated from the people it was ruling as it could be and with Lala Lajpat Rai receiving a Simon Commission lathi land on his brave and proud chest, India’s nationalist thermometer was on the climb. Bhagat Singh in the land of the five rivers , Jatin Das and the great names which were to be sounded and re-sounded two years later on a crackling night at Chittagong, were mounting the scaffold of martyrdom. Here, in and around this very University , Time was readying Bina Das, firm of commitment but , fortunately for Governor-Chancellor Jackson, very un-firm with fire-arms to reach out to a pistol. And , working towards the largest Congress session ever to be held that year in Calcutta was seen for the first time in military-type gear, evoking awe and a new self-confidence. As he drove around the citry’s streets , a mother could be heard telling her little son ‘ Oi amader Subhas Chandra Basu aschen. Hat jor kore nomoskar koro baba …’ And even in the unlikely world of football, Gostha Paul , with his talent for athletics , was giving the lie to the belief that Indians were physically a weak people. ‘Oh my Gosh, around this time, was about Gostha.

The two sides – the Raj and its opponents – were as tactically matched as they were valuationally mismatched. And the Raj looked in every part the oxymoron that it was – a powerful but bad joke.

And quietly, like a village ditty sung under one’s breath , Bibhutibhusan’s Pather Panchali appeared that very year in serialized form. Not too many read it at the time but those who did doubtless found in its lines a sense of two and two Bengals co-existing uneasily , one that was about fantasies of power and the other about reality, one about the Bengal of vainglory and the one recognized and felt as ‘my Bengal’,

There was thus a logic to inviting the Mahatma to speak on ‘the future of India’. But logic and the Mahatma did not always go together. He relied most of all on that enigmatic thing he described as his ‘inner voice’ , wholly inaudible to others and when heard through Gandhi’s own explanations of it, wholly befuddling. Gandhi pondered Bidhan-babu’ s invitation and , inner voice acoustics firmly in place, replied : “Dear Dr Bidhan… Apart from the fact that as a non-cooperator I may have nothing to do with the university that is in any way connected with the government, I do not consider myself to be a fit and proper person to deliver Kamala lectures. I do not possess the literary attainment which Sir Ashutosh undoubtedly contemplated for the lecturers.”

Whatever else the grandson may or may not have inherited from the grandfather, he has not inherited the gift of brevity. Eighty four years on, with the British Empire resting retired in the pages of history books , the Republic of India is acknowledged as one of the world’s tallest democracies. Yet, who can deny that it is undergoing a deep decline in self-esteem ? Elected representatives of the people have status. But status is one thing, stature is another. Politics is not the nation’s most admired vocation, nor are politicians the public’s darling. Political leaders being driven round on a city street anywhere in today’s India would receive partisan cheers with slogans preceding and following them but would any one of them make a mother tell her little child, ‘Hat jor kore nomoskar koro, baba? I wonder. And just as in 1928, so too now two Indias are to be seen. One the India of financial and technological clout, the other of multiple vulnerabilities. And violence is in the air. Men and women are reaching out , firm of commitment and equally firm of hand, to guns. Most of these are illegal. None of them the less lethal for being so. And is Gandhi the future of India ? Ask Gujarat.

We live in a virtual world where make-believe takes the place of the real. And so a speaker gets identified who cannot speak on the future of India but claims a connection to the man who declined to speak. Never mind that he has no inner voice to rely on , only a much-exercised outer one ! Such is the penury of self-denial today, such the reign of presumption and such the working paradox of ascent by descent, that a Tucchhatma with alacrity accepts what a Mahatma so respectfully declined.

That , however, is not the only presumption. There is another.

My Bengal.

Apnar matha-ta ki kharap hoye gechhe? I can hear a certain voice ask.

To protect myself, I scurry for cover behind the Mahatma who practiced his Bengali lessons even on the last day of his life. His Bengali lessons ? That is right. On the 30 th of January, hours before he was so suddenly taken , he was trying his very Gujarati hand on writing Bangla, the script Vidyasagar wrote in, Rammohun Roy translated from , Sri and Vivekananda spoke in, and in which he, Gandhi, himself when at Beliaghata’s Hydari Manzil wrote the words ‘Amar jibon-i amar bani …’

Bengal engages, as do many other or, even, most parts of India. Bengal pre-occupies, as would any place one lives in or around for a length of time. But Bengal does more – it suffuses the minds of those who come in contact with it in a way few other places do. One may even say it obsesses them. And depending on the manobhava of the person concerned, Bengal all but takes over that person’s mental tapestry right along its weave, its stitch , its paint. Bengal also seems to work with Fate in a strange concordat to overpower those that come in contact with it, sometimes tragically, sometimes redemptively, but at all times definingly. You are one thing until you touch Bengal or Bengal touches you. And then you are another.

It has been so with many, it has been so with me. Whence my presumption and whence, ‘my Bengal’.

The window to my Bengal opened not here but at school in Delhi. Our music ‘master’ a venerable Bengali gentleman , tried his best to teach scores upon scores of un-musical children how to sing, play on the esraj, violin and sitar. He had two promising students.

One was a couple of years younger than I, who spoke little, and that softly, kept largely to himself, played the sarod and is now celebrated as Ustad .

The other student was of my age.

The famous father of two famous daughters , Pandit Shankar is not associated in the public mind with his son and that of Annapurnadebi. And Shubhendra Shankar is not a name we would immediately recognise today, though he is formally listed among his mother’s disciples. Shubho and I were in the same class. He was not what is called in school-time speech ‘my best friend’, but he was a deeply valued one. The sweetness of his spoken voice, the softness of the sitar he played, the gentleness of his manner had nothing – thank God – of Delhi in him. He was for me, Bengal. We had one non-Bengal thing in common, though – neither of us was into sports, particularly football , our school’s great boast. When others spilled into the football field like some Charge of the Light Brigade, Shubho would wander off , with me in trail , to talk of everything in general and nothing in particular. There was a faraway look to his eyes, a sadness beneath them, a sense something missing from his life, something that should have been but is not. I was not imagining this. A good quarter of a century, almost, before Time claimed the nonagenarian father from a sorrowing world, Time had claimed the son in silence. Mortality is impervious to chronology. As a bully is to a queue.

And so, even as a Bengali meal starts with ‘tikta’, my Bengal starts with a sense of Shubho’s almost musical sadness. I can never listen to the opening score of Pather Panchali without thinking of Shubho. My Bengal has therefore been inextricably associated with sorrow.

Ki bolchho ? I could and should be upbraided.    -          ?      ,   ।      ! " ## ?   ,   $ %# "   # ? Rabi Shankarer prosongoi – apni ki dekhte pan na tar gan kotota anondomukhor? e gan jiboner gan, sristir gan. kivabe apni take dukher sathe melalen? todupori, kivabe bisadke banglar sathe ek kore dilen? Have you not heard his opening AIR melody …his music for Sare Jahan Se Acchhaa…... Tadopori , kibhaabe bishaadke Banger saathe aek kore dilen ? Have you not seen the Poush Mela in Santiniketan, the Boi Mela in Kolkata, the Jagaddhatri celebrations in Chandernagore, the Rath-jatra at Mahishadal, the Purulia Chhau, the Pujo everywhere in the State, the Bhai- phontaa in Darjeeling, Christmas carols sung by the choir at Graham’s Homes in Kalimpong…

have you not heard the merriment at the Kolkata’s yatimkhana on Eid or at that cheerful home for the un-sheltered child , Future Hope and Sister Cyril’s Rainbow children at Loreto Sealdah ? Where is the sadness ? &#'   (#   )* +,-   . ? ...  & /,'    ... 0 +,' 1#' 2  ...    3/4 5 &26 . & & # "' ! ?    ? mohaloya ki apni banglar akasher buke ghuri uran ni kokhono?... apni iha dhoriya rakhite pariben na...thik uriya choliya zaibe... kono ek adhidoibik shoktir sahazye. taha hoile kothay dukho? kiser bedona?

And do you not know that Rabindranath called himself the poet of Ananda …Have you not heard Ananda Loke Mangala Loke … Dhano Dhanya Pushpahara ? Have you not sung Sujalam, Suphalam …? Or if you are not into culture as I can see..…leave culture aside…Have you never heard the happy chatter at Kolkata’s Coffee House, the roar of joy at a football match between Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting ? Have you not seen the millions who turn up to greet Maradona ? Have you not felt the earth quake in ecstasy when Saurav Ganguly sends the red apple flying for a six ? And …Aachha aek cup chaai aar aek garam singhaaraa…you have obviously never walked towards Sonagachi…

Arey Baba , Enough !…. …aami jaanii … I am aware that the survival of happiness in our State and in our great city tantamounts to the triumph of the human spirit over the unhappier aspects of the human condition. I have, I have, indeed, I have seen and felt all that , not once but time and time again.

Yet , to be true to myself I must add that I have never responded with anything but dismay at the over-done description of Kolkata as the ‘City of Joy’. Dominic Lapierre’s novel and Roland Joffe’s film of it have many things going for them but what works for them as a title is not meant for mindless adoption and repetition out of context. And though Rabindranath has called himself the poet of Ananda, the overwhelming number of his songs and his paintings, particularly his self-portraits, tell me that if ananda permeated his sensibility , so did dukkha and that, in fact, a pramukha bhava if not the pradhana bhava of Rabindranath’s works seems to me to tend to sadness rather than to exultation.

When the agronomist Jyotiprasad Bhattacharjee was introduced to my parents by my sister who was later to marry him, conversation between my cautious father and observant mother naturally turned to Tagore. One thing led to another and Jyotibhai, as we called him, found himself being asked to sing. Quite effortlessly, Paagla Haaoa Baadal Dine ensued. The young suitor and later bridegroom had to repeat the performance several times including on the long distance phone of the ‘three minutes over’ type for my by now absolutely delighted father and heartily reassured mother. The lasting impression made on my mind, however, was by Jyotibhai’s rendering of another song – Nibirho Ghana Aandhare which despite its brave extolling of hope , remains completely under the shade of its dark opening words.

Aekla Chalo Re is an energy-giving song and has immortalized it by her rendition of it , even as ’s woodcut visualization of the lonely pilgrim has etched for itself a permanent place in the world of art. Gandhians in general tend to be rather un-musical but thanks to Gandhi’s ashramik practice, they sing and they sing this song , in and out of sur , in and out of season. But whenever it is that they sing Aekla Chalo Re the song rings very, very true. Why ? Because of its association with a very sad, indeed tragic passage in Gandhi’s life and in the sub-continent’s history.

The Tagore song which, in my opinion, is of far greater magnetism in Gandhi’s Bengal connection is, however, not Aekla Chalo Re . It is Jibono Jokhono Sukae Jae . This most heart- wrenchingly sad song was sung at his instance, when he broke his fast in Calcutta on September 4, 1947 and which was sung again upon his breaking the final fast of his in Delhi shortly before his assassination. As Gandhi fell, on 30 January, 1948, life ebbing out of him, a daughter of Bengal, his grand-niece in law, Abha Gandhi nee Chatterjee, held the sinking head and lowered it gently onto what can only be called Bengal’s lap. Music was not in the air at that moment , only the smoke from a fanatic’s pistol. But I would like to imagine that somewhere above and around that scene an inaudible voice from here in Bengal , Juthika Roy’s, perhaps, or the future Iffat Ara Dewan’s, began softly to sing ‘ Jibono Jokhono Sukae Jae …’

Whenever I visited Hydari Manzil in Beliaghata, I heard its walls, mute and muffled, sing that song. It is easy to name and easier to re-name heritage buildings. It is less easy to keep them attuned to their legacy. Hydari Manzil, or Gandhi Bhavan as it is now is called with facile ease, had become hostage to managerial egos and individual myopia . It was retrieved in 2007from neglect and misapplications (including the installation of a mock billy goat and a portrait of Sri Sathya Sai Baba in it). The Government of India and the Government of stinted no money. And Jyoti Babu, who had met Gandhiji in Hydari Manzil in 1947, himself inaugurated a beautifully restored venue on August 15, 2007. I hope the premises will not be allowed to regress to decline and that this greatest of all Gandhi Heritage Sites , next only to Tees Janvari Marg itself, will once again become the magnetic field that it is meant to be.

Jibono Jokhono .

That song is not for and about Mahatmas alone. It applies to simple folk who are not securing the future of India but are the children of other children of Time, occupying the Space that Chance has allotted to them and which holds in it the entire range of the human type, the human experience, the human lot in which love and loss are the twinned centre-piece.

I last heard the song at Santiniketan , thanks to the then Upacharya Rajat Kanta Ray, rendered beautifully by Sangita Bhavana children at the Kristotsab gathering at the Mandir, in 2008. Among the singers was one girl with large expressive eyes, seated near the glass wall. She was singing with particular feeling.

Within a few weeks of that, the girl’s lifeless form was being taken home. Svati had been shot and killed by a young man in the hostel. Her Sangita Bhavana classmates, dazed with shock and grief, sang Jibono Jokhono.

With notable exceptions, love and its loss, deprivation and sorrow are to be seen in Tagore’s plays, stories, short or novel-sized. All this is of course ascribable to Rabindranath’s personal experience of tragedy. But it has also something to do with the fact that in Bengal’s sensibility tragedy possesses or is possessed by (to use an Einsteinean phrase) a “unified field” .

This embraces the site of tragedy, its environs, it holds the particularism of the grief and then responds to it multi-resourced – through individual expression, adjacent responses, collective reactions, through word and action, sometimes creative, sometimes destructive but at all times inevitable.

Again… Bangla ar dukkho bedona-r byaepaar…

I will risk the charge.

I do feel – and I have said ‘feel’ not ‘think’ because this is about an impression , not a finding – Bengal is receptive to sorrow in a way few other places are , and sorrow does not disappoint Bengal. Bengal knows grief and grief does not let Bengal forget it. Bengal is attuned to tragedy and tragedy does not keep Bengal waiting.

I have often asked myself why should go to Almora, to San Diego, even Debu Chaudhuri to Delhi, Kishore Kumar, Geeta Dutt, Bimal Roy, , Hemanta Kumar to Bombay, to Bangalore, Nirad-babu , Bimal Matilal , Tapan-da go to Oxford and , conversely, why should Guru Dutt come here to Kolkata to make his heart- wrenching Pyaasa…or Kiran Desai position herself in Kalimpong to write The Inheritance of Loss ?

Ae jaa … Buddhi-b-bhrashta… I can hear my friend say…I can give you an equal number of names of people who came here from elsewhere and have found happiness not sorrow …

I know that to also be the case. Ustad Rashid Khansaheb has given me the privilege of listening to his reyaaz at his Salt Lake home. His Kedar and Tilak Kamod take on an aspect that only Kolkata can enable. As also who sings matchlessly anywhere but when she sings at Dover Lane the angels come down to hear her. Rahul Bose will act great as the gentle Mr Iyer or as Agastya Sen or as a Jihadi in Kamalahaasan’s Vishvarupam anywhere but see him in any film made in Kolkata and you can see not just where he belongs but where he relates. As a rugby champ he will play on the right wing and fill-in as scrum-half anywhere in the world but see him on a playing ground in Kolkata and you not only know where he relates but where , nose bleeding or arm crying in pain , he laughs his lungs out. Ask the Davis Cup champ and cap Naresh Kumar if he would like to settle in Wimbledon and he will say ‘I will go to Wimbledon each year to watch the game but I can live only here… this is my home….’. Ask the nonagenarian if he will shift to London, Bombay, Paris, San Franscisco and he will say no, East or West, Calcutta is Best. They are all men and women of genius, men and women of laughter as well.

And yet, there is such a thing as the rasa of a place, its sthala-rasa. There is also such a thing as the icchha-rasa of the rasika even as there is such a thing as an icchha-raga of any lover of classical music. As a rasika of Bengal, I can say that my Bengal , which need not be anyone else’s , is not tinged with the colours I see sprayed on here in Kolkata or in Santiniketan. Rather, with those that one sees in Tagore’s self-portraits and which Nandalal Bose has applied on the Halakarshan fresco at Sriniketan and Benodbehari on the three walls at the Hindi Bhavana there – earth brown, mustard yellow, frank madder. These are the colours of life which can be toned to one side to make them the colours of pain, or toned to the other to make them the colours of joy. You can guess which side mine turn.

Black and white, in photographs are not about black and white but about grey which is the natural colour of so much in life’s anomalies, ambiguities. The Great Bengal Famine of 1943 stimulated Somnath Hore’s grey sketches, ’s black and white photographs and , unfortunately in colour, in Ray’s Ashani Sanket – another Bibhutibhushan-Satyajit Ray pairing. These creations are part of that same unified field which saw the dying of 3 million people and the breakdown of village life in all its departments and individual tragedies all merging into one whole, brilliantly symbolised by the giant trees that recur like a refrain in the film. Scarring episodes like the Great Calcutta Massacre of 1946 and the riots of 1947 of which the killings of Sachin Mitra and Smritish Banerjea , non-violent activists for Gandhi form part, are another unified field of personal tragedies sublimated into a common experience of pain.

Bengal’s share of tragedies has not been higher than that of other parts of India. Others have suffered no less. But there is in Bengal’s sensibility, in its svabhava that which metamorphoses tragic experience , when individual, to the collective and then takes the collective to some form of artistically, politically or institutionally shareable expression. I do not wish to dwell on the politicization of grief, a phenomenon which can be – to the politics concerned – productive as also totally counter-productive.

A slender isthmus of feeling links the continent of Bengal’s emotion to the sub-continent of its intellect.

Equally, a narrow strait of sentiment links the ocean of Bengal’s sub-liminal sympathies to the bays of its willed understandings.

Continents are made by the sundials of Time, sub-continents by the clock-towers of history and countries , we might say, by the wrist watches of politicians . Bengal’s emotional continent is anterior to its intellectual subordinations. And it is that continent which has determined the shape or the structure and the stability of its objective creations.

Oceans are about aesthetics of creation, bays are about their demarcated interpretations. When oceans heave, bays ripple. An ocean of sentiment has fed , one might even say nourished Bengal’s artistic expression.

Creativity and even scholarly academic enquiry move over the strait of sentiment in Bengal.

Sentiment is not the same as sentimentality. Derozio and Derozians like and were not sentimental people. But when opposing “the hollowness of idolatry, the shames of priesthood” and “summon(ing) Hinduism to the bar of reason” , they were actuating a sentiment which we may call, paradoxically, the sentiment of reason. Bengal, even when it employs the instruments of reason, does so with a passionate intensity. In the winter on 1992-3 I heard Professor Amartya Sen speak in Cambridge on the shame of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It was among the most moving speeches I have heard in my life. And he was speaking on the side of reason, and against emotion.

Nirad Chaudhuri was and remains indefinable. He would, I think, have liked to be remembered as an intellectual Excalibur. He quizzed me at one of our early meetings to, basically, evaluate my IQ. He gathered that my mother tongue was Hindi/Hindustani. But he wanted to find out if my knowledge of the language was limited to speaking it or a bit more. ‘What is the root-word for your fruit ‘aam’ ?’ he asked. Fortunately for me, I remembered to say ‘, sir, I think…amra …’ He did not react. Saying I was right was, of course, out of the question. More was to follow. ‘What is the difference between the Urdu ‘be’ and ‘ba’ ?’ Again, Allah ka shukr hai , I mumbled the right answer. I knew I was with – ‘ Excalibur or no – an intellectual pocket- knife that could cut in many directions and at once. But that was just one side of him. When Mrs Chaudhuri passed away quite suddenly and I with many others rushed from London (where I was then working) to Oxford, he was no Excalibur or knife. He said to me ‘I am over ninety now…And I had never seen anyone die in front of my eyes…until last night…when Mrs Chaudhuri died…and…I was alone…’ This was not India’s Best Known Unkown Indian speaking, but one who was giving me in one drop all the emotions of grief that can be held by the pippet called the human intellect.

Alongside the isthmus of feeling and the strait of sentiment, there also rises in the Bengal I know, a delicate char , sandy, soft and shy, from the river-bed of personal experience , personal inclination, personal bend, to make Bengal’s shared creations, both narrative and three- dimensionally physical. The Gitanjali, I would say, arose thus as did the little clay-hut in Santiniketan built , as Rabindranath said, for his ‘ seshbela’ …jaar naam ‘Shyamali’ where ‘maatir kole mishbe maati …’ and which ‘ birodh korbe na dharani sange …’ The connecting vestibules – the isthmuses of feeling ,the straits of sentiment and the char of personally felt experience – have been crucial to my understanding of Bengal . It is those strips of sand or water which, like a hyphen both connect and keep apart, that make Bengal for me, ‘my Bengal’. In the case of Rammohun and Vivekananda, these vestibules work through their letters which share and not just convey, in the case of Saratchandra through his short stories where he lets the characters play, not preach. In the case of Rabindranath, they work through his paintings and shorter poetic or musical works. In the case of Buddhadeb Bose, through the triptych Maner Mata Meye which , to my mind, is an isthmus ,a strait and a char combined, linking the heart and the mind, with love shown in all its dimensions, too serious to be taken lightly , too accessible to be seen as philosophic expressions. And loss, too terrible to bear alone, too private to be understood by anyone but the loved.

I may be permitted to place before this gathering five summations:

1.Bengal , as I see it ( ‘my Bengal’) has been a field of many emotions but , very specially, of pain and of the emotions that accompany pain.

2. Bengal is also the field of an unusual concentration of artistic expressions.

3. Bengal’s pain starts or occurs at the point of the personal or individual but soon becomes shared in and through expression in literature and the arts, especially music.

4. Thus sensed, shared, sublimated it joins , like a river to a flood plain, that unified field of pain in Bengal which takes the experience of pain into itself and gives it a form that can be deeply fulfilling to the first experience and then to subsequent ones in an almost seamless transmission.

5. This phenomenon is not and cannot be peculiar to Bengal but Bengal is certainly a major theatre for it.

There is , first, pain’s subjective blueprint with the individual pain’s signature on one corner, over which comes to be laid the objective super-structure. The process follows the pattern of an aalaap in vilambit which then moves on to the song’s syllabic structure with as many interpretations to it as it has listeners.

So what then makes up ‘my Bengal’ ?

I have asked myself many times if the Bengal I know, respect, covet, love, is the Bengal of emotional catharsis or of its intellectual musculature , the Bengal of political assertion, or of spiritual redemption , the Bengal of pain felt and sublimated or of Ananda and joy. To say it is a bit of all these would be to cop-out of the question, not answer it.

There are works – literary, artistic, musical, basically, ‘creative’ works. And there is work – hard work on the field, on the ground of real life.

Bengal has given us both, not always in perfect balance, but still, both, sometimes in combination as in the field work of Nirmal Bose , Mahalanobis, Amartya Sen, Sukhomoy Chakravarty , Mahbub-ul Haq and Andre Beteille and sometimes separately. After pondering (which is different from reading) the works of Rammohun, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Bibhutibhusan, Saratchandra, Rabindranath , Buddhadeb Bose, M N Roy, and, in our own times, of pre-eminent academics such as the ones I mentioned and, Ashok Mitra , , Tapan Raychaudhri, Ranajit Guha, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Partha Chatterjee, Amiya and Jasodhara Bagchi and Uma Das Gupta and of persons in the field like Ashoka Gupta and .

Letters from some of these distinguished contemporaries of mine are among my most prized possessions. They have, more than books, set me on those narrow but continent-linking and ocean-linking bars of human experience.

Books and letters…books about letters, letters about books. Bengal is to this day, the very home of the art of letter-writing.

‘My Bengal’ has been enriched by these. Shortly after a restoration of the library in Raj Bhavan , many letters came in appreciating the step and asking for access. But Kolkata would not be Kolkata if there was nothing contrary to the pattern. One letter said “You are doing boundlessly useless things like inaugurating some beauty parlours or Subidha Toilet Complex etc….Recently you have started renovating a library on your Raj Bhavan. Yah by this action some rats or mouses will be surely killed but no history of national importance will be created…” I wanted to tell the gentleman that I have inaugurated no parlour , nor been invited to do so. Alas, the writer had signed off with a fictitious name.

Letters, some touching, some funny, mostly very instructive, were a joy to receive. One letter in a rasa of its own came towards the middle of my term of office here, by which time I had said and done things not everyone approved of. This one was written in Bengali and it too withheld the writer’s true name. It connected emotion to the intellect’s most mischievous offspring – Swiftian satire. Praying for my early quittance from the face of the earth it gave the mist appropriate sender’s address : Nimtola Ghat Road. Having figured the implication of this I went on to see if the letter bore the sender’s name. It did. And I was surprised to see that it was a woman. But on reflection, I realised that it was not quite so. The signed name too was a work of creative genius , as creative as the address was and a masterfully delivered swipe at that. The anonymous writer wishing me to reach my Nimtola had signed off as ‘ Kamana Biswas’. This was such an altogether brilliant pun that far from being upset by the letter’s macabre kamana or its biswas , I was left admiring the high standard of its black humour.

Rage is an emotion, as is frustration. Estuaries connect tides to scoured river-beds. Very saline estuaries with unblinking gharial beneath their placid waters connect tidal frustrations to the blood-vessels of Bengal’s political intellect.

My Nimtola letter was a barnacled raft on such an estuary. Yet, I preferred it by far to the blows that were sought to be administered by some other gentlemen who thought they were the political equivalents of Gobar Guha. They were , of course, nothing of the kind, for Gobar fought clean and even when he delivered the radda , his backhand chop was open and could be seen coming from an essentially honest akhada .

Another letter, written in English, started off with an unintended and concise lesson for the Governor on the boundaries of a Head of State’s authority. Walter Bagehot could not have done better. It came around the time Raj Bhavan had decided to be part of and not an exception to the city’s power outages. It was a wholly appreciative letter but the form of address employed by the writer , chosen wholly out of genuine respect, reminded me, without intending to do so, of my constitutional limitations. It said : “I am honoured to be addressing the Figurehead of the State.”

It helped me to see that even a right step , such as a voluntary power cut, if taken unilaterally can seem self-righteous. But if taken after consultation, it is likely to be understood and even appreciated. It would have been better had I taken the then Minister in charge of Electricity into confidence before asking Raj Bhavan to turn the lights off for a certain number of hours each day.

It was another letter – from a simple person – that made me aware of the perilous decay of ‘Step Aside’, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das’ self-respectingly modest yet proud home in Darjeeling, leading to its lovely restoration by the State PWD with the guidance of the brilliant Darjeeling-based architect, Austen Plant.

It was again another letter that sensitized me to the statues at Flagstaff House, Barrackpore. But for that I would never have really woken to the beauty of that cluster of re-located statues which are at peace there. Barrackpore is about Mangal Pandey and we have to thank Dr Rudrangshu Mukherjee for having sifted fact from fiction, and history from legend around that enigmatic figure. But the statue there of the pathetically beautiful William Peel, brave soldier and Captain of the Royal Navy, who should have died, if he were to die then at all, fighting an Indian braveheart. But no, this third son of the Prime Minister Robert Peel died, at the height of the 1857 uprising, of the pox. The miserable circumstances of that death are rescued and raised to an unacknowledged height by that marble masterpiece by W.Theed. It stands behind a frangipani , by the Cenotaph in Flagstaff House, its constant companion a handsome white-faced Barn Owl which my wife spotted when she had done with a long gaze at William Peel, above a pillar.

A statue that rivals and excels Peel’s for its anatomical perfection is of one I would describe as being that of a seventeen year old labourer, shepherd or fisherman moulded by exertion to a beautiful orderliness. It could also be that of a tribal. It if of course no such thing. The statue of sandstone, three and a half feet high, in the Indian Museum, Kolkata, is of the Buddha. It was discovered , according to one version, in the Gond country on the Narmada. Be that as it may, it was drawn , I am sure, by some unknown master sculptor who had before his real or mental eye a youthful Gond, at one with the earth and its innocents, enlightened without knowing it, smiling at the artist who asked him to tarry for a rough sketch made on wet earth to become, in time, this statue.

I was reminded of him when on the tense day that had Nandigram written over it, at Tamluk, I saw a figure, prone, among a dozen more, awaiting post mortem. It had no smile on its face, only surprise.

In my journeys across the State I saw many who could be the original of the Gond Buddha many that of his mother, wife, sister, and , yes, daughter. At the RajBari in Cooch Behar, a painting of Maharani Indira Devi rivaled that of her daughter Gayatri Devi. And both were matched for me by no painting but a living being no Goddess can surpass for the grace of her deportment, the magnificence of her generosity, the luminosity that surrounded her. On the day I was driving to Nandigram, I stopped by a village, impromptu. The small group of huts in it were inviting me – ‘Esho, esho…amar ghare’ in Iffat Ara’s voice. After spending a few minutes among them, as I was leaving, one woman, shall I call her Goddess, asked me to step into her hut. Just for a moment, she said. I did. From a shelf, she brought out a brass thali with a lamp lit on it. And a dab of red powder. I will not describe the touch of her ring finger on my forehead for I cannot.

Nor can I put in words the throng of people at Chandernagore, that loveliest of towns, which greeted their Governor at the wharf , when coming with the French Ambassador and Professor Andre Beteille, a Chandannagarer Nandan. That piece of French history on Indian soil does not have to mimic Pondicherry but it needs to become its own bridge between India and Europe, excavating a future in our shared past. The papers and letters there are unique in terms of their archival value and literary calibre.

Letters, I said.

I must, as I close, share with you a cameo from my childhood. While at school , at age thirteen, I think, I chanced upon a set of letters retrieved from their sources and kept carefully by my father in a trunk in our home. These were written by Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Wholly emotional, they were addressed to one she called ‘Lawgiver’. No prizes for guessing who the Lawgiver was. Her handwriting was beautiful, the words lyrical. In the bunch there were letters written by the Lawgiver to her as well, in green ink, addressing her as ‘Pearl’.

In the set was a letter , a very emotional one, from a person as searingly intellectual as Rajaji. Only Bengal, in the shape of Saraladevi Chaudhurani, could have unlocked the sluices of emotion – the emotion of strong disapproval – from the water-tight dam of that mind. Asking his ‘Dearest Master’ to sever his relationship with Saraladevi forthwith , Rajaji wrote ‘…as to (comparing Saraladevi to) Mrs Gandhi it is like comparing a kerosene oil Ditmar lamp to the morning sun…’ Rajaji’s advice was followed. I was consumed by a desire to learn more about Saraladevi (apart from kerosene oil Ditmar lamps) and took the bunch of letters to my recently widowed mother who knew about them but had not really read them. Tears flooding her eyes, she re-read them and said (in Hindi) ‘ Jaise rishi-muniyon ki pariksha hoti thi… Apsaraaon ko bheja jata thaa…us hi tarah hamare Bapuji ki bhi pariksha hui …..Aur bapuji us agni pariksha mein vijayi hue.. Saraladevi se humein koyi shikayat nahin …Ve pariksha kii maatra maadhyam theen, bas…’

In his final letter to Saraladevi ( available, God be thanked, and published in the Collected Works) Gandhi himself called the closure given “ that perfect coincidence, that perfect merging…self-forgetfulness”. Greek means nothing to me now; it did even less when I was thirteen. But Bengal became for me, from that time onwards, a universe in which transcendental and sacrificial love – Eros – had a place. Sacred spaces, inviolable from the dross of human failings and set apart for the worship of the gods – Temenos – had a place. As did paradoxes or a puzzles that come to us as in a heap of occurrences – Soros.

Bengal is unabashedly about love – Eros. Bengal is un-embarrassedly worshipful – Temenos. And in its ability to juggle the lyrically emotional with the intellectual ,the religious and the secular , the tragic with the joyous, Bengal is wholly paradoxical and puzzling – Soros.

Bengal’s gift of love tends to making a cult of it. To have and love a hero is one thing, to blindly worship that hero, to idolise and lionize and make an idol or deity of the object of that love is another. There is no disloyalty or disrespect involved in disagreement. One should be able to differ from on some particular statement or view of his and still revere him. One should be able to be out of synch with Mahatma Gandhi in the matter of , say, brahmacharya in marriage and still hold him in the bonds of love. One should be able to say about Netaji that his political values were inspirational but his political decisions fallible. One should be able to say Tagore’s Gitanjali is unparalleled , but his own translations of it unsatisfying.

The late Amlan Datta once wrote to me about what he called “the risk of love”. Bengal’s loves need to court the risks of love. Equally, love of Bengal needs to risk candour.

Eros , Temenos, Soros have a fourth cousin – Pyro or Pyros.

In Bengal’s propensity to ignite thought, inflame desire and combust emotion it is Fire – Pyro or Pyros.

Professor Uma Dasgupta and one of the most distinguished philosophers of our time Arindam Chakrabarty have done me the favour of interpreting Aguner Paroshmani . Professor Chakrabarty writes in an informal but deeply thought-out comminication: “ Fire, standing for all the trials and tribulations of suffering, bereavement, humiliation, disease, ageing – "duhkha" as Buddha would have called it – and Tagore's life starting with loss of mother, favorite sister-in-law, father, son, daughter, wife, on and on was full of this fire (full of ) burns. People take it as devastation, burning to ashes. Rabindranath – not just in this song but in many many many songs and poems – expresses his "anubhav" that this Fire transforms the "iron in the soul" to Gold.

Hence "Fire's Poroshmoni"... mixing of metaphors. Instead of burning down life, may the Fire of extreme suffering touch my life like a sparsha-mani and make it "punya" – sacred, holy. E jibon punya karo, ejibon punya karo, e jibon punya karo . By what? By the gift of BURNING: dahan dAney …” That was Professor Chakrabarty, intense and insightful, in his letter. He will, I hope, expand that letter into a book about how emotion moves to reason, feeling to intellect.

My Bengal knows pain. That is not its weakness. In fact, that can be its strength.

It can use its experience of tragedy, like a dahandAney, to tell itself and India how to salvage solutions from crises, answers from riddles, not by feeding agun but transforming it.

“I cannot leave Bengal”, Gandhi said. “And Bengal will not let me go”.

I can say the first but will not presume to say the second sentence.

This much I will say :

Bengal’s legacy of pain, her experience of tragedy, her gift of love, her dower of art distinguish it.

Distinction is a form of individualism.

And individualism can become a love affair with oneself.

A lonely distinction is a form of self-exclusion.

My Bengal is distinctive but not lonely, unique but not exclusive and says to its Mother, Diyechhe joto, niyechhe taar beshi.

Acknowledgments for suggestions, interpretations, translations and inspiration

Professor Andre Beteille

Professor Arindam Chakrabarty

Dr Uma Das Gupta

Professor Sushanta Datta Gupta

Professor Venu Madhav Govindu

Begum Iffat Ara Dewan

Vidvan T M Krishna

Shri Kuldeep S. Kachwaha

Shri Ravi Nath

Supratik Chakraborty

Shri Avishek Chatterjee

Shri Mohammadul Haque