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 Mahatma Gandhi – none other – be invited to deliver the Kamala lecture that year.

The physician – B.C. Roy, 40 years young – was the one to, shall we say, bell the goat. And in a handwritten letter he asked Gandhi to deliver the Kamala lecture and even suggested the subject, ‘The Future of India’, no less. At that point in time, Gandhi was the future of India.

The British raj of the day, strong and imperious, was as alienated from the people it was ruling as it could be and with Lala Lajpat Rai having 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 the governor-chancellor, Jackson, very infirm with firearms, to reach out to a pistol. And Subhas Chandra Bose, 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 city’s streets, a mother could be heard telling her little son, ‘Oi amader Subhas Chandra Basu aschen. Hat jor kore nomoskar koro baba.’

And quietly, like a village ditty sung under one’s breath, Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyaya’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 Indias and two Bengals coexisting uneasily, one that was about fantasies of power and the other about reality, one about the Bengal of vainglory and the other 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 Bidhanbabu’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.’

 

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 is identified, one 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.

Bengal engages, as do many other or, even most, parts of India. Bengal preoccupies, 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. 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 unmusical 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 Amjad Ali Khan. The other student was of my age.

The famous father of two famous daughters, Pandit Ravi 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 recognize today, although he is formally listed among his mother’s disciples. Shubho and I were in the same class. He was not what is called in schooltime 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 showed he 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 of 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.

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.

 

To be true to myself I must add that I have never responded with anything but dismay at the overdone description of Calcutta as the ‘City of Joy’. Dominique 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, an 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 with 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 haaoar 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, in spite of its brave extolling of hope, remains completely under the shade of its dark opening words.

Aekla chalo re is an energy-giving song and Juthika Roy has immortalized it by her rendition of it, even as Nandalal Bose’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 unmusical, 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 subcontinent’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 4 September 1947 and which was sung again upon his breaking the final fast in Delhi shortly before his assassination. As Gandhi fell, on 30 January 1948, life ebbing out of him, a daughter of Bengal, his grandniece 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.

 

That song is not for and about Mahatma’s 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 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 centrepiece.

I last heard the song at Santiniketan 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.

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 Uday Shankar go to Almora, Ravi Shankar to San Diego, even Debu Chaudhuri to Delhi, Kishore Kumar, Geeta Dutt, Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Hemanta Kumar to Bombay, Devika Rani to Bangalore, Niradbabu, Bimal Matilal, Tapan Raychaudhuri go to Oxford and, conversely, why should Guru Dutt come here to Calcutta to make his heart-wrenching Pyaasa, or Kiran Desai position herself in Kalimpong to write The Inheritance of Loss?

 

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 Holi here in Calcutta 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 Benode Behari 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 to 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, Sunil Janah’s black and white photographs and, unfortunately in colour, Ray’s Ashani Sanket – another Bibhutibhushan-Satyajit Ray pairing. These creations are part of that same unified field which saw the dying of three million people and the breakdown of village life in all its departments and individual tragedies all merging into one whole, brilliantly symbolized 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, nonviolent activists for Gandhi, form part, are another unified field of personal tragedies sublimated into a common experience of pain.

 

There is in Bengal’s sensibility, in its swabhava, that which metamorphoses tragic experience, when individual, into 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 subcontinent of its intellect. Equally, a narrow strait of sentiment links the ocean of Bengal’s subliminal sympathies to the bays of its willed understandings.

Continents are made by the sundials of Time, subcontinents by the clock-towers of history and countries, we might say, by the wristwatches 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 inquiry move over the strait of sentiment in Bengal.

 

Sentiment is not the same as sentimentality. Derozio and Derozians like Ramtanu Lahiri and Peary Chand Mitra 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 of 1992-3, I heard 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.

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 riverbed 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 five summations: (i) 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. (ii) Bengal is also the field of an unusual concentration of artistic expressions. (iii) 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. (iv) 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. (v) This phenomenon is not and cannot be peculiar to Bengal but Bengal is certainly a major theatre for it.

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. I say this 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, Mahasweta Devi, Tapan Raychaudhuri, 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 Tushar Kanjilal. 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.

A statue of sandstone, three-and-a-half feet high, in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, 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 rivalled 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.

I must, as I close, share with you a cameo from my childhood. While at school, at age 13, 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 watertight 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 13. 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 puzzles that come to us as in a heap of occurrences – Soros.

Bengal is unabashedly about love – Eros. Bengal is unembarrassedly 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 towards its making a cult of it. To have and love a hero is one thing, to blindly worship that hero, to idolize 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 Swami Vivekananda 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 deci-sions 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.

Uma Dasgupta and one of the most distinguished philosophers of our time, Arindam Chakrabarty, have done me the favour of interpreting aguner paroshmani. Chakrabarty writes in an informal but deeply thought out communication: ‘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, favourite 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 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 sparshamani and make it "punya" – sacred, holy. E jibon punya karo, e jibon punya karo, e jibon punya karo. By what? By the gift of BURNING: dahan daaney.’ That was 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 dahan daaney, to tell itself and India how to salvage solutions from crises, answers from riddles, not by feeding agun but by 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.

 

* Based on the Kamala Lecture, delivered at the University of Calcutta, January 2013.