Bengal’s split personality

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, “a hulking, obese Babu whose stockinged legs shook with fat”, was the ultimate Bengali schizophrenic. For this figure of fun who spoke what was called “Babu English” was the James Bond of his time, nursing a canny mind under his comic exterior. British India’s espionage service knew him as R.17.
The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and British secret agents (called “pundits”) in Tibet are another story.

My concern here is with the duality that Rudyard Kipling’s Mookerjee personified, and which is especially evident as Bengal bustles in the frenzy of Durga Puja. This week’s vibrant activity is far removed from the lethargy of failed business houses, dusty law courts and government offices where the only movement is of huge yawns and wagging tongues.
Having some work last week in a Bengaluru sub-registry, I couldn’t help but admire the brisk efficiency with which digital appliances took my photograph and left hand thumb impression while a clerk readied papers for signing. Any court experience in Kolkata is a painfully protracted ordeal.
Not that Karnataka can be called India’s cleanest or most efficient state after revelations about the far-reaching ramifications of Bellary’s illegal mining. But I didn’t see in the Bengaluru sub-registry the strategically half-open drawer where lawyers’ clerks quietly drop bundles of notes, adding to the pile already visible, in a Kolkata registry. The scale of corruption is probably smaller in Bengal but it’s all-pervasive. It was a Bengali vigilance commissioner who first took official note of the term “speed money”.
Speed money must play its part in the Pujas too. That’s to be expected in an operation of this magnitude. But the real significance of this year’s Puja lies in open participation by government ministers for the first time in more than three decades. Not that Left Front functionaries totally disregarded either their religion or that of voters. One minister even raised a storm by publicly worshipping in a Kali temple. But the others were secretive about it. After all, they were Communists, and hadn’t Lenin banished god from the Soviet Union? It was another example of Bengal’s schizophrenia.
Now that Mamata Banerjee with her “Maa, Mati, Manush” (Mother, Earth, Mankind) slogan has returned to tradition with a bang, Trinamul Congress ministers are revelling in celebrating Durga Puja. No one more so than Subrata Mukherjee, the public health engineering minister, who took over the Ekdalia Evergreen Club Puja in Ballygunge some years ago so that it is now locally called “Subrata’s Puja”. It’s an active instrument this year of innovative technology and Indo-German diplomacy. A German designer who retains intellectual property rights over what I am told is a special light-and-shade image, webcams, video conferencing, the German ambassador’s presence and the proposed global display of Durga and her family make it unique in the annals of devotion.
Durga Puja must cost hundreds of lakhs of rupees even if an Internet blogger’s estimate of the equivalent of nearly a billion dollars is on the high side. The orgy of spending on clothes, jewellery, food and entertainment that precedes it must also cost hundreds of lakhs of rupees. The ten days of celebration give employment to thousands of labourers and craftsmen. They keep alive skills like confectionary-making, clay modelling, electrical decoration, fashioning pith into wondrous shapes and creating tented cities that might otherwise have withered away. Hundreds of lakhs of people are constantly on the road, surging from one “pandal” to another, visiting friends and family, and stopping to eat and drink in restaurants that are open round the clock.
So dense is the crowd that many roads have been closed to traffic. I returned from Bengaluru to find I needed a special pass to enter the road where my family has lived since 1946.
Clearly, Bengalis are capable of the tremendous organisation that all this demands. They have huge reserves of energy, an impressive capacity for hard work and the ability to mobilise massive funds. This is one endeavour that owes nothing to either official patronage or the non-Bengali traders who dominate Kolkata’s social and economic life. The person who said that Calcutta high court, the Kali temple and the Calcutta Club were the only three institutions left to Bengalis forgot Durga Puja. It’s a spectacular Bengali upsurge.
But what happens to all these worthy qualities during the rest of the year? Go to the municipal corporation, where Subrata Mukherjee lorded it for many years as mayor, and you might find the staff rolling in at midday before quickly disappearing for a cuppa. I had to spend a whole day there recently and watched an employee play solitaire with feverish concentration on the computer the entire time. Go to the secretariat and they are all noisily gossiping about Ms Banerjee’s next publicity drive. Businessmen say they preferred the Left Front’s organised extortion. Now, gang after gang turns up demanding funds in the name of the “real” Trinamul.
The contrast between Durga Puja’s well-managed exuberance and slothful daily life highlights the Bengali’s split personality. As I quoted in this column on May 17 — Say hello to CPI(Mamata) — a Bengali told Trevor Fishlock of the Times, London, “We are a special people, a mix of Aryans, Muslims, Mongols and Huns. When the Aryan blood comes to the top you see our intellectual side. But when the Mongol blood gets to the top we might assassinate and demonstrate violently.”
There must be another strain that makes for uncaring indolence. Bal Gangadhar Tilak can have witnessed only R.17’s mensuration wizardry with a rosary of 81 or 108 beads instead of the rods, chains, links and angles that lesser agents needed to pay Bengal his historic tribute.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author