Bengali Londoners: Puja as index

If it were not for the sombre Chinese whispers which went around at the venue about alleged financial bungling on the part of some of the organisers, one could be excused for believing that the atmosphere here was straight out of Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral. Chutzpah and spontaneous enjoyment seemed rather sparsely distributed in this crowd. The mellow congeniality among fellow Bengalis that abounds in Puja pandals across India, and especially in Kolkata, was nowhere in evidence. Instead, the entrenched patricians seemed hard at work to maintain a steep gradient so that the new, globalised Bengali, who had more recently set foot in this country on his own terms, remained confined to an assigned place several notches below them.

The largely geriatric populace frowned on loud humour, idle banter, requests for second helpings of the bhog, and dancing to the music of the drums. In fact, they seemed to find the very existence of the young Bengali — who was not even born when they themselves had set foot on the soil of this nation — an immense irritation. Their scorn was almost palpable.

Little wonder then that once I exited the Camden Centre and boarded the Metropolitan Line train to Harrow, I noticed visible relief on the faces of several of the other younger Bengalis, who later converged on the Durga Puja organised by Panchamukhee, a five-member group which had started out in 2006, perhaps after having been shown its place in the pecking order at Camden. The two-hour long festivities included a fantastic rendition of Chitrangada by a troupe of Bengali girls, who had been born and grew up in London, and a thundering performance by Eklavya — an upcoming music band which reflected the same ethos as Panchamukhee. The contrast between this celebration and the Camden Centre one was especially pronounced given the spirit of community enjoyment and camaraderie here, with software engineers rubbing shoulders with city lawyers, bankers and young entrepreneurs.

Obviously the Bengalis long entrenched in London looked down upon their younger compatriots as upstarts who cannot speak English in the diction they themselves had spent a good 40 years to semi-perfect, but who can now afford to live in their neighbourhood. These, in fact, are the very upstarts who are now prowling the world’s stage in search of their rightful place on it.

This new force cannot be cowed down. It seems to wear its attitude on its sleeve and proclaim, “If you don’t open your doors for me, I will build my own house!” This is the spirit that has typified the great rising Indian middle class through the decade of the nineties, and to this day. Although this spirit has, over the years, been written about to death, to find it in operation in and during the Durga Puja was indeed surreal. Clearly, as with the younger generation of Indians in other communities, Bengalis are fed up with the artificial divides created by people well-entrenched in the status quo, and who have now become almost fossilised.

By no means is the Camden Centre reflective or representative of the larger Bengali populace, but it is a small shrunken rivulet that is, perhaps, afraid of the surging ocean which it refuses to meet. It shrinks apace with every passing Puja.

The writer is an advocate of the Supreme Court