Calcutta,after Cairo
What kind of change is coming to a people that hate change?
The Bengali cuisine is extremely nuanced,and misplacing or mistiming a tiny ingredient can spoil it all. But the ferocious desperation with which my neighbour in Delhi clings to every detail in instructing his cook — as if the quintessence of being Bengali depended on it — is replicated in his family’s daily pilgrimage to relatives and friends in Chittaranjan Park. It might seem perfectly innocuous. However,what this family whines about all the time is the lack of Bengali company — notwithstanding their kitty parties or evening soirees,and the instant invitation they extend to any Bengali they come across.This isn’t about perpetuating the delights of tedious culinary routines slipping away from us,or even the Bengali adda. This is about a phenomenon called “resistance to change”. Although it manifests itself acutely among Bengalis living away from Bengal (nothing exclusively Bengali),it derives from a more sinister resistance to change that characterises a state abhorring every step towards the world as it exists.
No community’s middle-class goes to a glitzy mall or eats out with as much guilt dogging them,or sneers at women in Western wear,or insists as much on the mother staying at home so that the kid doesn’t grow messed up. That is,admittedly,not in the criminal category of the conservatism witnessed still so often in the north Indian heartland. But it’s criminal enough,given the liberal veneer that the idea of being Bengali still retains.
Is this the same people who modernised India by breaking all the rules so that others could learn to break the rules?
2011 may be a year of many turning points. And although the unthinking reference to Egypt is ludicrous,there’s a perceptible difference between Mulayam Singh talking about doing an Egypt to Mayawati’s UP and Mamata Banerjee evoking the same parallel in Bengal. To set apart obvious differences between Cairo and Calcutta,Bengal’s had no change of executive since 1977 — an executive four years and four months senior to Hosni Mubarak’s regime — and the inevitability of change this May is surely the biggest political certainty in India. How does the inexorable approach of a storm likely to unseat 34-year-old government square with such passion for the old and unchanging?
To fathom the irony,one might say this Change is the sharpest marker of the Bengali resistance to change. After all,the commonplace of opinion is how seamlessly the Trinamool adopted the Left’s decades-old obstructionist politics and torpedoed a reformist chief minister’s — never mind his salad days in the abyss of Pramode
Dasgupta’s Stalinism-lite — latter-day attempt at salvaging industrial Bengal from the sins of his political fathers (among whom he too should,incidentally,be counted). This argument runs: Buddha made a U-turn. He realised the necessity of change,his adversaries kept Bengal at square one. In switching to Mamata post-Singur,the people of Bengal exhibited their fear of the new. When the Left tried to air and light up the hell of its own making,they clamoured for preserving that hell,albeit by commissioning new gatekeepers.My generation was born after the Left came to power in Bengal. Without basking in the halo of East Europe 1989,or Egypt 2011,this generation has known no other dispensation in Calcutta,nothing apart from an entrenched system of privileges,large and small,doled out to the card-holders or sympathisers of the Party,be they bureaucrats,businessmen,academics,students,clerks,electricians or domestic helps. If you didn’t sell your soul,you got little or nothing. If you did,even the quintessential CITU-affiliated clerk might smile at you through his dentures on a good day. Some of the CPM’s time-servers have already changed camps,fearing a purge,or looking to retain their goodies. Some are bemoaning the apocalypse. The rest of Bengal embody the logic of history’s inexorability.
When your time’s finally up,it’s up; be it 30 years or three.
What’s coming may not be better or even new — but it will be here soon. That negates the contradiction of a change-hating people decidedly tipping the scale. Whether or not Buddha,through the half-decade of hope he steered till Nandigram 2007,remained a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist,the CPM’s rally at the Brigade Parade Ground on Sunday showed one thing unmistakably: the party has no vision for re-inventing itself. The CM’s fantastic relapse into the rhetoric of the foreign hand gave it away as did the talk of returning to roots and taking to the streets.
Mamata had followed the Left there; of late,she has slyly shelved agitations and bandhs,perhaps heeding somebody’s sane advice. So while the CPM,like my neighbour,waters the eternal roots,will there be a mere change of guard at Writers’ Building or a reformation of the body politic?
It may sound imprudent 1,500 km away,but somehow one knows,30 years hence,the memory of this May will not be of Mamata. That’s not just doubting her ability as big boss. Thirty years hence,we may say she was history’s instrument,nothing in herself,except her unmitigated will to unseat the Left. And because Bengal has been so change-resistant,the watchword “poriborton” has such an epic ring,even if it ushers in more of the same.
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