Indian Talent, Global Content
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Indian Talent, Global Content |
January 2009: What's in the breeze |
Why are so many good writers from Kolkata?
I have come across this question often. I believe the answer has a lot to do with the ‘arty’ image that both the Bengalis as a people and Kolkata as a city enjoy across the nation, and to some extent, the world. This image, or idea, probably has its origins in the era when Calcutta was the commercial hub of the East India Company (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and then the capital of the British Government in India. It was a remarkable city then, with its bustling population of the landed gentry and green British officers, its teeming trading houses, schools and newly set-up universities, its clubs and bazaars, its churches, mosques and temples and the people who came in a steady flow from the villages and towns from all parts of India to find ‘work’ in the ‘City’, each carrying a dialect in the dust on his feet. It was a city in which Persian (the language of pre-British administration) had become nearly extinct in as little as half-a-century while Sanskrit, Latin and Greek were cultivated with great enthusiasm, where the vernacular Bengali was finally systematized and a dozen other languages and cultures were in partial currency. And where English was being taught and learned like there was no tomorrow. Not surprisingly, within a century of the Battle of Plassey (1757), the battle, which gave the East India Company its definitive victory over the Nawabs, Calcutta was producing pioneers in the fields of social thinking, literature and religion. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar gave India, the first schools for girls. People like Rammohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore were fighting for a new liberal religion while Derozio ushered in Bengal’s irrefutable (if derivative) ‘Renaissance’ of ideas. By the time Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the irreverent genius, took up the pen, Kolkata had already seen Macauley’s infamous Minutes (1835) and accepted the absolute necessity of an English education in ‘barbaric’ India. When Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda began writing in the second half of the 19th century, English was firmly established as not only an alternative medium of creative and popular expression -- it had become the medium, the world-view of an educated Bengal. It was therefore a very conscious choice on the part of Madhusudan, Bankim and Rabindranath who reverted to Bengali as the primary language of literary output, a choice Bengal’s writers and intellectuals have taken forward into the 21st century – giving the state its own thriving literature. The ideological output of Bengal seems to have followed the multiple strands of the local Bengali, diverse national-regional influences and the cross-cultural English ever since. And it has done so with an acute sense of location. Having given more than its fair share to the freedom movement, it continues on its decades-long dialogue with the ideals of socialism. It is perhaps this centuries-old tradition of bi-lingualism and multi-culturalism, of political experimentation and innovative reception of the ‘other’, which gives Kolkata an edge over most cities in India. To have experienced the throbbing masses in the city’s buses, trams, trains and alleys; seen its gleaming fly-overs, shopping malls and shoddy makeshift-stalls; participated in the international film- and theatre- festivals, book fairs and handicrafts bazaars, banned political rallies, popular public debates and inevitable ‘cultural’ events, one can perhaps arrive at an average Kolkatan’s pride in the ‘local’, and an almost equal sensitivity to the ‘non-local’ – a willingness to respond to the political situation in the villages of Midnapore and the sudden floods in California with equal alacrity. Kolkata remains a remarkable hot-pot – one which has instigated the philosophy of Rabindranath, inspired the imagination of Satyajit Ray and channeled the existential questionings of entire generations of poets and artists. And it continues to throw up a unique spectrum of literary talent even today – ranging from the regional activism of Mahashweta Devi to the very postcolonial Amitav Ghosh, and a diasporic Jhumpa Lahiri.
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