Ramachandra Guha - Why Bengal is to India what France is to the world
In a book published some years ago, the sociologist,
Rabindra Ray, observed that Bengalis were so obsessed with intellectual
pursuits that even their swear words reflected this. In other parts of India,
the most common form of abuse dealt with incest - you accused someone you
disliked or were quarrelling with of sleeping with his mother or sister. The
most common curse in Bengal, however, was he who so far forgets himself to make
love to a fool.
I was reminded of Rabindra Ray's insight when reading How
The French Think, a new book by the Oxford historian, Sudhir Hazareesingh.
This presents a panoramic view of the life of the mind in France, from
Descartes and Voltaire down to Sartre and Foucault. The subtitle of the book is
An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, and its main thesis,
illustrated by many different examples, is that among the cultures of the West,
the French are most devoted to the arts of thinking and arguing.
Reading Hazareesingh's book, I was struck by how many of the
quotes he uses, and the aperçus he provides, are relevant to Bengal and
Bengalis. They too are an intellectual people, so much so that in this
long-time Bengali-watcher they evoke much affection and occasionally some
exasperation.
The great historian, Jules Michelet, once wrote of the
French: "We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use
strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects."
This is a characterization that fits the Bengalis too. For the French, writes
Hazareesingh, "ideas are believed not only to matter but, in existential
circumstances, to be worth dying for". Much the same could be said for
Bengal through the 20th century, when - as in their involvement in violent
anti-colonial movements and later in the Naxalite rebellion - they showed
themselves even more willing to die for their ideas than the French.
The more adversarial the ideas, the better. Thus, as a
Parisian scholar remarked in the late 19th century, "we are French,
therefore we are born to oppose. We love opposition not for its results, but
despite its results: we love it for its own sake. Our mood is combative, and we
always need an enemy to fight, a fortress to capture. We like to launch the
assault, not so as to enjoy the spoils of victory, but for the pleasure of
charging up the ladder".
Once more, the Bengalis can recognize themselves in these
remarks. A slogan common to all protest movements in Bengal is Cholbé
Na: This Will Not Do. Opposition comes naturally to the Bengalis; notably,
opposition to the fortress that is New Delhi,which all Bengali politicians
(from Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee down to Jyoti Basu and
Mamata Banerjee) have heroically sought (but thus far failed) to capture.
How the French Think describes how the penchant
for thinking, the desire to read, and the compulsion to argue, cuts across all
social classes. Analysing letters written to a left-wing newspaper,
Hazareesingh notes that the contributors "came from all walks of life:
students, workers, artists, priests, mayors, members of parliament, doctors,
lawyers, industrialists and farmers; there was even a customs inspector".
Much the same could be said of Bengal. When I lived and
worked in Calcutta, one went to the National Library not knowing whether the
adjoining desk would be occupied by a fellow academic or by a railway clerk
seeking to improve his mind. The film and bridge clubs I belonged to, which in
Delhi or Bangalore would have been the preserve of the Westernized elite, here
had as their members babus from Burdwan, sub-inspectors from
Howrah, and the like.
While all citizens think, those who think and write for a
vocation claim the privilege of speaking for society as a whole. In Bengal,
poets, artists, and film-makers are accorded a greatly elevated role; so also
in France, where, as Hazareesingh tells us, there is a widespread belief
"that the possession of a certain cultural capital entitled writers and
thinkers to intervene in public debates and to provide overarching answers to
the problems faced by French society". Bankim and Tagore, in the past, and
Mahasweta Devi, more recently, have played a comparable role in Bengal to the
likes of Voltaire and Sartre in France.
In recent decades, the intelligentsia in Bengal has tended
to be on the Left. Here too, they mimic their Parisian counterparts. For
communism, says Hazareesingh, has "exercised [an] extraordinary
fascination in France".
The flip side of communism is a hatred of the United States
of America. The historian, Jacques Portes, observed that that since World War
II anti-Americanism has become "a defining criterion of French political
and intellectual life". Hazareesingh himself remarks that, with rare
exceptions (such as the great Alexis de Tocqueville), "French writings
consistently represented American society as alienated, violent and
materialist, dominated by eccentric beliefs and an absolute incapacity for
cultural elevation".
Here, again, we can recognize the similarity with Bengal.
Few acts have ever given Bengalis more pleasure than when, at the height of the
Vietnam War, they named the street on which the American consulate stood after
Ho Chi Minh. Like their French counterparts, Bengali intellectuals have tended
to see Americans as crassly commercial as well as nakedly imperialist. More
recently, they have followed their French counterparts in continuing to despise
America while seeking a haven in the American academy.
Halfway through his book, Hazareesingh sums up the
characteristics of "the French style of thinking". These include: "its
inherently disputatious and polemical character; its fascination
with... order, predictability and linearity (and, paradoxically, its contempt
for conformism); its obsession with religious forms and metaphors; its
belief that the possession of a high degree of culture provides (in and of
itself) an entitlement to rule; its ability to transform private setbacks and
personal misfortunes into general philosophical world views; and its capacity
to swing from energetic optimism to melancholic pessimism".
The italicized phrases are those where the parallels between
the French and the Bengalis are more or less complete. Disputatious, polemical;
non-conformist; the elevation of culture above politics and especially above
entrepreneurship; the personalization of societal misfortune; the abrupt mood
swings - such are some of the characteristics of the Bengali way of thinking.
Sudhir Hazareesingh writes that the French believe
"that they have a duty to think not just for themselves but also for the
rest of the world". The problem, however, is that the rest of the world no
longer accepts this. The loss of global influence has bred a deep pessimism in
the French. Towards the end of his book, Hazareesingh speaks of a sense of
"Gallic doom" that pervades intellectual and political life in France
today. Everything, it seems, is declining in France; French cars are no longer
exported, nor are French films much watched outside France. As one novelist
bitterly remarked, a nation whose science, philosophy, literature and film was
once the world's best now has "nothing to sell except charming hotels,
perfumes and potted meats".
The Bengalis do not have even this consolation. People from
all over the world flock to Paris, but there are no Malayali or Tamil tourists
to Calcutta. The days when Rabindranath Tagore dominated Indian letters,
Satyajit Ray dominated Indian films, Sourav Ganguly dominated Indian cricket,
are long past. Indeed, even the ownership of the roshogulla has
been challenged by the Odias. No wonder that the bhadralok sense of doom is
even more complete than the Gallic one.
