Sankarshan Thakur: Bengal is in the throes of unalloyed bigotry
NB: "The criterion which makes the difference between a great man and a popular one consists in the great man's searching for what is nobly human in the masses, to raise them by its means, whereas a merely popular man looks for what is low and brutal so as to raise himself".. Rabbi J.S. Bloch; My Reminiscences, 1923, p. 233
Bengal is in the throes of unalloyed bigotry
One afternoon three or so years ago, I stepped out of our Calcutta offices for a smoke and a shot of bhaanr (earthen cup) coffee. Within earshot from where I stood is a small shrine to Hanuman that hugs the corpulent trunk of a banyan. The neighbourhood is a busy wholesale warren, scores pay obeisance to the deity as they pass by. That afternoon, a quite unusual devotee had arrived below the banyan. He wore a saffron shirt and a tilak emblazoned across his temple. There was a swagger to his manner. He hadn’t arrived to pray, he was hectoring the mahant of the shrine, a quiet, wizened man always turned out in dhoti and kurta. He sat there, in his implacable little space, hearing out what sounded more and more like a burst of bluster. Paraphrased, this is what the mahant was being told: the colour of the shrine is all wrong, it needs to be saffron, not white; it needs ornate lighting and it needs a loudspeaker which can drown out the azaan call that routinely rings out from a nearby mosque; it needs activity, bhajan and kirtan, some action. This was no way to run the affairs of a temple, help was required to assert its presence and help was at hand; “Panditji, kaho to log bhijwaaben? (Should I send men, Panditji?)”
At this point, the
elder could take it no more. He shed his calm and barked back: Yeh Bangaal
hai, aur yeh pracheen mandir aisehi rahega jaise rahaa hai, yahan tumahara
hukmarani nahin chalega! Prasad lo aur badho aage! (This is Bengal, and
this is an old temple, it will run as it has run in the past. Your diktat will
not work here, receive your prasad and carry on!) The visitor,
most likely a sangh apparatchik out to push his authority,
hovered a moment on the dare, then turned and picked his way.
Three weeks ago, I was in central Calcutta again, in the
vicinity of the Hanuman shrine, in a similarly busy lane opening on Dharmatala.
I saw a febrile chant stampede across the streets: ‘Jai Shri Ram! Jai Shri
Ram!’ There was nothing like a prayer to the intonation of it; it was the
bellicose outcry of assertion and arrival. It reminded me instantly of that
afternoon three years ago, and it made me wonder if the mahant under
the banyan would still be able to bark back in the face of the new refrain
strutting the streets: “Yeh Bangaal hai!” If at all iterated, his
riposte would sooner be drowned than heard in today’s Bengal.
Bengal is changing, or it already has; it isn’t the Bangaal the
old mahant was invoking. We shouldn’t have to wait for the
outcome of the assembly elections to acknowledge or understand that change. If
Dharmatala is ready to echo the sectarian rabble-rousing of the northern
heartland, something has changed, and it is not a fleeting change that will
arrive and depart with election season. There is an unspoken, but probably well
and widely understood, code to the ‘asol poribartan’ being promised —
‘real change’. It’s akin to the promise of ‘achchhe din’ whose
distillation we all now know is unalloyed bigotry. Bengal is in the throes of
it. It is a change that will leave much more than merely the banyan tree mahant censored….
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