Bengal Diary: A Dose Of Nostalgia For “Those Who Shouldn’t Be Named”

Those Who Should Not be Named

“And then there were those who shouldn’t be named.” This was one prescription from my maternal grandmother. She did not elaborate much on this, but her tone was sharp and crisp. Not only were there names one was advised not to utter, but also specific times of the day when these prohibitions had to be followed. This linguistic curfew would be most potent after sundown and sometimes even in the dead of the afternoon, when the houses went quiet with the members all enjoying their siesta.

My grandmother formed a part of a larger community of the elders of the house who were conversant with the demands of these rules and the nitty-gritty of it. The target audience was to be unsuspecting grandchildren, and the pre-teen members of the family. These prohibitions came into place to keep the young and the mischievous in check, to prevent them from venturing too far from the house, or stop them from talking to strangers.

There was another binary at work. There were those who shouldn’t be named as opposed to those who couldn’t be named. The former was beyond comprehension, the acknowledgement of a presence that was beyond the linguistic, the rational and the superstitious. We were aware of something being out there, but it is the impalpability surrounding their nature and origin that added to the mystique and charm and in some cases fear in the minds and hearts of children.

The Improbable and the Impossible

I grew up in pre-liberalisation Bengal. Erstwhile Calcutta was still the commercial and cultural hub of the state, but the discourse of the improbable and the impossible had to be imported from rural Bengal. Thankfully, Bengali literature abounded in figures which would inspire fear and laughter, the macabre and the funny in the imaginative domain of children and young readers. The most famous was Thakurmar Jhuli (roughly translated as ‘The Grandmother’s Bag of Stories’) by Dakshinranjan Mitra Majumdar, who collected the folklore and fairy tales from Bengal and published them under one rubric in the year 1907.  Literature and fairy tales in translation from Hindi were also available, the most notable being that of the Panchatantra and Betaal Pachisi—tales that combined beast fables and moral lessons. Even Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala, which can be looked upon as having similarities with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, provided the literary and social imagination with the figure of the tantrik, the sage who is looking for human sacrifice and by doing so, made sure that Bengali households had a ready reckoner of a figure whom they could fall back upon and invoke every time they felt the need to instil some fear and discipline a child.

What these figures and literary characters did was to accentuate the visual narrative too—the stories were often accompanied by drawings and illustrations that made it possible for fear to take roots in the fertile minds of those who were young and uninitiated into the ways of the world. And I would like to believe that the book covers, sometimes printed by the not so well-known publishing houses, and hence making them as colourful, garish and lacking in as much subtlety as possible, contributed to the entire network of creating a discourse of fear.

Different factors have been instrumental behind the vanishing of the ghostly and the uncanny from the lives of the young and the impressionable. Spirits and ghosts who would frequent the marshes, the villages, the farmlands, and the large ponds which would be deserted without a human in sight during afternoons and once the nights set in, had vanished without so much of a trace from the public imagination. Empty spaces and lands were taken over by the Housebuilding and Land-Promoting Syndicates. Old houses were demolished, and guarded and closed residential complexes came to replace them. These empty geographical spaces were once the fertile breeding ground for imagination running wild and stories and legends were born.

This New World

In this new world, we have a name for everything and everybody. We are no longer starved for information. In fact, there is too much of it. The threats to the social order in terms of the un-nameable have now been replaced by the ones that can be named. Villains and Super-villains (akin the Marvel and DC cinematic universe) have replaced their more outdated counterparts—in films, in literature and by extension in the public imagination. And what we wouldn’t give to get those old days back...

Sayan Aich Bhowmik is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Shirakole College. His debut collection of poems I Will Come with A Lighthouse was published in 2022