Calcutta's Dead...

WHAT Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. In Calcutta, one of theworld’s youngest and India’s second largest cities, even the cliche diedyoung. Chauvinistic rulers in Bombay and Madras slapped local names—Mumbai andChennai—on their cities and went provincial three years ago. Now Calcutta, runby the world’s longest-running democratically elected Communists, seems to befollowing suit: its warped rulers and intellectuals are hellbent on changing thecity’s name to Kolkata. Not only that, they want to rename West Bengal asPaschim Banga. All this before the year’s out.

Why now? Not surprisingly, a section of Communists, led by its faux culturalczar and self-righteous home and information and culture minister BuddhadevBhattacharya, and a curious gaggle of friendly intellectuals and hangers-on feelthe Bengali identity is under severe threat. Stoking these fears is a recentstudy by the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) that suggeststhat there’s been a decline in the city’s Bengali-speaking population overthe past four decades (see box). Then the government stumbled on to a Bengaliand Jyoti Basu hate-site on the Internet and sent its thought police to trackdown and arrest its host, a young non-Bengali software startup entrepreneurwho’s still behind bars on charges of attempting to cause ill-will and hatredbetween communities, impersonation and defamation after being nabbed on June 22.

Never mind that this teeming city of 10 million has been reduced from athriving metropolis to a lawless hick town. Never mind that one of India’smost advanced states has degenerated into a near-bankrupt industrial wastelandclogged with six million jobless youth and run by party-backed mafia-like unionswith a pathologically sick work culture. Rename the city and the state and, thegovernment believes, Bengali identity will reassert itself. "It’s onlywhen the bread runs out that those who hanker for a footnote in history turn tothe distraction of the circus," says Sunanda K. Dutta Roy, columnist andformer editor of The Statesman, who returned to the city recently after a longhiatus.

The circus is now fast morphing into a burlesque. Last week Bhattacharya toldthe state assembly how the government would encourage a private TV channel to"safeguard Bengali culture and way of life". Then he declared that thestate government would engage computer experts to find out ways to stem theproliferation of hate-sites on the Net! Such assistance, the apparatchikelaborated, would be sought from the ailing state-run Webel or the West BengalElectronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd. Some Rs 50 crore would beneeded to fund this cultural revolution, and, predictably, the government aloneisn’t in a position to cough it up. "We’re entering an era of Bengalichauvinism," seethes Radha Prasad Gupta, an expert on the city."They’re destroying Bengal’s catholicity by involving themselves innon-issues." Shades of the Shiv Sena’s moral and cultural cleansing ofMumbai. The move, say its opponents, will only unleash fascist forces in a citythat’s long been known for its multi-culturalism.

This isn’t the first time there’s been a faddist chorus of approval amongthe rulers and a section of the citizenry to rename the city and the state. TheMarxist government had once formed a committee to consider new names for Bengal. The latest move stems from the efforts of the Calcutta-based Bhasha ShahidSmarak Samiti (Memorial For Martyrs of Language Society), a culturalorganisation floated last year to promote Bengali language and culture byinvoking memories of citizens who died in the inspiring language movements ofundivided Bengal. The Samiti, which includes such denizens as filmmaker MrinalSen and litterateur Ananda Shankar Ray, came up with a 10-point wishlistsometime back. That list included a demand for renaming Calcutta and WestBengal, making Bengali compulsory till Class VIII in the state’s schools, andlaunching a 24-hour Bengali TV channel. "We can’t let the Bengalilanguage and culture die just because there are more important things todo," says Sunil Gangopadhyay, celebrated novelist-poet, who heads theSamiti. "We’re also not trying to alter Calcutta’s metropolitancharacter in any way."

Gangopadhyay’s concerns are genuine. But the decline in Bengali language,cinema, theatre and its folk arts has more to do with the falling quality of itspractitioners, the Marxist appropriation and patronage of subpar state-sponsoredculture and an abysmal educational system where none of the languages are taughtproperly by errant and politicised teachers. To quote an example, the statepublic works minister Kshiti Goswami, who presides over the country’s worstroads outside Bihar, helped build a sleek 60-ft-long marble statue honouring themartyrs of the language movement because he’s a member of the Samiti."The Bengali language has been vulgarised, trivialised and abused by itsown practitioners," says Gupta.

For most, the renaming exercise simply doesn’t make sense. Says Dutta Roy:"About a decade ago the state government put me on a committee to considera new name for West Bengal. I told the CM (Basu) then that while the West isredundant, Bengal is as acceptable nationally and internationally as Basu, theEnglish rendering of his name, which offends no one’s nationalisticsensibilities. Similarly with the city. In Bengali we’ll continue to refer toKolkata; in English it remains Calcutta like Roma and Rome. The proposed changewill add nothing to a Bengali’s pride which should be rooted in more importantthings." Agreed a scathing editorial in The Telegraph last week:"Bengal is a multi-cultural and multi-racial society. The identity of aBengali can’t be reduced to a language. A refusal to accept this widerdefinition of who’s a Bengali has produced a false identity crisis and anequally misplaced show of aggression." Adds Magsaysay-winning social workerand novelist Mahasweta Devi: "The Marxist government has failed the peoplein the state. There are a lot more important things to do, like development andimproving the work culture."

But saving Bengali culture and identity, clearly, tops the government agendathese days. Typically, half-a-dozen pressure groups have emerged. The Samiti,for example, has erected a small open air stage on the Maidan, where poetsrecite their work and local folk arts are on display. Also coming up isNabojagaran (Renaissance), a motley group of Bengali journalists, managers,barristers, doctors, sportspeople and police officers, which wants to usher in a"second renaissance" in Bengal. Registered as a trust, it plans toorganise mobile cells that’ll travel through the city and districts to goadBengalis into opening businesses instead of looking for jobs. It also plans togive away awards to Bengali language toppers in secondary examinations."It’s a question of Bengali nationalism, not chauvinism," saysAshoke Dasgupta, editor of Aajkal, who also heads the trust. "Theeffort’s to build the economic backbone of the community, that’s beenbroken."

But a lesser movement such as this has the potential of turning the state’steeming, frustrated legions of unemployed into a xenophobic mob againstnon-Bengalis and English-speaking ones. It could also lead to cultural movementsbeing hijacked by shadowy Bengali fringe groups like the Santan Dal and AmraBangali, whose supporters openly roughed up the hate-site host Shamit Khemkawhen he was produced in court last fortnight. "We Bengalis believe theworld is out there to get us, or if not the world, it is the rest of India whoare out to get us and cause trouble," says Sushim Mukul Datta, formerHindustan Lever honcho. One example: vernacular papers report spectacular risein sales when they run sensational stories about "non-Bengaliconspiracies" to prevent local hero Saurav Ganguly from becoming captain ofthe Indian cricket team.

Meanwhile, the flight of capital continues unabated, its infamous work ethicrefuses to improve and militant unionism continues to hold Calcutta’scitizenry to ransom. A couple of centuries after Job Charnock, a petty Britishtrader, pitched his tents on the east bank of Hooghly and made a start onCalcutta, the city had evolved from Rudyard Kipling’s "packed andpestilential town" into a cosmopolitan, plucky and congenial city, theintellectual capital of the nation and a thriving political and arts arena, apromising industrial belt. The future seems to be a rust-belt boondock with anew name.