Being brought up mainly in Birmingham in the 1970s I had very limited exposure to Indian and Bengali culture despite the English Midlands being a centre of immigrant communities. I had spent a few months in India when I was about 5 and then didn’t visit again till I was 19; relatives were always seen through the prism of old photographs and I had little or no experience of meeting them. I was always aware of the fact that we were Bengali but it wasn’t until I spent one summer working in a pharmacy with people coming up to me and speaking unknown languages – Hindi and Punjabi probably - that I realised how different we were.
My mother always wore a sari which I’ve now learnt is quite unusual – most of my Birmingham aunts wore Western clothes sometimes. There were numerous air mail letters from India each week – thankfully my father and my uncle wrote in English which meant I could at least read my uncle’s letters – and my father received an international edition of The Statesman – printed on very thin paper to minimise air mail charges - the Calcutta newspaper, each month. I don’t think I had been to an Indian / Bengali event in the UK till I was about 10 or 11 and when we did go no one explained to us the symbolism or rituals so we felt rather left out. The Durga Pujas, the Bengali equivalent of Christmas, were more of a social event for my parents. Probably at about the age of 12 I stopped going to Bengali events.
I still have vague memories of our extended visit to Calcutta when I was 5 years old. I remember my grandfather’s house mainly because of all the personalities there from my grandfather to my uncles and aunts and 3 girl cousins. There is one wonderful photo of me dressed as a geisha – don’t ask why, I don’t know – with a cousin dressed as a Native Indian. Perhaps we were off to a fancy dress party. I think I would have been in my element with so many trusted relatives around me.
The house, in what had previously been an upmarket part of Calcutta, had apparently been bought from an Englishman and extended with a small pedestrian bridge connecting two separate buildings. Generally the ground floors of buildings were vacant, or let out to tenants, possibly because there was always in Calcutta the fear of monsoon floods. I don’t know exactly when but I believe my grandfather bought the house in the 1920s before my mother was born. My mother remembers a telephone in the house from a young age. Milk was apparently bought from a farmer who brought his cow to the front door so the household could watch the cow being milked.
During the short time in Calcutta I went to two reputed schools: Calcutta Boys School and Don Bosco, both of course English medium. In the intervening period we had spent a few months in Assam, in Gauhati the capital, in the middle of monsoon and I remember our bungalow being on stilts and the monsoon rains. The flight to Gauhati must have been my first flight as we had come to Calcutta by boat and train. Thankfully my father’s quest to find a role befitting his hard won surgical skills and qualifications failed to bear fruit and after exactly a year in India we returned to the West, and the west of Ireland where I must have picked up an Irish accent.
Sadly there were no visits to India again till I was 19, and I think the intervening years were the time to instil Indian values and culture. I think because I was denied them I go looking for that culture nowadays. We were royally treated on that trip; my uncle was a very senior policeman and access to hard currency bought us high status in India. I remember being met at Dum Dum Airport by perhaps 40 or 50 relatives who I didn’t know nor was I introduced to.
That trip, despite also touring the sights of Delhi and beyond, was the most shocking. Calcutta was in the midst of its genteel decline almost at its nadir. The poverty was almost literally in your face; old women, maimed children would come up to your car and beg. There were frequent power cuts, quaintly called “load shedding” and houses had their own generators or one was left with just candlelight. The educated left, for other parts of India and the West. If you were influential and connected life was good.
In retrospect I was probably arrogant and if any cousins read this I apologise. We were Westerners visiting a Third World nation and, of course we were young and superior. But in my defence I had no exposure to the breadth and depth, and the wonder that is India. I would be looking upon the country in a very simplistic way: the poverty, the limited and inadequate infrastructure, the lack of consumer goods. Cousins asked us to bring Walkmans and Levi jeans. I should have given thanks for being born an Englishman but not felt superior about it. There was one incident that I think summed things up: we took photos with our Polaroid camera, which deliver instant photos, and there was widespread astonishment.
At Bagdogra Airport, the gateway to Darjeeling, my father bumped into his niece, my cousin, who was married to the manager of a tea plantation. Her son was quickly introduced to his great uncle, my father, but for some reason we were not introduced to my cousin.
Returning to the UK I must have found that my interest in India was unsated. In terms of my need to connect with my "Bengaliness" the trip was superficial. There was in those days very little to connect me to India in the UK; there was little interest in the press, I would not have been interested in Indian politics, we didn’t see Bollywood and there were few books. Ironically on a coach tour around Europe a couple of years later, while I was accompanying my policeman uncle, an American woman recommended
The Far Pavilions and was rather surprised I hadn’t read it. So on my return to Birmingham I bought a copy.
Like most of the available literature on India
The Far Pavilions was written from a British perspective. MM Kaye was Indian born and wrote what might best be described as a romantic adventure. I would probably have stalked Dillons in central Birmingham, probably then the best book shop in the Midlands, for India related books. I would have bought
Lives of the Indian Princes, a coffee table book, EM Forster’s
Passage to India – I was a sucker for anything with India in the title – and Paul Scott’s
The Jewel in the Crown, which was a TV drama series.
Then one day I found
Days and Nights in Calcutta in Dillons and to some extent I had secured my connection to India; thus ended my initial search for my Bengali roots. It might be rather grandiose to ascribe such attributes to a mere book but I can assure you it furthered my understanding of what it was to be Bengali. It was in many respects a revelation.
Days and Nights in Calcutta was already dated when I first read it but nevertheless compelling. It is written by two married North American based academics and writers Bharati Mukherjee, of Bengali origin, and her husband Clark Blaise, a Canadian. They had met in the 1960s at a writers’ workshop in the USA and forged a life together. During the 1970s they had decided to spend a year in India with their young boys and the book is largely an exploration of their time in India. The book is divided into two parts, the first written by Blaise and the second by Mukherjee.
I was always drawn more to Blaise’s chapters because like him I view Calcutta and Bengalis almost as an outsider. Blaise talks about learning to speak Bengali fast and eating Bengali food with his fingers neither of which I can do. When arriving in Calcutta without his wife he steels himself to “pronam” his wife’s uncles i.e. touch their feet in respect, but finds he cannot do it. Blaise excuses himself by admitting the gesture is not his culture. I have the same feeling: I have done it a couple of times and felt very self-conscious but I think my relatives are accepting of the fact that I am an Englishman. I don’t think I have ever pronamed my own parents.
There were nuances of “respect” that I was completely unaware of, certainly well into my 20s. One should not drink or smoke in the presence of an elder. Mukherjee’s cousin asks Blaise to play table tennis just so he can go outside and smoke. The cousin could not smoke in front of Mukherjee’s father. To my chagrin I broke this rule; I certainly drank in front of my father and my uncle. It was only when we were all at a pub in the UK and I was asked what I wanted to drink that I was aware of my faux pas. I asked for a scotch and a UK uncle retorted: “he (
my real uncle) has allowed you to drink?” (My italics). I didn’t know I needed anyone’s permission to have a drink.
Family names were a complete minefield for me and Blaise did simplify matters. Names of relatives are generally dependent on whether one is on the paternal or maternal side and by one’s position in the hierarchy by age. So, one might have a number of names depending on who is referring to you. As an example Blaise uses Choto Mama, which means mother’s youngest brother. No wonder I was confused for a while not having grown up in Calcutta or within an extended Bengali family.
Blaise says of “desh”: “the all-important Bengali word that means more than just birthplace....”. I’m not entirely I get the concept of desh, but I know Bengalis ask it of each other. Is it perhaps to say that we have roots in the country? And it’s asked of people whose families have been in Calcutta for many generations. But despite being in Calcutta most families keep an ancestral home and land in their desh.
I learnt about caste for the Mukherjees are Brahmins and one of the centrepieces of
Days and Nights in Calcutta surrounds an arranged inter-caste marriage. Blaise is involved as the only younger male relative on the bride’s side. Some of the issues around arranged marriage are discussed and how a bride might move into her husband’s home to be “broken in” by her mother-in-law. It’s not as bad as it sounds in an upper caste Bengali home. The choice of the partner is examined: “The margin for error is very narrow....she cannot refuse to marry”. Thankfully this culture has changed in upper caste Calcutta today. Blaise puts the Western counterpoint: “How can you marry someone you don’t know?”
It was interesting to compare my mother with Mukherjee’s mother, who would refer to her husband as” my husband” and never by his proper name. I can never recall my parents using their names to refer to or call each other. In retrospect I do find this quite shocking. “She (
Mrs Mukherjee) lives only for Bharati’s visits every three summer...” and for visits from other relatives. “Family is all”. Again it’s sobering to realise that some Bengali women have no lives outside the family or the family home. It must in those circumstances in particular have been a wrench for my mother to leave her own family to come to the UK. But my mother followed the same pattern in the UK in not having another life despite the educational, work and leisure opportunities that were available.
“The Bengali palate is the least easily appeased in all of India” – there is a considerable focus on food, how it is prepared, how it is eaten. My parents were perhaps not so food oriented but main meals were eaten late and with a variety of courses. My mother complained it was far easier to make the children’s Western food. A speaker at a lecture attended by Blaise in Calcutta remarks that he, a Bengali, returns to Calcutta for the rosha-golas, the very sweet sticky dessert beloved by all Bengalis.
Blaise devotes a considerable part of his chapters in
Days and Nights in Calcutta to Bengali culture and in particular Tagore and Satyajit Ray, neither of whom I had explored as a child or even a young adult. I have seen a few of Tagore filmed works and seen a number of Ray films. But from my perspective I need to explore further in order perhaps to understand my roots better.
There are a number of references to Bengali positioning within India: “Why are Bengalis hated so, why were they feared by the British (
the British capital was moved from Calcutta) and every other conqueror...because of a daunting intelligence, an ability to learn the rules of any conqueror and to overcome them with their own mental sluggishness” (my italics). You can see why I warm to Blaise.
Mukherjee’s section is well-written and compelling being written by someone a little younger than my mother and also someone who has made the long journey overseas. I rather think that the English education she received in Calcutta was better than mine in the UK. She wonders if she should have left Calcutta, Bengalis, her family, to make her life teaching and writing in another language. I rather think most Bengalis have that longing for Calcutta.
But it is Blaise’s section that has the most resonance for me and there are many facets of the book I have not discussed. Each time I read
Days and Nights in Calcutta, perhaps once a year, I find a new nuance that I had missed. It is not an exaggeration to say it is a primer of life for me.
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