We must stop fighting yesterday's battles; start building for the future

Bengal was the richest province of the Mughal empire, renowned across the world for its manufacturing acumen -- particularly as the textile hub of the world until the 19th century, and the centre of artisanship of the highest quality in a myriad forms of manufacturing. That is why it was such a prize for the British and French.

Within two decades of the British "victory" at Polashi, the East India Co's rampant looting (which saw Robert Clive emerge quickly as the richest Britisher alive) led also to a devastating famine in Bengal that wiped out a third of the province's population. Continuing British depredations for the next two centuries are too well-known to recount. As the first part of India to fall to the British (after Madras/Chennai and its immediate surroundings), Bengal was subject to the greatest exploitation of any province -- and consequently became one of the poorest regions of India. (It is a remarkable fact that the provinces of India that were richest in 1945 were those ones that were conquered last by the British -- and this extends also to the Malay peninsula, which was conquered even later -- while the poorest ones were those that had been ruled the longest by the British).

But Bengal also acquired the most Anglicized elite, especially after Macaulay's Minute (to create a class English in manners/speech and upbringing, but Indian in ethnicity) began to be implemented during the Bentinck years (1840s). Raja Rammohan Roy's Brahmo Samaj represented a quintessentially Indian response to the challenge of western civilisation -- before Macaulay's plan had begun to be implemented. (Raja Rammohan was fluent in Bengali, Persian, Sanskrit and English, and taught himself some Latin and Greek; in 1835, the Mughal emperor appointed him his ambassador to the British court to negotiate a higher annual treaty payment to him -- which, of course, the Brits erroneously referred to as a "pension"). But it was a syncretic response -- and one that the British began to loathe as the Indians learnt better English and figured out how to argue for their rights in the British idiom. (The intensity of this response is beautifully evoked in Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" in the British characters' response to the English-speaking Raja, Neel, in contrast to their easy indulgence of Neel's bumbling father, who understood little of English culture or law, and was thus more easily exploited).

As that Anglicised elite began to argue for the human rights of Indians more effectively (exemplified by the young Aurobindo Ghosh, who got a high first in the Classics Tripos, the most difficult degree possible at Cambridge, and then chose to plunge into nationalist politics rather than join the ICS as his ilk was supposed to do), the British instinct for "divide and rule" reached fever pitch. The period from 1905-47 marked a titanic battle between British imperialism and Bengali resistance (much of it obscured in the mists of history by the British penchant for secrecy, being married since Independence to the Nehru/Gandhi family's need for its own myth-creation at the expense of any alternative, true narrative). The Bengali resistance peaked when Netaji Subhas was able to mobilize an army of resistance from all India and south-east Asia that ultimately brought down the British empire. But Netaji's INA was formally defeated in battle (alongwith their Japanese allies, who surrendered on August 15th 1945 not because of the superiority of British arms in Asia -- which, in fact, lay defeated across Malaya, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, coastal China, Korea and Taiwan, i.e, all the parts of Asia that are prosperous today -- but because of the American nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The INA trials re-ignited Indian nationalism, and that patriotic tide carried the British empire with it into the Royal Indian Navy's seas. The moribund Congress (and the Muslim League) rode that wave to power in India (and Pakistan), primarily because Netaji's death in that supposed plane crash in Taihoku ended the life of the one man who (alongwith Gandhiji) could have defeated the British design to divide India.

But Partition also marked the ultimate victory of the British project to emasculate the Bengalis -- a project that began in 1905 and achieved complete success 42 years later.

Much has been written about the Partition of Bengal in 1905 (and the creation of the Muslim League a year later in Dhaka to help perpetuate non-existent divisions among Bengalis, and later extend them to all Indians as necessary). The great patriotic upsurge against that 1905 division led the British to rescind it within six years. But the undoing of the first Partition of Bengal was an even cleverer device than the 1905 partition itself. By excising key Bengali population centres (such as Cuttack, Jamshedpur, Ranchi, Dhanbad, Patna, etc.) from the newly "united" province of Bengal, the British ensured that the new province would have nearly a 50-50 split between Hindus and Muslims -- unlike the pre-1905 province which had a clear preponderance of Hindus.

Bengal was thus shrunk culturally -- by reducing the area of the world where Bengali was the main language. And British gerrymandering through the Communal Awards (which disenfranchised Bengali Hindus, by allowing Muslims alone to vote for Muslims, while Hindus participated in open contests, a situation that permanently hamstrung the non-Muslim parties in pre-Independence Bengal) gradually advanced Britain's political goal of partitioning the newly shrunken province further by dividing it along Hindu-Muslim lines.

When the Indian National Congress was choosing a national language, Bengali came within one vote of beating out Hindi. In fact, in the 1940s there were certainly more Bengali speakers in undivided India than there were speakers of Hindi (although Hindi+Urdu+Hindusthani possibly had more speakers than Bengali). Even today, Bengali is the fifth or sixth most widely spoken language in the world (competing for that position interchangeably with Hindi). In modern India, though, Bengali is the third most widely spoken language (behind Hindi and Telugu). Obangalis often laugh at the way Bengalis refer to non-Bengalis; when you realise that there are more Bengalis than German-, Italian-, or Russian-speakers in the world, you might not necessarily be surprised by Bengalis' propensity to look at "OBangali" as the Other.

Sadly, the self-image of Bengalis is completely at odds with the pathetic state that Bengal (including Bangladesh) has fallen to. We Bengalis continue to fight yesterday's battles. The British defeated us, subtly and indubitably 62 years ago. It is pointless continuing to be anti-imperialist when imperialism has been defeated in India (and across the world), but Bengalis have not given up that quixotic fight. It is pointless to be spouting Stalinism when that ideology has been rejected even in Georgia and Russia (Stalin's home-nation and his adopted one), but the majority of Bengalis are apparently still wedded to it. Bengal must move on. Tomorrow beckons, and the only way we can progress is by cleaning the slate of yesteryear's battles, and beginning to think about the challenges of today and tomorrow. In future blogs, I intend to do just that and invite readers to engage with me as I do...

Time to reverse a half-century of decay

A century ago, Shanghai and Calcutta were Asia's greatest cities. Both went into decline in the 1960s amid the madness of the Cultural Revolution and its Indian offshoot, Naxalism. But Shanghai's revival began in the mid-1990s and it has re-emerged as China's business capital. Calcutta, on the other hand, continues to languish -- and as long as it does, eastern India will lag further behind southern, western and northern India. Calcutta's natural calling as the capital of Creativity and Knowledge must be revived if eastern India is to partake fully of the Indian economic miracle.

The true Knowledge City of India today is Bangalore -- not just in information technology, but in a growing array of areas ranging from scientific innovation to health-care to intellectual leadership. In the 1950s, Calcutta had all the ingredients to emerge as such a Knowledge Capital, but sadly its intellectual energies were wasted in extreme radicalism. Politics in Bengal has come to be characterised by an endless series of Agitations, which destroy Bengal's prospects rather than help to build anything new and creative. Endless Agitations must end, and Building must begin, if Bengal's prospects are to be revived. This site is intended to be the first building bloc for that revival.