BackA Bengali in Kolkata at Christmas
Real secularism, Bengaliness, and a city with an extremely strange relationship with its British past
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No Indian city celebrates Christmas with as much gusto and joy as Kolkata. All corners of the city are lit up; and though the aesthetics in many cases may be questionable, the spirit is wonderfully genuine. The festooned lights of Park Street are of course famous—a century-old tradition, and hundreds of thousands throng the road just to look at them. The various monuments in and around the maidan are also lit up, and a late-night drive along the wide avenues there can be a near-magical experience.
No one in Kolkata considers Christmas to be a purely Christian festival. It is a long Bengali custom to bake cakes on Bada Din, and for those who don’t want to make the effort, every grocery in the city stocks up on cakes of every variety a week ahead. By the morning of Christmas, the inventory is sold out. The magnificent—and huge—St Paul Cathedral is jam-packed for midnight mass, and the crowd there to rejoice in the birth of Christ are from all faiths and denominations. The full ceremony is telecast live on Doordarshan Bangla.
At the beautiful riverside campus at Belur where the Ramakrishna Mission is headquartered, the bushes have been trimmed to resemble giant Christmas trees, with yellow and white chrysanthemums as the stars. The prayer hall is decorated specially for the occasion with a small chapel erected on one side with a tableau of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Interestingly enough, Christmas Eve is one of the days of the year when Belur sees the highest number of visitors. The hall is as packed as St Paul for the evening prayers.
Kolkata at Christmas time will give any visitor hope that true secularism is still possible in our country.
If you want lunch or dinner at one of the city’s famed clubs on Christmas Day, you have to book many days in advance. At the Tollygunge Club, where I managed to sneak in for lunch, everyone is turned out in their best clothes. Many women wear stuff that seems straight off the spring collections from the shows in Paris and Milan. Some even wear very nice hats. Almost everyone has the latest shades on—the women for style, the men—I suspect—to hide the under-eye pouches earned from a lifetime of merrymaking.
Many of the guests wear something in Santa Claus red—jackets, trousers, ties, skirts, dresses, stoles. The waiters are terribly overworked, but unfailingly cheerful. A large board lists all the events planned for every day till the New Year and beyond. This includes a bowling tournament. No, not the bowling which cricketers do—this is the one about trying to knock down wooden pins with a large ball. And it’s not amusement park alley bowling, this is the real thing—men wearing smart casuals and caps on a grassy meadow, and possibly exclaiming “Crikey!" in patented Oxbridge accents.
The British may have abandoned Calcutta as India’s capital in 1911, but the intimate relationship never ended. If you look up at the imposing buildings in the city’s central business district (ignoring the chaos at street level), you could well imagine that you are in London with the edifices a bit shabbily maintained.
As for the Bengalis, no other race in the British empire would possibly have exasperated and infuriated the colonialists more. They took to Western education and ideas faster than fish to H2O, and formed the bulwark of the Raj administration—from Indian Civil Service officers to lower-division clerks (after all, the word babu comes from the way Bengali gentlemen address each other). On the other hand, more Englishmen were killed in India (or attempted to be killed) by Bengalis than any other community. One of them even raised an army, raised the slogan Jai Hind and went to war with them in the jungles of Burma and the North East.
Bengalis revere the men who fought, killed and died in the cause of India’s freedom. Everyone knows about Khudiram Bose, the teenager hanged for trying to kill a British district magistrate, and when asked by the authorities if he had any last wish, said that he would like to inform the public on how to make the bomb he had used. Subhash Chandra Bose is above any critical appraisal or discussion—he is simply to be venerated. No Bengali worth his salt believes that Bose died in the 1945 plane crash in Formosa (now Taiwan).
The Indian government has always made sure that we remember the birthdays of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. But without any such help, almost every Bengali—at least anyone who has spent some part of his childhood in Bengal—knows Bose’s birthday. For example, I have known it all my life—I can’t remember a time when I haven’t known it, though I can recall when I learnt the day of Gandhi or Nehru’s birth; I learnt these dates in school.
Yet, a true Bengali respects a degree from Oxford or Cambridge more than one from Harvard or Yale. When I first visited London, I felt strangely at home and thoroughly comfortable, like I have never felt in any other foreign city, and even in most Indian cities. It was really weird, and something I realised I had no power over. It was part of my Bengaliness—and I’ve spent less than a quarter of my life in Bengal!
This is of course nothing compared to the late Nirad C. Chaudhuri who travelled to London for the first time in his 60s and had no trouble finding his way around because he knew the map of the city by heart. Chaudhuri was obviously an extreme case, but there are persistent rumours that elderly Bengali aristocrats still secretly celebrate the birthday of Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, every year.
So it was not surprising that one of the first promises that Mamata Banerjee made when she became chief minister of West Bengal was that she would turn Kolkata into London. Unfortunately, as is her hallmark now, she has both underdelivered and gone over the top in this enterprise.
Underdelivered: the only step towards this laudable goal she has managed till now is to replace the lamp posts in large parts of Kolkata with streetlights of typically London design. Over the top: There is now a streetlight every five metres or so on most Kolkata roads, and since each of these has three lamps, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation is having to pay staggering sums of money in electricity bills!
But while Kolkata currently has the most well-lit streets among all Indian cities, Bengalis seem to have become fixated with some stuff that can hardly be considered very illuminated. An astonishing number of astrologers, numerologists, clairvoyants, mystics, sages and experts offering magical cures for everything from a broken heart to muscular paralysis are doing rollicking business. In fact, these characters are perhaps the best entertainment available on Bangla television. But about them, in my next piece.
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