The great heroes we adore

I have my heroes, therefore I’m Bengali, Victor Banerjee offers himself as a case study in understanding a very inscrutable people The Indian Express Saturday, December 24, 2005

Now let’s shift focus to the turn of the 19th century almost a hundred years ago. It is quite a different matter that Sri Sri Ramkrishna for most of his life had just one staunch drunk playwright and actor as his true devotee and it was only after his great disciple, Swami Vivekananda’s trip to America and the twist our creative marketing geniuses gave to his famous speech in Chicago, that two more heroes entered our lives. That Vivekananda’s trip to the US was funded by a Tamil prince and that he sat on the rock off Kanya Kumari contemplating a Vedantic future for his own people in Bengal, is something we glorify and grapple with every day in our personal lives. In our devotion, after a hundred years of preserving his home in Calcutta and worshipping its decay, we decided to dedicate our renaming of the city to ‘Kolkata’ by doing a marvelous mortar and plaster job to reverentially resurrect the ruin. As a staunch believer in Ramkrishna’s condemnation of kamini, kanchon, and chakuri, I have kept my eyes averted from Mallika Sherawat’s physiognomy, shunned the acquisition of wealth and invested only in traditionally Bengali-approved Unit Trust Schemes (that failed me) and surreptitiously put money into certain Chit Funds (some condemned by the government and some encouraged) that wiped out all the Provident Fund savings I had after quitting my non-prescription chakuri (service).

Rabindranath Tagore too was someone who some unbelievers thought had robbed the limelight from Michael Madhusudan Dutt whose Meghnadbod Kabya is considered by divergent intellectuals to be the greatest work in our literature. That said, our Nobel laureate was a poet within a family of touted geniuses in painting and music like Abanindranath and Gaganendranath and Jyotindranath. But, frankly, Gurudev Rabindranath has honestly contributed much more to Bengali ethos, pathos and melancholic joie de vivre than the awkwardly scripted national anthem that agnostics believe should have been picked from either D.L. Roy’s Dhuna, Dhana, Pushpa bhara... or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Bande Mataram that even has Generation X rocking today. And like Vivekananda, if it weren’t for Rothenstein, Thompson and Andrews (non-Tamilian this time, but in our terms foreigners all the same) who revealed Gurudev’s genius to the world, and brought him to the notice of the Nobel Committee, another of our legends may have remained just a prolific bard who lived in the Jorasanko palace, surrounded by an expanding ghetto of a growing community of immigrant merchants.

Let us move on to the great Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Sri Aurobindo who were rejected by Gandhi because he couldn’t tolerate the volatility of the former and the terrorism of the latter. That hardly any Bengali joined the INA is not what drove Subhas to an anonymous death. But his passing has titillated the imagination of those of us who refused to believe he could ever die so unsensationally, although the thought of a furtive flight in a Japanese aircraft, through the smoke of the world war and crashing in search of freedom for a nation, does conjure up some romance. The fact that a park in North Calcutta named after Subhas had become a public urinal can be attributed to the necessary distractions of an industrial or peasant’s revolt that we had running through our veins. But all that has been remedied and the park is now a beautiful place to walk past.

As a man who has earned notoriety from celluloid, I have to touch on Satyajit Ray and Uttam Kumar and gloss over Pramatesh Baruah and Prithviraj Kapoor who are also very much a part of our star studded ‘‘heroic’’ past. While the contrary always dwelled on the genius of Ritwik Ghatak and Uttam’s peers took fluidly to the Bengali penchant of factionalism and dividing actors’ forums and notwithstanding the fact that it took another foreigner (Ismail Merchant) to, at the last minute, open the eyes of the Oscar Committee to the unheard of genius of Ray, our Bharat Ratna, Uttam Kumar, is perhaps the only one of our immortal heroes who made it entirely on his own on home ground and is alive and stirring in our psyches, and hearts, as much today as he ever was when he lived.

We Bengalis are one of a kind, and shall remain “self-seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before”, often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet always resuming our march on the way that was lit by the light cast by the great heroes we adore.