Mukul Kesavan runs amuck

The martyrdom of St Dada Indrajit Hazra HindustanTimes December 17, 2005

The howling came primarily from India’s ‘Chosen People’, the Bengalis. His exit as captain and player was immediately seen as modern non-Bengali India’s extension of Lord Macaulay’s infamous minutes on the codification and westernisation of criminal law, where he stated that the Bengalis were “physically fragile” and “moral cowards”, adding that they were “habitual liars, evaders, connivers and frauds”.

Suddenly, it became clear why everyone outside Bengal (barring Shyam Benegal, perhaps) sneers at Manikda’s movies, makes jokes about men from Shantiniketan and women like Mamata Banerjee. It was worse because Sourav Ganguly had overturned the stereotype of the effete Bengali as player, as captain, as man.

In fact, come to think of it, it was the Irishman W.B. Yeats — not any non-Bengali Indian! — who saw the genius in Rabindranath Tagore and introduced Gurudev to the rest of the world and ultimately led him to the Nobel. And wasn’t it jury members at Cannes, Berlin and the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who feted the great Satyajit Ray — and not any non-Bengali Indians?

Earlier this week, when Ganguly’s name didn’t make it to the team list of the third Test against Sri Lanka, the ghosts of Aurobindo Ghose (in his revolutionary avatar, of course), Subhas Chandra Bose and a million other ‘sidelined’ Bengalis joined in to protest against the crime committed against a people. But this time round, the rest of India seemed to have also joined in.

Comment by Tusar N Mohapatra

What a contrast! Mukul Kesavan runs amuck and calls Sri Aurobindo the worst poet of Bengal [Telegraph Sunday, May 29, 2005], and not even a whimper of protest.