The recent political shift in West Bengal has by now been analysed threadbare in the media and in street-corners across the country. Many commentators have also discussed the possibility that it could present a major opportunity to reverse the state’s long-term economic decline.
West Bengal accounted for 10.5 percent of India’s GDP in 1960-61 and, despite Partition, was the third largest economy in the country. Today, that share has shrunk to 5.8 percent of the national economy and is falling. Similarly, per-capita income has dropped from 127.5 percent of the national average, the third highest after Delhi and Maharashtra, to just 80 percent.
There are many reasons for Bengal’s economic decline ranging from the rupture with the hinterland of East Bengal to the absurdities of socialist planning (freight equalisation is just one example). Many of the wounds were self-inflicted by successive state governments that demonised private enterprise, neglected infrastructure and needlessly antagonised the central government. This tipped the state into a vicious cycle of financial and human capital flight. In turn, this resulted in intellectual and cultural stagnation.
The Bengali community—once famous for thinkers like Swami Vivekananda and Vidyasagar, poets like Rabindranath Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, scientists like Jagadish Chandra Bose and Meghnad Saha, political leaders like Subhas Bose and Chittaranjan Das—is today seen mostly as the source of household help in Gurgaon and Bengaluru. There is nothing wrong in working as household help (all labour should be respected) but, as a proud people, it hurts that this is now our place in the world.
This economic decline, however, does not present the most important cause for concern. Politics and economics are downstream of culture, and the roots of the problem lie in a fundamental decay of Bengali civilisational anchors. Partition bears some of the blame but much of it is deliberate sabotage. The way Bengalis perceive their history and culture has been systematically manipulated for two generations in order to change their understanding of themselves as a people.
Today, most people have the impression that Bengalis are somehow culturally against private enterprise. This is not borne out by history. For most of history, Bengal was home to the country’s (and the world’s) largest ports—Tamralipti, Chandraketugarh, Hugli and Kolkata. Bengali folklore and literature are full of merchants like Chand Saudagar. It is well-known that Kolkata was built by the British on the site of three villages, but they were for weaver communities: Sutanuti, as the name suggests, was a textile hub.
At the time of independence, many of the country’s most successful companies were not just in Bengal but owned by Bengalis—Calcutta Chemicals, Mohini Mills, Bengal Chemicals, Sulekha Ink, to name just a few. Yet, a member of Parliament representing the state confidently argued recently that Kolkata was never home to an industrial base!
This should not be seen as the result of ignorance, but part of a systematic pattern. Bengali literature boasts luminaries like Tagore and Nazrul Islam, but the poetry being promoted today is made up of meaningless nonsense words like “opang-jhopang” and “hamba-bamba-ramba”. This is not innocent babbling but a way to create dissonance in how Bengalis understand their language. School textbooks, similarly, have been edited over half a century to break the links to older literary traditions.
Most Hindu Bengalis belong to the Shakta tradition—that is, they worship goddesses as the primary deities. The Shakta festivals define the Bengali year. The festival of Saraswati puja, dedicated to the Goddess of knowledge and the arts, has always been popular with students and artists. The festival has been subtly re-branded in recent years as the Bengali Valentine’s Day. I have no particular problem with boys and girls going out on a date, but the shift in emphasis from a celebration of learning to that of teenage hormones is quite palpable.
A similar shift is being attempted for Durga Puja, perhaps the most sacred festival of the Bengali Hindus. At least in Kolkata, the festival is being unhooked from its religious moorings and being converted into a secular, cultural festival where the idol of Goddess Durga is merely a prop for a selfie. Again, this is not just natural evolution driven by commercialisation, but deliberately guided by an intellectual class that cannot even bear to call the festival by its proper name and refers to it as Sharodiya or Sharad Utsab, the Autumn Festival.
Note that cultural manipulation is not restricted to Bengali Hindus and is also being attempted on Bengali Muslims. The state-sponsored promotion of Urdu among Bengali Muslims is part of this agenda. Urdu was never the language of Bengali Muslims. Indeed, the Bengalis of Muslim-majority East Pakistan rose in revolt against Urdu imposition in 1971, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. The irony is that the same language has been promoted in West Bengal in recent years as the language of Bengali Muslims.
As the civilisational roots of West Bengal are being deliberately chipped away, it has left an intellectual and socio-cultural vacuum. The sneering of “aantel” intellectuals cannot fill an emptiness that creates the space for all manner of dystopian ideas and ideologies. This is the source of Bengal’s political anarchism, mindless trade unionism, militant student activism and deadwood intellectualism—all merely trying to fill that hole in the heart. It also means that an important border state is susceptible to external interference.
I will leave it to readers to judge the “who” and “why” of the systematic manipulation of Bengali identity sustained over the decades, but I hope the article provides a glimpse of “how” it is being done. For West Bengal and Kolkata to rise again, Bengalis need to recapture their civilisational identity. Interestingly, another Indian state currently suffers from a very similar economic and socio-cultural crisis—Punjab, the other state that experienced Partition.
Sanjeev Sanyal | Economist and writer
(Views are personal)