Banglophilia

In the age of cultural insularity, Salil Tripathi reminisces about his love for another language, another culture and simply another way of living … What unfolds is a story of journeys through books, streets and memories seeped in Bangaliana …

I was born in Bombay in a middle class Gujarati home where my parents seemed to have had distinctly non-Gujarati priorities. Acquiring wealth or money was never their goal, and there was never enough of that either. For example, it took my parents 19 years to buy their first refrigerator (I have memories of going to our neighbours’ to get some ice when needed; of my mother going to keep leftover food in their fridges, to be brought home the next day and reheated). We had to wait for a phone connection (though the blame for that could be laid at the doorstep of the government because we had been waiting in a queue to get the connection); and we were among the last to buy a television set in our apartment complex – a full six years after television arrived in my city, just in time to watch Sunil Gavaskar score two centuries against Pakistan in a series India lost 0-2 in Pakistan.




But there was wealth of another kind – the books in our flat – many books – of philosophy and sociology (my mother’s subjects at the university), management and business (my father’s subjects at the university), and there were novels – in Gujarati and English. I remember my mother reading out stories of Tolstoy and Tagore to me. Instead of worshipping Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, our home was in awe of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, although we did not have her idol either. And as with many Indians of their generation that turned nationalist under the influence of Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, my parents looked at Bengal for inspiration.

Even before I was born, my mother had decided that if she had a boy, his name would be Salil, after Salil Chaudhuri, the Bengali music director of Hindi film songs; and if a girl, she would be named Sujata, after the Bengali director Bimal Roy’s eponymous film. (Eight years after I was born, my brother was born, and his name was decided -Utpal, chosen after Utpal Dutt, the Bengali thespian whom my mother first saw in the film Bhuvan Shome. Two years later, my youngest brother was born, and he too got a Bengali name – Pranav.)

Decades later, in the spring of 1986, I would meet a Marathi engineer called Karuna Sirkar, who would tell me during one of our long walks along Marine Drive that her parents had named her after Karuna Bannerjee, the actress who played Apu’s mother in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Aparajito. A couple of years later we were married – I read Tagore’s poem Ananta Prem (Unending Love) at our wedding. After her unexpected death in 2006, at her funeral, I read out that poem again. What Tagore had written seemed so appropriate:

We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

*

My earliest memories of my father are of him humming old songs of K.L. Saigal and Hemant Kumar, from films of the Calcutta-based studio, New Theatres. He would buy 78 rpm records of Bengali songs and play them on his hand-wound gramophone, removing dust carefully after each time he played them. On Saturdays, he went for Rabindrasangeet classes near a temple not far from where we lived, where he would learn to sing Tagore’s songs. My Bengali friends now cringe at having been forced to learn those songs – across India, there were some like my father who went out of the way to learn those songs. He often took me along, and I would learn the melodies of Tagore even though I could not understand a word of what they were singing. I wanted to learn those, but I also wanted to play cricket and become an astronaut in those days.

At home we spoke Gujarati; the medium of instruction at my school was Gujarati; and my parents encouraged me to read books in English. With its elegant and beautiful but unreadable script, and charming and lilting enunciation of words, Bengali had an exotic appeal, like a romantic foreign language, and in comparison Gujarati seemed dull and dry like an accounting ledger, and as uninviting. My mother liked Bengali saris, and although I never got around to asking her, she probably saw herself sometimes as a heroine in one of the novels of Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya, whose Gujarati translations she had read avidly.

The school I went to – New Era – was founded by two cricket-hating, US-inspired khadi-wearing Gandhians, Maganlal Vyas and his nephew Kantilal Vyas. They were Indian nationalists in the broad, inclusive sense, deriving inspiration from Gandhi and Tagore, and the school’s walls had the art of great Indian artists including M.F. Husain and Jamini Roy. The assembly hall had a large canvas showing the landscape in Birbhoom district in West Bengal, where Tagore had set up his famous university, Vishwabharati, in Santiniketan. Teachers encouraged artistically-inclined students to go there and study. Pinakin Trivedi, who composed the school’s official song, Dhanya New Era, had studied there, and that tune has an unmistakable resemblance to Tagore’s melodies.

When I was not yet ten, I saw my first Satyajit Ray film. It was the delightful musical film Goupy Gyne Bagha Byne. Ray had already made remarkable films since the mid-1950s, beginning with his 1955 debut Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road) which had won the “Best Human Document” award at the Cannes Film Festival that year, but discovering those films would have to wait.




Soon after I turned 10, Pakistani troops unleashed a reign of terror in the country’s predominantly Bengali half, then known as East Pakistan, because the people there had voted for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who wanted greater regional autonomy and official recognition of Bengali as a national language. The generals were not amused and a bloodbath followed in which hundreds of thousands died.Rivers of blood irrigated the land that inspired Baul music, which the film-maker Ritwik Ghatak pined for, where Tagore sat by the river and composed Gitanjali for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and where Jibanananda Das celebrated the beauty of a woman called Bonolota Sen. The war was horrific; I staged a play with my classmates and we earned the princely sum of a little over a hundred rupees which we donated to the Bangladesh Aid Committee set up in Bombay. By December 1971, Indian troops joined the war and helped the Mukti Bahini liberate Bangladesh – four decades later, I would revisit that war and those stories, spending more than 90 days in Bangladesh, listening to victims, witnesses, and survivors of the horrors of 1971, which became my book, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy (Aleph Book Company, 2014).

*

In my teens, not only did I read Ray’s science fiction and other stories for children; I also saw some of his films at Capitol cinema, opposite the large railway station, which was in those days called Victoria Terminus. I remember going to see Ray’s Jana Aranya(The Middleman) with my friend Kartikeya, now a leading gynecologist in Bombay. We were not yet 14. The Central Board of Film Certification had given the film (A) certificate, which meant that only those who were 18 and above could see it. Ray was a chaste filmmaker (he once said when a man and a woman enter a bedroom, the camera and the director must leave the room), and there was no nudity in the film, but the theme was risqué – the protagonist,who is a graduate and unemployed, becomes a middleman, a broker, and to get the deal he is willing to go to any length; his middle class morality crumbles. He is willing to offer a woman to a client, and towards the end of the film, he finds that the woman he has picked up is the sister of his best friend at college. Kauna, he calls her by her dak-nam, and she responds, Amar nam Juthika, her adopted name as an escort. The film was bleak, in keeping with the mood of Calcutta, and indeed, the nation in mid-1970s. Kartikeya and I had tried our best to get into the theatre without being found out and kicked out of the auditorium. But an absent-minded schoolteacher who was at the same screening clearly forgot where she was and loudly yelled: “Arre, Salil, Kartikeya? How did you manage to get in?” We froze momentarily and decided to ignore her completely – in an auditorium with another 50-odd people, we were unlikely to be found out if we stayed quiet. And the staff had better things to do so we survived.

I loved Ray’s cinema and Tagore’s poems, but felt frustrated because I could not understand any of it except in translation or with subtitles. I felt close to the meaning and yet the emotions remained elusive. I loved the sounds of the language – “sa” becoming “sha,” “a” turning into “o”, “va” becoming “ba”, and “ya” “ja.” Salil was Sholil, and my friend Kavita who lived in Calcutta was of course Kobita. It just felt musical. I had to learn the language, I decided. And when I was 18 with another Gujarati friend from my school, a woman called Sonal, who was also learning Odissi dance, I joined Bangla classes. It was an optional course that my school offered every Sunday. Our school became a cultural beehive Sundays actually, with art classes, drama classes, classes to learn Bharat Natyam dance, and Bengali was being taught in another classroom, as many of us keen to expand our horizon beyond Gujarati.

*

I learned Bengali for two years, sufficiently well not to have to read subtitles while watching Bengali films, but not well enough to read. I had seen Badal Sircar’s plays in Marathi at Chhabildas School in Bombay; in 1980, Sircar brought his group to my city, and I spent a week seeing six of his plays and wrote about them for my college newspaper. Sircar declined to be interviewed by me, but one of his actors, Deben Ganguly, took pity on me, and spent half an hour talking to me about Bengali theatre. (Later I was told Sircar didn’t like being interviewed by anyone; my being a young college student was incidental).

I had better luck with Satyajit Ray. He was in my city to accept an award at a ceremony in 1979, and Sonal and I decided we had to meet him. Tentatively, I phoned him at his hotel – he always stayed at a hotel called Shalimar near Kemp’s Corner, which was my neighbourhood. The receptionist connected me to his room. Hesitantly I explained my purpose. I was a student; I had seen some of his films; I was keen to meet him; I would come with a friend, she had also seen those films; I wouldn’t take much time. And he said yes, but only a short time.

We reached the hotel at the appointed hour and I called his room. He said he could see us for five minutes. My pulse was racing as I went up to see him. Sonal held my hand. He opened the door; his towering presence dwarfed us. He smiled; lay on his sprawling bed. I sat to his right. Sonal sat in front of him. He asked her to move. “There is sun behind your face; I can’t see your face.” Sonal blushed.

And we talked – about the book on science fiction he was reading; about the state of cinema; about the aesthetic of calligraphy; about typography (I asked him about Ray-Roman, the typeface he had designed); about Sonal’s plans in life; about my plans in life; about making Pather Panchali; about how he wanted to make Ghare Baire in colour; about how colour mattered so much to him. And then he signed my worn copy of Our Films, Their Films, the collection of his essays, and he wrote, “Keep up the good work.” There were no mobile phones then for us to take selfies. We left his room, but we felt we were floating, or walking on water, or somehow elevated. Once on the road, Sonal said: “Do these people even know who we have just met?”

But that was the end of my luck with Ray. In 1989 or so, when he had made Gonoshotru (a film that presciently saw the rise of Hindu obscurantism, if not fundamentalism) and Shakha Proshakha, I was in Calcutta on an assignment for my magazine India Today. I wanted to interview him. But he was unwilling to meet. I tried everything – reminding him of our past encounter, which he had understandably forgotten, saying how we’d do a serious piece. But he would not. I went to his home, on Bishop Lefroy Road, but I was turned away by people who guarded his privacy. Ray was touching 70 then, but in frail health. I met his son Sandip outside the building. And Sandip was rather curt and told me his father was hurt by the way India Today had treated him, when Sumit Mitra wrote the cover story on the making of Ghare Baire. I said that he had spoken to the same reporter for a subsequent story, which appeared in another magazine; but he said his father would not be available for an interview. One shouldn’t argue with sons guarding their fathers, I decided. Instead, I called Soumitro Chatterjee, the gifted actor who gave life to so many Ray characters – and he gave me a fascinating interview, which brought the essence of the film to life. I had my story; my regard for Ray the film-maker, not dimmed; my views about the keepers of Ray was another matter altogether.

*

In 1986, I went to Bangladesh for the first time. I spent two weeks in Dhaka and met politicians – most significantly, Farooq Rahman, the colonel who would not repent his role in planning the assassination of Sheikh Mujib. (The encounter also gave me the title of my book). I also met Khaleda Zia (who saw me but declined to be interviewed) and Hasina Wajed (who took me through Mujib’s home on Road #32, Dhanmondi, showing me bloodstains and marks in the house where Mujib was shot while she was in Germany and therefore lucky to have been spared the fate of the rest of her family. I later went to Sylhet, to the forest in Srimangal, where one morning, as I walked through the forest, I could hear the sound of a train, and then, between the trees, I saw a train pass through, its steam spreading across the trees. It was unexpected, and in a sense, it was my ochenaranand, the delight of the unknown, which Apu and Durga felt when they saw a train cross through a palash field in Pather Panchali in 1955.

From 2010, I returned to Bangladesh often – to travel across the country to interview people, to absorb the nation, as I researched and wrote my book. It took me more than three years to write the book, during which I went to the market in Chuknagar where a massacre took place, the campus in Dhaka where students were shot, the circuit house in Chittagong where Zia-ur-Rehman was murdered, the streets of Natore where Bonolota Sen inspired Jibanananda Das, the Jessore Road which Allen Ginsberg immortalized in a poem, the ashram in Noakhali where Gandhi brought peace, and the kutibadi in Shilaidaha where a boat sat on its reflection, in which Tagore sat at dawn and at twilight, leaving with a boatman in the river, looking pale in the golden light, sailing on the water, capturing that ethereal moment, and writing the Gitanjali, the sounds of Rabindrasangeet played on an ektara playing in my mind. Amar sonar Bangla; ami tomay bhalobashi.