Why India finds Bengal difficult to understand

This may come as a shock to many in the rest of India that the inability of a ‘north Indian’ party, namely the BJP, to sink its teeth into West Bengal owes not to an apparent anti-Hindu society and regime of the region but to an urbane-tribal clash — to make it technically perfect, a Vedic-Tantric fight. No, the stereotypical Bengali you have in mind, the quintessential bhadralok, is a product of Kolkata and the capital of the state is not a representative sample of the state, but a Bengali you run into in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru or Hyderabad is most probably not from Bankura, Medinipur, Bardhaman, 24 Parganas or the Indian part of Dinajpur.

The tribal culture in a Bengali’s private life fuses with iconoclasm in his public life to create a unique political species that ‘outsiders’ would find difficult to make sense of.

Bengal’s secular, tolerant, inclusive ethos, however, is a recent phenomenon, newer than the period of Bengal’s renaissance beginning with Raja Rammohun Roy and ending with Rabindranath Tagore. It may stun many to believe today that the opinion about Muslims in many of the moderate figures from contemporary history — like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Tagore, Babasaheb Ambedkar and even Jawaharlal Nehru — was less pluralistic than that of today’s left.

What inserted the aversion towards Hindutva is an old story spanning centuries, though. No, it did not start with the 34 years of communist rule, made worse for Hindus by the past 13 years of Trinamool Congress rule which have witnessed a couple of communal riots every two years. It did not start with Tagore’s aversion to nationalism or Brahmo Samaj’s act of discarding the Puranas.

The tribal Bengal

How different Bengal has always been can be understood by tracing the history of the region back to the ancient era when Alexander reportedly defeated Porus in the place that is modern-day Punjab. The Mauryas had not yet risen. Their predecessors, the Nandas, had a relatively small territory. The next paragraph of this article would sound unbelievable to left-wing and right-wing historians alike.

It is taught to students in Bengal that there existed a Bengali kingdom called "Vangadesh" (aka Gangadesh) to the east of the territory of the Nandas, which spooked Alexander. He was told these were ferocious tribal people whom his regular army had no training to cope with. Well, that may sound as funny as books of history in Pakistan claiming that they won the 1965 war against India, but this is how the West Bengal secondary education system is!

Such paranoia about Bengalis matches the public perception in large parts of north India where Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators have allegedly settled in. Regular residents of these areas are apprehensive of venturing into those parts, believing they are barbarians!

Reportedly, when in the early 20th century freedom fighters began demanding complete freedom from the British, intellectuals wondered how much its territory would span. Unlike today, Indians of that era did not have an emotional connect with a certain shape and size of the map of their nation. It was then that Bengali freedom fighters wondered whether they should fight for Bengal’s independence instead, as the linguistic community had a far clearer idea about the length and breadth of the land they inhabited. That map in their heads was the map of Vangadesh.

The beginning of iconoclasm in Bengal

Back in older history, the Pala dynasty, which ruled parts of present-day Bengal and Bihar from the 8th to 12th century CE, were patrons of Mahayana Buddhism and played a significant role in the revival of Buddhism in the region. Buddhism, as people know, rejects Hinduism’s icons. That was the beginning of iconoclasm in Bengal.

The Palas were followed by the Senas (11th and 12th century CE), who tilted more towards mainstream Hinduism involving deities. While the Senas made sincere and sustained efforts to revive Hinduism in Bengal, including importing Brahmins from present-day Uttar Pradesh and faraway Andhra Pradesh, in the mediaeval period that followed, when kingdoms gave way to smaller fiefdoms, religion became a private affair even as a phenomenon of iconoclasm resurfaced in public life. This was a stark contrast between a series of Bhakti personalities like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Ramprasad Sen, Bama Khyapa, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, etc at one end of the spectrum and Brahmos beginning with Roy and ending with Tagore at the other. Swami Vivekananda was initially a Brahmo, too, the uninitiated must note.

A problem with the radical idea of iconoclasm is that the stauncher it is, the more appealing its follower finds it to be. When it comes to breaking idols, Buddhism cannot compete with Islam, of course. No wonder, a large section of former Buddhists who had left the Hindu fold, repelled by the idea of God in various anthropomorphic figures, found Islam all the more attractive. This was like the peculiar problem Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba faced when ISIS arrived in that country. The ISI-sponsored LeT had a tough time mobilising radical Islamists to fight for it, as the potential recruits found the ISIS truer to the idea of jihad.

For that matter, all such parts of the subcontinent that are Islamic states today did not convert from Hinduism to Islam. From Afghanistan to the west of present-day India to Bangladesh to its east, these were Buddhist territories.

This nihilism in Bengal’s public life coupled with a distinct sect of Hinduism in the province, the Shaktas who follow Tantras rather than the Vedas, gave its people a unique profile and a different national outlook. The education curriculum of West Bengal would bear me out on the latter.

Among the varied Hindu practices, while Puranic literature caters to the masses and the Vedas and Upanishads, Advaita, Mimansa, etc are philosophies for scholarly pursuits, what stirs believers is fables. In Bengal, a mandatory part of puja in a Hindu household involves reading from a panchali — what is referred to as a katha in the Hindi-speaking regions of the country. In a panchali, the deity comes across as vindictive. These stories typically begin with a rich merchant who defies the god or goddess, is turned bankrupt and then he comes to his senses, pleading with the deity to have mercy, after which his fortune is revived.

Ask a student of social sciences from Bengal why such Hindu gods are characteristically different from their Vedic counterparts, and he will say that’s because these people were tribals! According to the history of Hinduism taught in the schools of Bengal, several tribal practices were subsumed in the Hindu whole, with the Vedas, an import from what Marxist historians identify as ‘Aryans’ from central Asia, providing aristocracy and respectability to the faith with Sanskrit, even as the popular lore kept being told and retold in the local language.

Perhaps the most defining evidence of the divide is seen every year during Durga Puja when Bengalis want to feast on the meat of the sacrificial goat offered to the goddess whereas north Indians who celebrate Navratra around the time, with a strictly vegetarian diet in that duration, find the sight downright repugnant.

If tribals are convinced about something, they will stick to the conviction for ages

As per Adolf Hitler, who often lamented the soft nature of Christians, impressed by Islamic fanaticism, Arabs were a tribe too, and it’s in the nature of a tribe that its people believe in a credo only after much persuasion — think of the centuries for which Arabs used to be pagans before embracing Islam — but once they do, they stick to the newfound belief for ages all over again. This is why, the Nazi said, Muslims tend to be fundamentalists. It comes from the tribal streak that Arabs have in them, Hitler thought.

So, if ‘Jai Sriram’ is not working politically in West Bengal, it’s not going to work in the foreseeable future, given that Bengal collectively behaves like a tribe. Another piece of information about the state which shows this behavioural pattern staying for a long time may not be known to many non-Bengali Indians. It was one of the most regressive societies before turning into one of the most progressive Indian groups. In the early 1990s, Bengali broadsheet Anandabazar Patrika used to republish a story from its edition exactly 100 years ago. One of those news reports spoke of a Brahmin who was bringing home his 35th bride. Doing so, the reporter wrote, Mr Mahamahopahyay maintained his “kaulinya” (the highest status within a given Hindu caste is of those who are kuleen — Kuleen Brahmin, Kuleen Kayastha etc). Contrast that Bengal, where even a journalist was casteist, with today’s Bengal. You ask a Bengali his caste and he will throw at you a gaze that seems to say, “What zoo has this extinct species been released from?”

In 2015, when the BJP was tentatively entering Bengal, it had invited scores of Bengali journalists to the bungalow next to its then-headquarters on Ashoka Road in New Delhi. The points person from the party told the gathering that they were wondering what policy and strategy would work in Bengal, given that they had been told that the caste equations that work in the rest of India wouldn’t work in this state. Well, the answer is — you need to be a Bengali, essentially a tribal, to understand Bengal.

But the tribal wing of Hinduism, comprising followers of Tantras, is not unique to Bengal, by the way. In 2018, the whole country including its Supreme Court wondered what was wrong in letting menstruating women into the Sabarimala shrine. Wouldn’t God welcome all, the secular Hindu wondered. Well, Lord Ayyappa does not fit into a Vedic or Christian definition of the universal almighty. Ayyappa is a Shasta, to know whom one needs to follow Tantra. Between 2008 and 2018, even the RSS and the BJP were in support of letting women into the shrine. As was Pinarayi Vijayan of the CPI(M). Then, the whole sect poured into the streets in protest. The Sangh revised its stand on the issue overnight even as the communists ate a humble pie. Note that Kerala, home to Sabarimala, is another place where a ‘Vedic’ BJP struggles to penetrate. It takes a tribal to understand a tribe.

[Featured image: A map of ancient Bengal]