What is the basis of a shared culture? Does it reside in external signifiers of songs and movies, politics and economics? Or is it formed by the stories a community tells about itself? Writer and translator Parimal Bhattacharya, in his luminous and thought-provoking book of essays, Notes From A Waterborne Land: Bengal Beyond The Bhandrolok, comes down quite clearly on the side of stories: stories of self-representation, stories of struggle, pragmatic stories, fantastical stories, boastful stories. And, ultimately, stories of “radical aspirations”, a phrase Bhattacharya borrows from economist Amartya Sen. This framing of stories that a self-conscious linguistic community chooses to tell about itself can be clearly found in the title of the book. And among the dominant linguistic groups of Asia, Bengalis are second to none when it comes to creating a narrative of linguistic sub-nationalism.
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What Bhattacharya probes and critiques is the one big flaw in the Bengali narrative: the fact that it is almost entirely the product of the upper-caste bhadralok imaginary. For over a century and a half, the history and culture of Bengal—which could be said to include not just West Bengal but also the nation state of Bangladesh as well as areas that were once part of the colonial Bengal Presidency—have been dominated by the bhadralok narrative and its cultural signifiers. The cultural dominance of the Tagore and Ray families, the social reforms of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the revolutionary zeal of Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poetry and Subhash Chandra Bose’s adventures are but some of the markers. Even the social egalitarianism and iconoclastic irreverence of West Bengal’s long tryst with left-wing politics came with distinct bhadralok characteristics—just look at Jyoti Basu’s political career.