Bengal: Intellectual tradition
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Indrajit Hazra on Bengal’s ‘Inane-tellectual’ universe
Indrajit Hazra, The God Of Inane-tellectuals Oct 07 2016 : The Times of India
This Puja, all hail Karthik, the deity who'll bring the serious and wicked fun together
Every year, around [Durga Puja] time, you'll find him always standing or halfsitting on a peacock there in the same corner. Unlike the rest of the pantheon, no one really knows what he's brand ambassadoring.
Durga, heavy-lifting Big Mama that she is, is the vanquisher of evil. Her daughter Saraswati is the go-to goddess of learning (of the bookish type, though), while Lakshmi has wealth creators under her matronly thrall. Ganesh, despite being a bit vague about his USP (good fortune isn't quite a skill set), has overlapping divine duties with his sisters both as a remover of obstacles and deity of wisdom. So what exactly does Karthik in the corner bring to the table?
But before that, a bit on those who have created these gods after their own image: Bengalis. It is during Durga Puja that the binary vision by which this bunch views the universe becomes magnified. Already divided into Bangali (Bengalis) and A-Bangali (non-Bengalis), bhadrolok (gentlemen) and chhotolok (plebians), non-vegetarian and vegetarian, sanskriti (culture) and aposanskriti (decadent culture), pharsha (fair) and moila (dark, but literally dirty), the world hums before the Bengali in all its split-down-the-middle glory during these five Puja days.
Much in the same vein lies the two qualities that the Bengali most associates with the two kinds of himselves: anthlamo (intellectualism) and kaoramo (inane fun).The other quality of naekamo (affectation) is something he is in denial about.
The anthel (intellectual) is marked by gravitas, a stern fondness for subjects that lend themselves easily to jargon, name-dropping and a withering contempt for popular mainstream culture unless subjects such as baul music, pornography and `Mem Bou: The Post-Colonial Re-Rendering of the White Woman in the Bengali Television Serial Imagination' have been put through the intellectual sausage machine.He is the kind who will watch Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear inside Jadavpur University's Gandhi Bhavan without realising that the projector was screening the film upside down.
An arch enemy of the anthel is the kaora (jokester) for whom everything is khilli, a joke. This unserious specimen makes it a point to make even the gravest matter not escape his tongue, for kaoramo is an attitude that overwhelmingly finds its outlet in language and verbal play .
Because of this dependency on language kaoramo, unlike anthlamo, is a quality in Bengalis that remains invisible to the non-Bengali whether from Notting Hill or Camac Street. Thus, the nonBengali's understanding of `serious' movies such as Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, but utter incomprehension of the comedic genius the filmmaker displays in the character of Lal Mohan Ganguly in his two Feluda movies, or, for that matter, in Anik Dutta's delightful 2012 Bhooter Bhobishyot (The Future of Ghosts The Future of the Past) where the comic goon character of Haathkata Karthik (Arms-Chopped Karthik) is really the epitome of the 21st century kaora dude.
But kaorami usually flinches from matters of the intellect, throwing the baby of knowledge out with the bathwater of moribund intellectualism with its trademark onanistic qualities. The fear of being even suspected of being an anthel makes the kaora quite often embrace stupidity .
So we get the lowest sort of popular `culture' as tested in that barometer of taste television where kaorami, while staying clear of the equally inane ivory tower of `avant garde' (sic) film, music or literature, doesn't go beyond stupidity , dance or cooking shows, and grown-ups talking like children. Intelligent funmaking gets stranded between the rock of anthlami and the hard place of kaorami.
It is in bridging this gulf that Karthik in the corner holds the key . With his six-pack abs and dandy Edwardian villain `good looks', it's perhaps difficult to consider Karthik as an intellectual. It's hard enough to consider him as the designated god of war something that South Indian depictions of Kartikeya aka Murugan are successful with.
In Karthik lies the ability to take the intellectual out of his Marx-SartreGhatak grotto and dump this cretin in a vat of ...... kaorami. Anthlamo and kaoramo are two sides of the same coin something that the great writer Shibram Chakrabarty knew instinctively . In one of his works, Chakrabarty recollects how an acquaintance had once brought along an admirer of his comic writing. Instead of chatting about his stories, Chakrabarty started speaking about left politics and socialism. The next day , the man who had brought his friend along asked him, “Why did you start talking so seriously about politics?“ Chakrabarty replied deadpan, “What could I do? The day before, I had bumped into [the poet] Shubhas Mukhopadhyay at College Street. He started talking about politics. All that talk was buzzing around in my head. So I thought, `What should I do?' Which is when I found your friend. I just let everything loose on him. Now I'm free of all that. Bring your friend one of these days.“
If Dadaism, Pop Art and Charlie Chaplin-Buster Keaton movies could have blossomed a century ago in Europe under the quiet auspices of Lord Karthik in a trilby hat, there is no reason why an Inane-tellectual Renaissance can't bloom in our own backyard this Durga Puja.
