Pandals For The Pundit

THERE'S a crisis looming over Bengal. The crisis of heroism. Or the crisis spawned by the drought of heroes, if you like. So when the news arrived from Calcutta on the afternoon of October 14th that Amartya Sen had won the Nobel Prize, chief minister Jyoti Basu interrupted another banal discourse on the virtues of the work ethic at a meeting in rust-belt Siliguri and harrumphed: "I have a piece of good news. It is a matter of pride that Dr Amartya Sen has won the Nobel Prize. He is a Beng-ali...he is an Indian." A frazzled audience of teachers, students and apparatchiki jumped from the seats and applauded.

A few hundred miles away in Calcutta, the Sen bug, travelling by TV, radio and word-of-mouth, had infected the population. Over the weekend, it developed into a full blown pandemic. At a time when the state has been reduced to an industrial wasteland, Bengal lost no time in appropriating Sen's stellar achievement. Kali puja pandals last week flaunted tacky cutouts and shabby illuminations depicting the economist. "Amartya Sen is Bengal's biggest pride after Mother Teresa, Satyajit Ray and Saurav Ganguly," gushed an organiser of a Kali puja in north Calcutta. His pandal's tribute: a clumsy painting of a glum-looking Sen surrounded by rickety humans—an allusion to the economist's oft-quoted statements about being moved by images of the Bengal famine.

The battle for the political appropriation of Sen began hours after the award had been announced. The Marxist government promptly announced a civic reception when the economist visits Calcutta in December-end for a seminar. The seeds of political one-upmanship were sown: zealot mayor Prasanta Chatterjee prefers the refurbished Town Hall as venue as Tagore was felicitated there after his Nobel win; but state cultural affairs minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya favours the sprawling Maidan or the 85,000-seater Eden Gardens to create a populist public spectacle. Stung by the government's appropriation of the ceremonies, a rag-tag Congress got into the act: party legislator Sadhan Pande proposed a special session of the assembly to felicitate Sen.

The city's academicians too didn't cover themselves with glory while tomtomming their reception plans. The head of the economics department of Calcutta's Presidency College, Sen's alma mater, suggested a day's holiday for the students to 'celebrate' the event! The suggestion was shot down by the wise principal. (This in a department where research fellowship positions are vacant at its once-prestigious and now nearly defunct Centre For Advanced Studies in Economics as there is no one to supervise doctoral research.) Then the much-politicised West Bengal College and University Teachers Association (WBCUTA) organised a quickie meet to pay tribute to the economist in a half-empty hall. Asked about the ill-organised function, a senior WBCUTA functionary quipped: "Strike while the iron is hot."

Many discovered this truism worked with the Senmania sweeping Calcutta. For one, Senmaniacs clogged bookshops to snap up the 300 remaining copies of Jibanjatra O Arthaniti (Living and Economics)—a collection of his translated essays—in three days. It is another thing that the Rs 40 volume from city-based Ananda Publishers had sold just 5,000 copies since it was published eight years ago. Faced with such overwhelming demand, Ananda rolled the presses over the weekend to print another 5,000 copies. "We simply don't know when the demand will taper off," says Badal Bose of Ananda Publishers. "We are ready to print more instantly if need be." Then the city municipality discovered a large number of parents christening their sons Amartya after the big news broke.

To meet the insatiable curiosity about Sen's life and work, city morningers were overrun with hype, saucy stories on Sen's personal life, profiles of his parents and listings of his academic positions, awards and spouses. Even the CPI(M)'s dowdy Ganashakti ran a special colour pullout with a translation of Sen's writings. On its news pages, the paper reproduced a mushy phone conversation between the Nobel laureate and his mother with this memorable ending: "At the Sen residence in Santiniketan, visitors are peeping at the cordless phone, wondering when it would come to life with a voice floating from across the oceans, 'Ma, I am coming.'"

Clearly, Senmania is here to stay for awhile. "It points to a poverty of thought, a poverty of imagination," seethes Prasanta Roy, head of the sociology department at Presidency College. "This mania is about basking in somebody's light and not being deserving of it." In the end, a city caterer capped it all with an ad congratulating Sen and declaring it was "proud to have served food at his daughters' wedding." In Calcutta, bizarre fads die hard.