Pagol Na Panjabi

Sitting here in New Delhi, not having been to Calcutta for two years, I sometimes get homesickness attacks. The first sign that one of these seizures is coming on is when I find myself muttering imprecations about Punjabis, Haryanvis, UP-wallas and other North Indians, including pompous Delhi-Madrasi bureaucrats, in my rusty street Bangla. One of the first curses that comes to my tongue is the old favourite ‘Boka*****!" (unintelligent fornicator), followed by the sexist but immensely satisfying ‘Khanki’r bachhara’ (children of whores).

A few months ago my friend Anjana forwarded me an e-mail message from Calcutta titled ‘The Boka*****s of Bengal’ (a site that has since been taken off the net and its owner arrested). I scanned this thing very quickly and promptly banished it from my computer, dismissing it as another example of jejune humour that infests the Net. Little did I realise that I was deleting a sliver of late ’90s Calcutta culture. I got rid of it in the same way I got rid of a more recent message, one which had a picture of a group of bikini-ed women with the faces of the Indian cricket team superimposed on top of the standard model cheese cake. Bad taste and not particularly interesting bad taste at that.

Opening a newspaper recently I realised that this piece of bad taste has had an effect. Like a billiard ball Boforsing off from a miscue at Hindustan Club on Lansdowne Road and curving away to land on a plate of pyaaj philluries at the Central Avenue Coffee House, this thing has found an unlikely trajectory and managed to cannon into some Very Illustrious Calcutta Egos. I look at the headlines and see that the V.I.C.E. have now decided to Retaliate. 

Words suddenly jump up at me from the front page, competing with other words like ‘Kargil’, ‘Wimbledon’, ‘Sonia’ and ‘Wasim’, words like ‘Andolon’, ‘Samiti’, ‘Sunil Gangopadhyay’, ‘Kolikata’ and ‘Khemka’. I start to react like any other minor Calcutta intellectual, my amusement tinged with irritation, till I realise someone is trying to take my ‘Kolkata Buddhijibi’ license away. I am, suddenly, a ‘double probaashi’, my exile multiplied and layered into two like a parantha turning into a Kabiraji cutlet. I am suddenly a non-Bengali from Calcutta being told that one, I am a second-grade citizen in my own home town and two, that, anyway, I am no longer from ‘Calcutta’ but from something which will soon be called ‘Kolikata’.

There is a wonderful insult in Bangla/Bengali, along the same lines but far sharper than the Hindustani ‘aadmi ho ya payjama?’, which asks the insultee ‘Pagol na Panjabi?’— ‘Are you mad or simply Punjabi?’ (to tell the exact truth, in the less PC pre-Bhindranwale days, ‘Panjabi’ here meant ‘Sikh’, as in the now extinct loveable Sardar looking at his watch at high noon, but if you’ve spent enough time in New Delhi you will see no reason to limit the ‘Panjabi’ to his or her religious background—to be from anywhere in the Greater Punjab should be enough to link you to the phrase). Remembering this, a spate of variations appears on the pop-up window of my mind: Matha-kharab na Marathi? Gaadha (there is a worse word starting with ‘g’, more appropriate, but we’ll censor it in fear of a Dhokla-Fatwa from my relatives in Ahmedabad...oops, I mean Kornaboti) na Gujarati, Ullu na Ayatollah, Kretin na Kolikattan?, leading to the inevitable and spare elegance of Boka***** na Bengali?

A far more powerful portrayer of contemporary Bengal than Sunilbabu and his ilk, a man called Ritwik Ghatak (dismissed by many as a merely ‘Bengali’ film-maker) had it exactly right as long ago as 1973. In his film Jukti Tarko aar Gappo there is a sequence where a young Naxal berates the old drunkard (played by Ghatak himself) for being a ‘pochaa Buddhijibi’—a rotting intellectual, by clear implication a rotting city intellectual. The burden of the young Naxal’s song is that the Calcutta intellectuals are completely out of touch with the real problems faced by ordinary people in Bengal’s villages. Mahasweta Devi’s reaction to this Bangla Bachao Andolan has more or less said the same thing.

In my own way, and at the obvious risk of it being pointed out that it takes one rotting intellectual to know another, I would add a couple of points.

Starting somewhere else, being raised in a Gujarati family in Calcutta, the city of Bombay was always ‘Mumbai’ (a note on pronunciation here—it is not ‘Mumbaai’ but ‘Moombai’ the a pronounced as in the first syllable of ‘ahankar’, ahankar as the word is pronounced in Hindustani, not Bangla), and it pains me to hear Australian cricket commentators mispronounce it, as it does to stomach the spin of sneer they invariably put on it.

Unlike recently jumped-up small towns like Ahmedabad and Bangalore, there is a double layer to the nomenclature of Bombay and Calcutta. On the one hand there is the cosmopolitan city with all its many mixes, the Bombay and the Calcutta of it, and on the other, there is a special feeling involved in being able to call something so big and well-known with a name that is, in a sense, private. Till recently, only Marathis and Gujaratis called Bombay ‘Mumbai’ and that implied a special relationship with it—it was the town where you didn’t have to ‘zara hatke, zara bachke’ because, meri jaan, it was not Bombay, it was Mumbai. 

In the same way, ‘Calcutta’ is an exploding cornucopia, formed and constantly changed by its whole history of all the different people who came and made it—from the first British coloniser through the Biharis, Marwaris, Chinese, Assamese, Gujaratis, Punjabis, Sindhis, Tamilians, Malayalis and what have you, to the latest Japanese tourist. Kulkutta is what you call it if you’re from the Gangetic plain or Gujarat/Maharashtra, ‘Cyalg’tta’ if you’re from the South, etc. etc. ‘Kolkata’ is what you call it if you live there and speak some kind of reasonable Bengali. (Kolikata is as old and archaic as Job, as in the Book, not Charnock) and I have no desire to hear Ian Chappell trample over these vowels as I have no desire to hear Bal Thackeray mis-pronounce Pashchim Banga and turn it into Puschsim Bung.

Besides the millions of Bengalis living outside Calcutta, stretching from Purulia and Midnapur to Sylhet and Comilla, who don’t give a flying philluri about whether West Bengal is turned into Poshchim Bongo and Calcutta into Kolikata, there is also the small problem of the millions living in the city as well. Exactly which Bangla/Bengali language do these guardians of Bengali culture want to save for Calcutta’s citizens?

Please tick one: The language of the 19th century elite? Which is different from the language of Rabindranath who modernised it into something else. So, Tagorean Bangla? What about the iconoclasts of the ’40s and ’50s who reacted to Tagore and tried to catch something more contemporary? What about the Bangla that Shakti and the self-same Sunil duo among others wrought out of the chaos of ’50s and ’60s Calcutta? Or is it the turgid, Sovietique, podium-thumping pomposity that the Left Front snatched in its nascence from the Congress and perfected over the last few decades? What about the argot of mini-bus conductors, might it not be easier to teach reluctant school children that functional Bengali?

Language is also deeply attached to music, so which musics will be kosher and which disallowed? Will it still be okay for cassettes of George Biswas to be sold next to those of Hemanta Mukherjee?—please to note sar, the interpretation of Rabindra Sangeet, including the words themselves, is radically different in both. Will the songs of Suman and Nachiketa still be available?—their use of Bangla is a far cry from Shyama Sangeet, how will you legislate this? What about the Bauls, most misused icons of Great Bengal? Aamar deho torchlight e, Guru bhore dao gyaaner battery! goes one song ("Into my body-torchlight, oh guru, put the battery cells of knowledge!") or does that illicit electricity come under apasanskriti?

Ooops, I’m now getting into my Bengali/Declamatory mode.

I will end on a note of hope. Curious about this villainous website, I went to Yahoo.com and tried to find it, just to see what all the halla-gulla was about. I typed in the evil words ‘boka*****.com’ into a blank space which I thought was a search window. It turned out to be a window to create you own website. The message that came through said the following:

Yahoo.Com Register Website boka*****.com is already registered. But these versions are available. Just click the box next to the web address you want:

boka*****.net
boka*****.org

Perhaps all is not lost yet.

(Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and writer temporarily living in Delhi.)