Sen on Gandhi & Bengal

Rabindranath Tagore, who owned big estates in Muslim majority East Bengal, opposed Indian Nationalism because he foresaw that his people would lose their property, perhaps even their lives, there. He was initially skeptical of Gandhi because he thought the man genuinely wanted the Brits to leave. Once he discovered that Gandhi's antics were enabling the Brits to stay, he was somewhat reconciled to him. Also Gandhi helped him get money for Shantiniketan.

In a recent article, Amartya Sen asks why Bengalis didn't warm to Gandhi. He concludes it wasn't because of Tagore's animosity. What then was the cause? 

could it have been Gandhiji's puritanism and famously austere life style that made the more easy-going Bengalis somewhat sceptical? For example, Bengal has never been a "dry state," free - as far as regulations go - of alcohol, unlike so many other states in India.

But Bengal had a well organized Temperance movement before other parts of the country. It was  believed that prohibition would cut Government revenue and thus weaken it.  

Going into less "materialist" matters, many Bengalis take great pride in the fact that Bengal was ahead of the rest of India

because the Brits ruled India from Calcutta. A Russian musician- Gerasim Lebedev- settled in Calcutta and studied Sanskrit. He is believed to be the first person to score Indian music for Western orchestras. He also established the first proscenium drama theatre in India. This theatre opened in Calcutta in 1795.

Apparently, Lebedev had originally landed in Madras but found the place too boring and conservative and so left for Calcutta. 

As Kipling put it- 

Clive kissed me on the mouth and eyes and brow,

Wonderful kisses, so that I became

 Crowned above Queens—a withered beldame now,

 Brooding on ancient fame.

But his verdict on Calcutta wasn't much better (Kipling was born in Bombay)

Me the Sea-captain loved, the River built,
Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold.
Hail, England! I am Asia—Power on silt,
Death in my hands, but Gold!

Kipling is wrong about sea-captains loving Calcutta, but it is true that much Gold is likely to create a demand for refined entertainment- more particularly if you might die of dysentery at any moment.  

in the development of a culture of modern theatre, which had thrived well enough in early India (with innovative use of what was modern theatre in the ancient world), but many centuries after that, nearer our time, most of the Indian cities were doing without theatre altogether,

No. There was a lively puppet theater as well as dramatic depictions of episodes from the Itihasas and Puranas.  

often with censorious articulation of the folly of that line of exposed entertainment.

The Europeans were welcome to have their own Concerts and Theater troupes.  

Could it be that Gandhiji's puritanism was a big divider in this case?

There was a traditional caste of 'Bhavai' performers. A more modern type of Gujarati theater had been flourishing since about 1850. The Parsis in particular were active in this field.  The 'Indrasabha' tradition that they invented had a direct impact on the development of Indian cinema.

This line of explanation does not work either. Despite Gandhiji's self-imposed constraints on his own life, he was not a great champion of imposing his tastes on the society at large, particularly through legislation.

Gandhi supported prohibition and most Congress Ministries did bring promulgate it after 1937. Bengal did not because it wasn't Congress ruled. 

Furthermore, Bengal saw much puritanism on the part of many local intellectuals

I suppose Sen means members of the Brahmo Samaj 

who were seriously critical of what they took to be frivolity - or worse.

To be fair, the Brahmos had been subjected to scurrilous libels. There were pamphlets circulated which accused the founder of the movement of having discarded traditional Hindu customs so as to make himself more appealing to Muslim prostitutes.  

Indeed, in my own school days, anti-puritans in Kolkata loved telling the story of a local guardian of morality, Heramba Maitra (the famous Principal of the City College), who - when asked by a young man whether he knew where the Minerva Theatre was - had replied with intense scorn that he did not know, and then, after reflecting on the fact that he had just lied, ran back, huffing, to catch the baffled inquirer, to tell him, "I do actually know, but I will absolutely not tell you."

Heramba's wife had been libeled by a newspaper editor in 1897 who had some political grievance against Maitra and the Brahmo faction (called 'Purists') whom he represented. This is what makes the above account so comic. Essentially, the imputation was that the man had married a slut. No doubt, he was pimping for half the theatre troupe at the Minerva. A trap had been laid for him- or so he may well have believed. The student who asked him the innocent seeming question would slip him a silver Rupee and say 'thank you, Dalalji!' as if he were a professional procurer. Equally, if Heramba had said 'I don't know', the allegation would be made that the prostitutes of that area had stopped giving him a cut. 

In contrast, as far as theatre is concerned, Gandhiji was not only not critical of people's propensity to have fun, he actually liked seeing plays himself, at least he did so in Kolkata. In fact, he saw a play on his very first evening in Kolkata on 31st October 1896.

That was about a decade before he embraced celibacy and set up as a Sadhu-Mahatma.  

He went to another play a week later on 7th November. Indeed, the pioneering Bengali theatre could take much pride in the patronage that it received, in its early trailblazing days, from the Mahatma.

By then, both Gujerati and Bengali theater were well established. The 'Indrasabha' genre in Parsi theater influenced the first Indian movies. However, Bharatendu, who died young in 1885, was the most influential dramatist of the period. But for him, would 'khariboli' now be the national language? 

Where, then, is the explanation? Perhaps we should move from matters of culture and taste to those of politics.

Indeed. C.R Das had joined with Motilal to enter the Legislative Assemblies. The Bose brothers were his proteges. B.C Roy- later the CM of West Bengal- was Gandhi's physician and a close friend and trusted aide. However, Netaji Bose was the hero of the young.  

It might be thought that it was Bengal's uncertainty about non-violence that made Bengali intellectuals hesitate about giving the Mahatma the unreserved admiration that would have been the natural sentiment to expect. The apostle of non-violence certainly stood far apart from the Bengali "terrorists" (as the British called them, not entirely without reason) who wanted to bomb India's way into independence.

The bigger problem was that G.D Birla became close to Tegart, the police chief who crushed the Jugantar revolutionaries. Tegart thought the Boses were trying to kill him.  

He differed radically also from Subhas Chandra Bose, the Netaji, who raised the Indian National Army from the British Indian troops captured by the Japanese army in the Second World War, and used that quickly formed army to fight the British. Earlier on, Gandhi did have quite a fight with Subhas Chandra Bose when Bose was elected to be the President of Congress and was working for a departure from Congress's unconditional commitment to non-violent struggle.

It was his re-election which was the problem. Gandhi had been miffed when Vithalbhai Patel & Bose issued a statement in 1933 saying Gandhi was a failure. Vithalbhai left some money to Bose in his will and Vallabhai went to court to prevent Bose getting that money. Gandhi thought Bose could be managed and so got him elected as President. He knew there was some anger in Bengal with Nehru who was blamed for failing to ally with Fazl ul Haq and form a Government. Sarat Bose, the Congress leader in Bengal, was eager for that alliance. Nehru stubbornly refused, demanding that the Premier be from Congress though Haq had more seats. Thus Mahatma Gandhi needed to placate the Bengalis by appointing Subhas. He may have hoped to split the brothers just as Vithalbhai and Vallabhai had split apart. Equally, he may have felt that Subhas would become more moderate once he saw how complex India actually is. Calcutta was one hundred years ahead of most parts of India. Festina lente. Indians must make haste slowly. 

Did not even the Mutiny of 1857, with all its gore and ferocity, along with valiance, start in Bengal?

No. It started in Meerut. Some say an incident in Barrackpore, a month previously, contributed to it.  

Was not the defence of political violence in the cause of independence a major preference in Bengal? More generally, is violence not a larger part of Bengali life than elsewhere?

Calcutta did have an underworld but Bengal was viewed as peaceful and its people considered cultured and courteous. I think the Bengalis are a noble people which is why they prefer to rise by their own efforts rather than by killing and looting. 

That line of hypotheses is also hard to sustain. The mutiny, at least in one of its manifestations, did start in Bengal, in Barrackpur to be exact, and yet Bengalis were hardly active in that enterprise.

A.O Hume says that the 'pugnacious and turbulent' East Bengali Muslim could fight his corner but the Bengalis were by no means a violence prone. 

The main thrust came from the north and west of India, and even the sepoys leading the mutiny in Bengal had mostly come there from further west.

I believe there was some recruitment- mainly Muslim cavalry- from Bengal itself. There was nothing wrong with the fighting spirit of the people. I imagine they had previously had higher real wages and thus less incentive to enlist. At a later point, there may have been a canard about Bengalis lacking martial qualities.  

In Gandhiji's own days, Bengal was also full of followers of unconditional non-violence, led of course by the Mahatma himself.

The Bengalis could see with their own eyes that the revolutionaries had failed to do anything but 'trouble their own house and inherit the wind'. Still, in common with other Indians, Bengalis honor those who laid down their lives in the cause of the Nation even if their ideology was different. 

There were many different political currents working in Bengal, and those who rejected unconditional non-violence were well matched - in fact numerically far exceeded - by those committed to getting the British out through entirely non-violent means.

Bengalis were sensible people and did not favor a leap in the dark. The problem was that young educated Bengalis kept having to face horrible racist taunting published in Calcutta's White newspapers. Kipling himself, in far away Punjab, was influenced by this at one point.

Rabindranath Tagore, to come back to him, showed his unshakable support for struggling without killing, both in his fictions and in his other writings. Rabindranath's condemnation of terrorism, despite his recognition of the high-minded dedication of the protagonists, is the major theme of his novel, Char Adhyay ("Four Chapters").

Published circa 1934. It was considered to be Tagore's response to the daring shown by some female revolutionaries. Perhaps Tagore was thinking of Doestoevsky's 'Demons' when he wrote it. There were plenty of Revolutionary 'Super-men' roaming around the world at the time. But their politics was nothing but gangsterism. The villain in the story is a scientist who has a grievance against the British. But, he is obviously a shit scientist. Otherwise he could have returned to France or Germany. He believes that he can't get a good job in India because the Secret Police think he is a revolutionary. So, in a nihilistic manner, he actually starts a secret terror cell which however concentrates on fucking over its own members. There is a cute girl whom he uses as bait to entice young lads. She falls for a poetic fellow and thus the Scientist marks her for destruction. Obviously, she insists her dreamboat must kill her because the cheek of Eternity must be turned so that the tear drop atremble upon it might more briefly blaze with the quotidien's quenchless fire or some other such bollocks. 

 Come to think of it, there was a Hindi film- Dev Anand's Zalzala- based on it. 

His admiration for the power and quality of political non-violence comes out most sharply in his play, Muktadhara, with a marvellous and ultimately victorious leader in the form of Dhananjay Bairagi (a character clearly modelled on Gandhiji himself), leading the people against tyranny through totally non-violent means.

This came out in 1922. Sadly, Gandhi surrendered unconditionally and went meekly off to jail.  

It would be hard to find an explanation of the alleged tension in Bengal through searching for a violence-loving people's unified scepticism of the sage of non-violence.

Gujarat has more Jains and thus 'Ahimsa' as a shibboleth commands more gestural support. Anyway, Bengal was in no mood to be lectured by what was then a more backward part of India.  

Indeed, despite the reputation of Bengal of being a place of hot-headed seekers of violent confrontation (perhaps generated by Bengal's non-negligible ability to make speech go very much further ahead of its deeds), even violent crime is far less common in Bengal than in the rest of India.

Indeed. Moreover the people tend to be 'Good Samaritans' and are more likely to intervene if they see anybody being harassed. I would say nobility, not garrulity, is the mark of the true Bengali.  

It is, in fact, quite remarkable that Calcutta, while being one of poorest cities in India (and indeed in the world), also has an exceptionally low rate of violent crime - indeed absolutely the lowest, by a big margin, among all the Indian cities. Violent crimes include of course murder. The average incidence of murder in Indian cities (including all the 35 cities that are counted in that category) is 2.7 per 100,000 people (it is 2.9 for Delhi). In contrast, the murder rate is only 0.3 per 100,000 in Kolkata.

If you believe the figures, the city had only 11 rapes in 2021. London has an average of 25 rapes a day.  London has 5 million less people. Clearly, I should move to Bengal if I am to preserve my virginity. 

But what about communal violence to defeat which Gandhiji went to Bengal in the immediate post-independence days of 1947? Is there a propensity in Bengal to go that way?

Yes. That is why Sen's family had to run away from Dacca. On the other hand, Hindus in West Bengal didn't do much ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Perhaps the economic motivation was lacking. After all, the law enabled well connected Hindu refugees to take land from some wealthy Muslims. But, my impression is, Hindu Bengalis respected the hard working Muslim. Still, there was economic migration of Muslims to East Pakistan.  

Certainly, the fire of communal violence was well lit there when Gandhiji came to squelch the flames.

He failed. 

However, those were very odd days when the politics of partition was being played out over India, but especially over Bengal. Bengal's record in keeping communal peace has been excellent since then in both parts of Bengal (that is, both in Bangladesh and in West Bengal) over many decades after the post-partition violence ultimately died out.

Yet millions of Hindus kept running away from East Bengal. I wonder why.  

Certainly, in the long run Bengal

West Bengal maybe. Not East Bengal.  

has done much more to keep its promise to Gandhiji (as the Hindu and Muslim leaders jointly told him, "we shall never again allow communal strife") than has Gandhiji's own state of origin, viz. Gujarat,

where there was no ethnic cleansing whatsoever.  

or for that matter Maharashtra (including Mumbai) and Delhi.

The Hindus may have done so but East Bengal's Hindu proportion of the population fell from one third in 1900 to about 8 percent today. By contrast, Gujarat was peaceful in 1947, though some Muslims did emigrate , and it has remained so. The post Godhra riots did not lead to a mass exodus though, no doubt, there was increased self-segregation. 

It remains to be seen whether Hindus will flee from Muslim majority districts in West Bengal. 

So a clash of instinctive propensities - of violence against non-violence - is not going to be a natural line of explanation of the "frank friendship."

It is a fact that there is little political violence in Gujarat. This can't be said about West Bengal since the Sixties. Sen himself is from East Bengal. The proportion of Bengalis displaced by violence is much higher than that for Gujaratis.  

I do not think that any ready explication emerges that would explain what could have caused a widespread scepticism in Bengal of Gandhiji's intellectual and moral position.

There were three obvious reasons for Bengali skepticism

1) Bengal was more industrialized and had better scientific education at that time. Thus Gandhi's rustic creed seemed retrograde. 

2) Bengal had a closer connection to Japan through the Dutch- Dwarkanath had a Japanese pavilion in his garden- and was aware of how the Japanese had risen up to become a great naval and military power. Gandhi, poor booby, thought that the Brits had very cunningly turned Japan into a colony of a veiled sort. Thus, if the Japanese navy had taken on some of the role of the Royal Navy- even in the Mediterranean!- during the Great War, it must be because some English Lord had pulled the wool over their eyes. 

3) Khilafat. That was crazy shit. In Gujarat, Hindus were the vast majority. In Bengal they were becoming a minority. What Khilafat meant to the Faraizi Muslim was seizing the land of the Hindu landlord and taking  government jobs. The August 1920 Calcutta Emergency Session of Congress showed the Bengalis that Gandhi was a nutter. C.R Das and Bipin Chandra Pal etc. were able to get the maha-crackpot to include some other demands along with Khilafat. Still, the damage had been done. Hindu Bengalis had seen at first hand that Gandhi was ga ga. 

That recognition takes us back to our point of departure, which itself needs critical scrutiny. Was there really such extensive scepticism about Gandhiji in Bengal?

Yes. There may have been a brief period between August 1920 and Feb 1922 when Hindu Bengalis believed that maybe Gandhi had superpowers and Muslims would think of 'Khilafat' as something wholly spiritual and non-violent. Then Gandhi unilaterally surrendered and went meekly to jail. He was merely a crackpot, not a Messiah. 

The harbouring - and celebration - of contradictions within a generally adoring persuasion is no stranger to Bengali intellectuals. Rabindranath Tagore too experienced some of that mixture, especially in his early decades.

Tagore was once close to the Revolutionaries. Then he realized 'Swaraj' would mean Muslim domination in East Bengal. 

I have discussed elsewhere why I think that the argumentative propensity of Indians as a whole is quite high, and that we cannot understand some features of Indian history without taking note of this tradition.

Neither adulation nor invective represent argumentation. Hindu Bengal faced an existential threat. If the Brits left, they would have to run away from the East. But after about 1917, it was obvious that the Brits would leave. Gandhi & Co were pushing against an open door. Thankfully, lots of others were also pushing to be the first through the door and so the Brits could take their time dictating the terms on which they would gradually transfer power. But, one way or another, the loss of East Bengal was inevitable unless perhaps Marxism had some magic power the Mahacrackpot lacked. Sadly, it didn't. It was stupid shit. Markets may have that power. Why knife people instead of selling them stuff? 

Within that general heritage, Bengal's propensity to raise the decibel level of argumentative articulation is quite distinguished.

Only because they were competing as to who could shout loudest. But shouting isn't argumentation.  

From the blustery eloquence of that "frank friendship" it would be hard to judge how distant the parties involved really were.

Tagore and Hindu East Bengalis stood to lose from the departure of the Brits. Hindu Gujarat or Hindu UP were perfectly safe. That was the great distance between the Gujju and the Hindu Bengali. Indeed, that remains the distance. Hindus may have to flee more and more Muslim majority areas in West Bengal. Gujarati Hindus face no such danger.