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Buddhadev Bose and 1971: bhadralok communalism?

Khademul Islam
Buddhadev Bose was a prolific letter writer. In Amar Chelebela he narrates how during his Noakhali childhood he was his family's designated letter writer, and about its post office and indolent postmaster. In Amar Joubon he rues the loss of several hundred letters to ravenous termites. Now we have Buddhadev Bosur Chithi, a collection of his letters written to his younger daughter Damayanti Singh Bose from 1962 till his death in 1974. These were first published--178 out of roughly 300--in 1988-89 in West Bengal's Desh magazine. They have been reprinted in a 256-page volume, the language even in these informal, sometimes-dashed-off missives gleaming like zamindari heirlooms. Its flow is marred by busy footnotes by Damayanti, who otherwise has penned a loving tribute to him. In these pages Buddhadev emerges as a conscientious, affectionate father and family man. No less valuable is the portrait drawn of '60s Calcutta, its gritty materiality.
It was therefore with shock that I came upon the letters written during 1971. Three out of a total of 16 refer to our independence war. The first is in a letter dated 23 March, 1971: a visible anger, to the extent of penning an angry letter to The Statesman newspaper, at having to pay a 'war tax.’ Compounding Damayanti’s inanities are the mocking quote marks around the word Muktijuddho.
Was it because Buddhadev was a Calcutta bhadralok? Nirad C Chaudhri, who knew the species well, had written: "The real shortcoming of the true native of Calcutta...was a pronounced lack of magnaminity... (it showed) most blatantly in (their) conduct... towards those whom they did not consider their equals. They would not be exactly rude, but would stare and remain silent as if they were in the presence of some strange animal. This was worse than being rude, it was being reptilian..."
Reptilian! Perhaps an apt word to describe the attitude here! But no, Buddhadev's words point to something beyond class disdain. Curious, I leafed back through Chelebela and Joubon. And discovered that in all those pages there was hardly any mention of Muslims. Buddhadev grew up in a Muslim-majority society and land, but he wrote them out of existence. His Chelebela is all dappled sunlight, mighty rivers and his grandparents. Absent is the Muslim peasantry that surrounded him—that Muslim peasantry which so enlivens the pages of, say, Abul Mansur's Amar Dekha Rajniti'r Ponchash Bochor of roughly the same period. Buddhadev does note dryly that rural Noakhali had no imposing Mughal architecture. Similarly in his Joubon the only Muslims he acknowledges besides 'Dhakaiya kutties' are the critic Abu Sayeed Ayub and writer-politician Humayun Kabir. The former approvingly since despite being a Bihari Muslim, in language, dress and manners Ayub was truly a 'Bangali' (code for Hindu), while Humayun Kabir kept him afloat during a period of financial distress with a timely UNESCO contract. Amid all the Bengali litterateurs, poets and writers mentioned in the two volumes there is not a single Muslim Bengali writer. The same is true about Buddhadev Bosur Chithi. Though European and Hindu Bengali writers and poets abound in its pages, there is an icy disregard for the epic changes--in theme, diction and idiom--being wrought in Bengali poetry' across the border by the language movement and afterwards, no notice of Shamsur Rahman or Al Mahmud, or of the host of courageous poets fighting for Bengali language and culture. None! And these letters were written during the '60s, as that poetry of protest was coming hot off the stove.
Why? Because I think they simply didn't count. I admittedly haven't read the whole of his writings, but plainly for Buddhadev what counted was Tagore, being a Hindu (whatever being an 'Eliotesque Hindu' may mean!), the Bengal Renaissance (with its core of Hindu revivalism), and Hindu Bengali writers, poets and essayists in an unbroken line from Bankim to Bishnu Dey. He seems to have considered Bengali Muslims and their writing as beyond the pale, and when in 1971 their revolution arrived at his doorstep, Buddhadev responded with scorn and bile: These low-rent upstarts with their quote unquote Muktijuddho!
Joya Chattel's book Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932-1947 (Cambridge University Press, Indian edition 1995) offers clues here. Her diligently researched book explores the tactics adopted by Calcutta's Hindu bhadralok class when their traditional pre-eminence was threatened by the prospect of Muslim majority rule after the 1935 Communal Award. Central to the bhadralok s strategy was their rewriting of Indian history, of re-inventing a narrative in terms of "Hindu 'cultural' superiority” vis a vis the unlettered and undeserving Muslims, who after all “were, by and large, a set of converts' from the dregs of Hindu society.” It was a view endorsed by no less a figure than Sharatchandra, who in 1926 flatly stated, “'If learning is simply knowing how to read and write, there is little difference between Hindu(s) and Muslim(s)...But if essence of learning is width of the mind and culture of the heart, then there is no comparison between the two communities.._A thousand years has not been enough time (to achieve this) nor will another millennium suffice."’ It is seemingly from this ill-lit cranny of the Hindu bhadralok's notion of 'cultural superiority' that Buddhadev Bose spoke from.
That Buddhadev attracted controversy is not in doubt. Even in this centenary year of his birth, his long-time chum Naresh Guha felt compelled to defend him in the pages of Desh (February 2, 2008) against long-held accusations of Buddhadev's pro-Americanism. Yet others might say that the old bhadralok figure today is a thing of patches and shreds (first hooted at in Hutum Penchar Naksha, and deconstructed by latter-day writers such as Sumanta Banerjee), their elitism and attendant communalism something best laid aside.
But that is to deny the continuing hold of Kolkata bhadralok literary culture on our own, to gloss over the fact that Buddhadev occupies a very important part in it, to deny that parts of that idiom and power are tainted in the worst possible way. Any final reckoning of that history, at least by us in Bangladesh, must re-assess Buddhadev Bose's place in it as a human being, and to some extent as poet and writer. To ignore this side of him is to mock our own independence struggle, our own history, our own literature of resistance.
Reading Buddhadev Bose will never again feel the same. Innocence is fled, and a lengthening shadow now stains what used to be a happy, sunlit spot by a riverbank.