* * *
People begin to arrive in the mornings. The young man, Raja, who cleans the cars in the building, strides in to collect the car keys; the cook rings the doorbell; then the part-time help, Kamala, my father’s daytime carer. They’re here from different parts of the city. You’re careful not to call them chakor any more. The word derives from chakuri or chakri, meaning “employment”; but it was mainly used to slight and humiliate. But chakor, like “servant,” reflects more poorly on the user today than on the person being alluded to; the preferred term is the neutral and politically acceptable (and slightly anodyne) kaajer lok—“people who work,” “working people.”
The chakor was often addressed as tui—the informal second-person pronoun, reserved for children, younger relatives, and best friends. This was the case irrespective of the age of the servant, though children were instructed to refer to older retainers as dada, or “older brother,” as in “Laxman dada,” while Laxman dada might also, paradoxically, refer to the master’s son as chhoto babu, or “young master.” Today, the kaajer lok are addressed as tumi—the semi-formal second-person pronoun for equals. However, the kaajer lok mostly address their employers as aapni—the formal second-person pronoun, used for superiors or older people, or as a respectful address for all strangers and acquaintances. It has no equivalent in English any more, but does in some European languages, the German sie being one. Just as you might address an older kaajer lok as aapni, or, if you’re exceptionally liberal or wish to make a point, all kaajer lok as aapni, there are some kaajer lok who might, familiarly, address you as tumi. In doing so, they might be being friendly, or unmindful, or provocatively democratic. If they do so, however, you don’t do anything about it; you don’t, for instance, say, “How dare you address me as tumi?” To do that would be anachronistic; an admission that you’re petty and uneducated, as politicians in small towns are, which, for the bhadralok, is a worse thing to be than being powerless. It’s a patchwork democracy, heavily weighted against the poor, the people who arrive at your door every morning — the help; the cook; the man who cleans the cars — but the middle class imagines it’s also weighted against them. People have a range of demands, the demands of the poor being least attended to; but no one has any rights in this situation — the proper context for rights hasn’t been created yet. It would be unfair on the middle class, or the bhadralok, to say they want a return to old-style feudal obeisance from the help, an unqualified servitude; but they do want conscientious work, honesty, long-term commitment, intelligence, and evidence of training in return for a basic salary (which has gone up minutely over the years, but is little more than a small honorarium), two days of paid “leave” in a month, a Puja bonus and gift, no notion of a minimum wage, no workers’ unions and, in effect, no hint of an independent life encroaching upon the middle class’s own. And so, the middle class hardly ever gets what it wants. The kaajer lok are unstable, uncommitted, they vanish for days without warning and then come back again one day, and are allowed to resume work after caveats are issued, unless some kind of replacement, who will also flatter to deceive, has been found. The middle class is dependent on this floating, flickering population, a few of whom will always materialise at its door in the morning, but fantasises frequently about living without it — mainly because it can’t stand the absence of commitment, the unwillingness to work, the air of being from a place that doesn’t accord with normal standards of behaviour and language, and also because it can’t bear to raise minimum standards of employment, salaries, and incentives. There’s no choice for the middle class, where kaajer lok are concerned, except to live from day to day, and indulge in fantasy and rhetoric.
Strictly speaking, there’s no bhadralok any more. Not only its heyday, its distinctive ethos — which produced the poets, novelists, painters, essayists; the Tagore family, Jamini Roy, Gopal Ghosh, Buddhadeva Bose, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Kamal Kumar Majumdar, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Sudhir Khastgir, Jibanananda Das, Utpal Basu, Purnendu Pattrea; composers like Himangshu Dutta, Atul Prasad, Nazrul, Nachiketa Ghosh, and Salil Chowdhury; filmmakers like Paramathesh Barua, Satyajit Ray, Devaki Bose, and Ritwik Ghatak; the scientist Satyen Bose, who collaborated with Einstein in the Bose-Einstein statistics, and after whom the now-celebrated “boson” is named — that ethos is finished for good. Still, it’s possible to be a bhadralok — fleetingly, in a fitful way — in relation to the kaajer lok, and to Calcutta in generaclass="underline" as a sort of anomaly or exception, as a group of people who are around almost by accident.