We’ve lost our way. Where exactly is Shobhabazar? We’re in Shyambazar, lurching forward steadily in the congestion—Dada, in which direction is the Naba Jiban Nursing Home? And, excuse me, Dada, did the Bengal Renaissance really happen? Could you point out its signs?
By the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist critics in Calcutta were ferociously, scathingly, disputing the notion of the Renaissance in Bengal. It was hardly a genuine renaissance, they said; to call it one would be an act of hubris. Their main quarrel was with its bhadralok context: its exclusion of the poor and the minorities — a charge that couldn’t be ignored. As a consequence, the idea of the Bengal Renaissance — and the bhadralok himself — has been much reviled: most often by the bhadralok, in an act of expiation.
The English, anyway, had never noticed its existence, though it happened under their noses. For the Englishman, both Indian modernity and the Indian modern were invisible. In a sense, then, Calcutta, to him, was invisible. Kipling, writing in the midst of the Renaissance, populates his magical stories of India with talking wolves, tigers, cheetahs, and orphan Indian children who have no trouble communicating with animals. No one would know, reading Kipling, that Bagheera, Sher Khan, and Mowgli are neighbours and contemporaries of the novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee and the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. In Kipling’s universe — and, to a considerable extent, in Britain’s — the Renaissance, and Bengali and Indian modernity, might as well have never happened in India’s uninterrupted, fabulous time.
This was not a renaissance overseen and funded by potentates, as the Italian Renaissance was. It had no Lorenzo de’ Medici. It burgeoned, incongruously, in the time of Empire, when the imperial view of culture — when there was one at all — was busy with other things. Which is why it has no monuments; which is why, when I go northward, to Mini mashi’s flat, or elsewhere, or, as we did that afternoon, in search of the Naba Jiban Nursing Home (naba jiban, “new life,” itself unwittingly echoing the resurgent naba jagaran), the only really grand official buildings are the lapsed colonial institutions on Central Avenue — such as the School of Tropical Medicine — still extant, and symbolic. When, on those journeys, you look for that so-called Renaissance’s great buildings, you, of course, see none.
When people visit me in Calcutta, I take them not to see landmarks, but people’s houses. These might be the ones found in charming clusters in Bakul Bagan, Paddapukur, or Bhowanipore, built in the twenties, thirties, and forties; or near the Hooghly, in marginal Kidderpore; or up north, where the ancestral mansions are, and which even I haven’t properly explored. Each house differs from the other, but there’s a family resemblance: the green French windows with slats, the intricate cornices on the balconies, the red stone floors, the stairs rising to the wide terrace where clothes are hung to dry and children hover, and, if the house came up after Independence, the wavy or floral grilles, the flecked tiles, the art-deco-type windows with frosted panes. There are no other monuments in Calcutta. When I look at these houses, I feel excited, as I might when rereading one of James Joyce’s stories; the pleasure of being surprised, even after repeated encounters, by the new. And the modern is perennially new, no matter what state it’s in, and even when it’s being dismantled — as many of these houses are, by property scamsters called “promoters.”
This renaissance wasn’t the renaissance of an empire, but of a home-grown bourgeoisie largely unacknowledged by the imperial sovereign; so its theme and subject isn’t grandeur, as often seems to be the case in the European Renaissance, in the resplendent, glowing paintings of Titian, in Michelangelo’s gigantic, looming, perfectly buttocked David, but the everyday and the desultory, such as you see in the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray. This renaissance is, in many ways, a refutation of that earlier, better-known one, with its epic pretensions. Its protagonist isn’t the soldier on horseback, or the gods, or the regent in the hall or garden; it is really the loiterer. Jean Renoir sensed this on his visit to this city in 1949, when he remarked, when describing Calcutta, that “all great civilisations are based on loitering.”
In the Jewish Museum in Hallesches Tör in Berlin, I realised, on the second floor, that modern man, twentieth-century man — in all his or her unimpressiveness and unintended comedy, in his or her preoccupation with shopping, the arts, the stock market, keeping diaries, borrowing books, going to the cinema, reading newspapers — might be the subject of a memorial, and have these enthusiasms recorded and collections and possessions displayed. That museum, of course, commemorated the sudden, enforced passing of a culture; it paid tribute, on the second floor, to an abortive but, in the end, ordinary world. I was accustomed, in museums, to reluctantly examining the vestiges of great civilisations — portraits of dukes and princes, pictures of dead pheasants in the kitchen, a comb that belonged to an empress, a stone from a palace, a bust of the Buddha or of Zeus. I say “reluctantly” because I’d never actually been that interested in the crumbling of bygone panoramas, or in the historical or canonical; and it was in the Jewish Museum, on the second floor, that I understood that it was the banality of modern man that gave me most pleasure and most moved me. This explains, to a certain extent maybe, why I introduce visiting friends to neighbourhoods in Calcutta when they ask to see the city. It’s here that the particular history I’m speaking of resided, and still persists in an afterlife, and where it will — as is already evident (and probably to the relief of all concerned) — eventually vanish.
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The Bengal Renaissance’s largely unnoticed state of existence — where the larger world and India’s colonial rulers were concerned — might explain its cherishing of secrecy, of looking, and spying, and its air of surreptitious playfulness — its very illegitimacy. And it may also be why, especially, the afternoon was a time of enchantment in Calcutta, pregnant with meaning for the Bengali child, when the adult, the figure of authority, had withdrawn, and the child was granted solitary freedom within a fixed ambit.
Charulata, in Satyajit Ray’s eponymous film, diverts herself in the afternoon in an immense nineteenth-century mansion in North Calcutta by opening the slats of the windows and spying on passers-by through binoculars. To be unseen, to look out at the world: for the artist, this is a prized privilege, and, in the late nineteenth century, Calcutta began to feel those possibilities — of being at once known and invisible — precipitously. This was the mood of that anomalous renaissance: the atmosphere — captured in Charulata’s opening frames — of afternoon and concealment. “Freedom consists in not having to make the laws,” said Tolstoy. So with the Bengalis in that age. Isn’t that why Tagore constantly mentions chhuti (holidays), khela (play), and the relief of kaaj nai (having no work to do) in his songs — because the colonial world has granted him an odd kind of liberation?