Calcutta Page 23
The Bengali’s pantheon, therefore, is stocked with Hindu figures who were invariably Westernized to some degree, who were usually wealthy or landed or both (these being caste marks of the bhadralok), who spoke passionately of freedom from the beginning, who did not at first speak against the British with great hostility, but who progressively can be seen in more rebellious attitudes until they are out for downright revolution against the Raj. Education was not totally monopolized by the bhadralok; mere was, for example, the low-caste blacksmith Panchanan who was employed by the printer Ward at Serampore, where he became skilled in making typefaces, though not as skilled as his son-in-law, who eventually cut type for fifteen oriental languages, including a Chinese fount with 43,000 characters in it; and there was Ram Camul Sen, a village boy who became a clerk’s assistant in the Magistrate’s Court and then rose on his native brightness and his friendship with Horace Wilson to a managing post in the Hindoostanee Press and a fortune of Rs 1 million. But the prototype godling of Bengalis remains Rammohan Roy, who came from a bankrupt zamindari past, who made his own fortune, who unfashionably denounced suttee, who was so enamoured of freedom-fighters that he broke his leg while rushing up on deck to catch his first sight of a French tricolour in Cape-town Harbour when he was sailing to England in 1830, and who – Hindu that he was of sorts – was eventually buried amidst Graeco-Doric monuments at the Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol.
Not many of these men were as besottedly Anglicized as the poet and playwright Michael Madhusudan Datta, a quaint and overwrought figure who crammed most of his output into a couple of years towards the end of the Young Bengal period and the start of the real renaissance. He based most of his work on Hindu mythology, though he became a Christian at one stage and he composed both in Bengali and in English. But while he used his native traditions he gloried in something more distant. He would claim that two thirds of his work derived from Greek artistic inspirations; he hailed Milton as divine and he once wrote to a friend; ‘Here you are, old boy, a Tragedy, a volume of Odes, and one half of a real Epic poem! … If I deserve credit for nothing else, you must allow that I am, at least, an industrious dog …’ Today, in Calcutta, where men of letters and culture talk, they still refer to him as ‘Michael’; or, rather more often, as ‘poor Michael’. But they give Keshub Chandra Sen his full name, for he still demands a very full respect. He went to England, like many other Bengalis of that age, and there he told them that Tou cannot hold India for the interest of Manchester, nor for the welfare of any other community here … If England seeks to crush down two hundred millions of people in this glorious country, to destroy their nationality, to extinguish the fire of noble antiquity and the thrill of ancient patriotism and if England’s object of governing the people of India is simply to make money, then I say, perish British Rule this moment.’ That was in 1870, and the English were so impressed by his style and competence if not by his sentiments, that they devised a small test for Keshub Chandra Sen one day, requiring him without any warning to lecture to them upon the subject of ‘O’; which he promptly did for the following hour.
They were much more frosty when they received Surendranath Banerjea, though he had not by then had his series of clashes with Lord Curzon over the administration of Calcutta Corporation. Banerjea was the son of a doctor, a westernized Calcutta Brahmin, and he obtained most of his education at Doveton College among boys who were mostly British or Anglo-Indian. He took a degree and then he went to London to sit for the racially exclusive ICS examination, which only one Indian before him had managed to pass; he was successful, together with two other Bengalis and a lad from Bombay, but at once Banerjea and another candidate were disqualified for having (inadvertently, it seems) falsified their ages by nine months. He challenged the decision at the Queen’s Bench and was successful. Three years later, the ICS sacked him for an error which would have earned an Englishman nothing more than a reprimand. Banerjea returned to England to get this decision reversed, was unsuccessful this time, and was turned down when he tried to make a fresh career at the Bar, because he was a dismissed Government employee. ‘I felt,’ he wrote later, ‘that I had suffered because I was an Indian, a member of a community that lay disorganized, had no public opinion, and no voice in the counsels of their Government. The personal wrong done to me was an illustration of the helpless impotency of our people.’ He was given a chair in English literature at a Calcutta college run by Indians and from it he began to run his campaign of Indian nationalism. He founded the bhadralok Indian Association (which counterweighted the landholders’ British Indian Association) and he made much of his propaganda through the columns of the Bengalee, of which he was editor. He was bitter in his hostility to Curzon, both over the Viceroy’s gerrymandering of the Corporation and his crass stupidity and Imperialism over Partition. But he was never an extremist, though extremists were on the way in Bengal, and he was partly responsible for loosing them. He is to be remembered typically, perhaps, for his warm response at that meeting in College Square after George V had revoked Partition. And for something Lord Minto wrote a little later: ‘It was simply marvellous,’ to Curzon’s successor, ‘with the troubles and anxieties of a few months ago still fresh in one’s memory, to see the “King of Bengal” sitting on my sofa with his Mohammedan opponents, asking for my assistance to moderate the evil passions of the Bengali …’ Another British ruler was to say of Banerjea even later; ‘I have a soft corner in my heart for Surendranath; we have done him a grievous wrong but he bears no malice.’
No Englishman could possibly have made such an assessment of Subhas Chandra Bose, who became Netaji, revered leader, to many Indians and a rival in their affections to Gandhi himself. Bose was born into a Bengali family living in Orissa in 1897, his father a lawyer and a member of the Bengal Legislative Council. He had been educated by Baptists before he started to read philosophy at the Presidency College in Calcutta, which expelled him for leading a communal assault on an English teacher in 1913. He was readmitted and he went on to Cambridge, where he was to write a letter home to say that ‘what gives me the greatest joy is to watch the whiteskins serving me and cleaning my shoes’. He got into the ICS without difficulty but resigned within a year to join Gandhi’s movement, now beginning to stir across India. To his disgust the Mahatma was talking some nonsense about non-violence and Bose began to drift off in the direction of Chitta Ranjan Das, who was a considerable Bengali poet, Calcutta’s leading barrister, and a highly successful defender of nationalists in court. Das by this time had already worked his way through the foothills of Congress in company with such people as Banerjea and the English Indophile Annie Besant; he had claimed the leadership of the extremist faction which was opposing Banerjea and the moderates and he was about to leave Congress to start the new Swaraj Party which would head the fight against the British. He picked young Bose as chief of the pickets which were enforcing the boycott of British goods in Calcutta’s shops; and when, in 1924, the Swarajists won control of Calcutta Corporation, Das became Mayor and Bose his first executive at a salary of £3,000 a year. Bose was still only twenty-seven and his personal mythology had scarcely begun to take shape.
He was arrested for suspected terrorism and, without being charged, he was sent down to the great concentration camp of a prison in Mandalay. Das died while Bose was there; his own health began to break, but when the British offered to release him if he would take refuge in Switzerland he replied that he was not a shopkeeper and he did not bargain. He watched Nehru become general secretary of Congress, which was yet another movement in the wrong direction, according to Bose. He is said, at this point, to have foresworn women and alcohol until India should be free, and it was a reputation that he was to maintain carefully but hypocritically until his death. The early thirties were now upon him, the years of civil disobedience on a massive scale in India, and Bose was in and out of prison several times. When not there he was either enjoying election as Mayor of Calcutta, making an uneasy peace with Gandhi, or travelling
in Europe; and there he was always warmly welcomed by a motley collection of politicians, from Ribbentrop to Stafford Cripps, from Hitler to Clement Attlee, from Eamon de Valera to Eduard Benes. At home he was crowned with the Presidency of Congress in 1938, arrived at its annual assembly on a carriage drawn by fifty-one bullocks through fifty-one gates of honour, and almost at once began to find himself outmanoeuvred for the ultimate hallmark of Indian approval by the shrewd Gandhi, who preferred the more biddable Nehru as his first lieutenant.
When war broke out and India was bundled into it whether she liked it or not, Bose began to stump the land with speeches demanding the immediate transfer of government from the British. Not surprisingly, on 2 July 1940, he was arrested; the excuse being seditious talk at a demonstration he had organized in Calcutta for the removal of the memorial Lord Curzon had erected to the victims of the Black Hole. He was sent home after going on hunger strike for six days. Nine days before his trial was due to start, he fled from the city by car, disguised as a Muslim teacher. He wore other disguises before he reached the Italian Legation in Kabul; in Peshawar he posed as a Pathan, later he pretended to be a deaf mute; and he tried to find the Russian Embassy in the Afghan capital, for he was not particularly happy about the Nazis and their ally, only settling for the Italians after getting lost several times. The Italians, however, were most obliging and Bose, identified in his new Roman passport as Orlando Marrotta, got to the Russian frontier, took train to Moscow, and flew into Berlin on 28 March 1941.
For the next two years his life among the Germans was uneasy and uncertain. He immediately asked if he might broadcast anti-British propaganda, but Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Italy’s Foreign Minister, vetoed the idea; he already had the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ex-King Amanullah of Afghanistan making similar applications and could visualize a number of wires getting badly crossed. Bose then asked that all Indian troops taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians in North Africa should be sent to him for brainwashing and eventual parachuting home along the North-West Frontier, to spread disaffection among the population of British India. He was allowed to brainwash them but Hitler forbade the parachuting because he was by no means ready for an Indian revolt. So Bose amused himself further by devising a flag for a potential Indian Legion, a green, white and saffron tricolour, with a Bengal tiger springing across it. He had a daughter by Emilie Schenkel, whom he had first known in 1934, when she was his secretary at the Free India Centre in Berlin, and to whom he was now married in secret; for he had the appearances of a vow to keep up among the other Indians in the city. And he constructed his post-war, post-revolution aims for India. For a few years after the British had been removed, there would have to be a dictatorship, for no other form of government would be ruthlessly effective enough in tackling India’s chronic internal dissensions and factions. She needed a Kemal Ataturk, and he would be Subhas Chandra Bose.
In February 1943, just as Bengal was beginning to starve to death, Bose sailed out of Kiel in a U-boat and eventually flew from Sumatra to Tokyo. The Japanese received him with acclaim, particularly on their new territory of Singapore, where Bose in July attended a series of public functions and private consultations with the military; and such was the mark he made there on his first visit that for several years after the war the anniversary was commemorated as Netaji Week. He accepted the Presidency of the Indian Independence League, which had been founded in Japan between the wars, and with it the allegiance of an Indian National Army which the Japanese were forming from sympathetic Indian prisoners. In August, Bose was in a position to offer 100,000 tons of rice to starving Bengal, as a gift from his league. The British turned the offer down. On 23 October 1943, his Provisional Indian Government declared war on the Allies and within five months troops bearing the banner of the springing tiger had crossed the Indian frontier after battling their way through Burma. Neither Bose nor the 25,000 soldiers of the Indian National Army were to advance again. They were beaten back out of their homeland by Slim’s Fourteenth Army. After the British victory and the Japanese defeat at Imphal, Indian troops serving the British discovered Indian troops serving Bose dead of starvation in the ruins of the garrison, though Bose by then was in Rangoon. Under the pressures of headlong retreat and one lost battle after another, troops of the INA and their Japanese brothers in arms began to quarrel. There were more and more desertions to the ranks of British India. The dream of a second Kemal Ataturk was destroyed and Subhas Chandra Bose was thinking of making his way to Russia when he took his last flight from Singapore to Tokyo. On 18 August 1945, his plane rolled down the runway on Formosa after refuelling there, was airborne for a few moments, then crashed into a hillside. A few hours later Netaji died very calmly, though he had been terribly burned.
There are many people in Calcutta today, many more right across India, who refuse to believe that Bose is dead; they say quite fiercely sometimes that the British imprisoned him, or that the Americans enslaved him, or else they suggest mat he is safe in some good Communist land, waiting for the right moment to come and redeem them from a bondage that has puzzlingly continued even though Indians now govern themselves. In 1970, indeed, the Speaker of the Indian Parliament’s Lower House presided over a meeting which demanded a judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading to the ‘disappearance of Netaji’. In Calcutta they have renamed their most important commercial thoroughfare after him as well as erecting two statues to him. One is at the edge of the Maidan, near the Governor’s Raj Bhavan, where Subhas Chandra Bose stands with his right arm raised in what could be a benediction upon the high-noon sun. And there, on his birthday, crowds come to place portraits of this hero against the high plinth, to garland him with flowers, to watch the guard of honour’s horses nervously pawing the ground when the sirens begin to wail and the firecrackers start to burst at 12.15 p.m. precisely, the instant Netaji was born; and then the military band plays the old marching tunes of the Indian National Army, and everyone goes home in quite high spirits.
There is only one name rivalling that of Netaji to produce a warm response from a Bengali, and that is Tagore. This is not a name so much as a dynasty and every element in the rise, the predominance, the lustre, the aspirations and the sad decline of both Calcutta and West Bengal is embodied in the fortunes of this astonishing family. It was a Tagore who moved over from Kalikata to Sutanuti to make way (with suitable compensation) for Clive’s new Fort William after Plassey; it was a Tagore who contracted the first business partnership with a European, Mr Carr; it was a Tagore who became the first Indian to pass the ICS examination; it was a Tagore who composed the Indian national anthem as well as bringing the first Nobel prize to India as a native of the country. From the very start of Calcutta, a Tagore has been standing at least upstage but more frequently dead centre at every scene change of the whole, rambling epic performance. The most remarkable thing about the Tagores, considering their history, is that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and not one of them, composed ‘Bande Mataram’ (Hail to the Mother), which is Bengal’s own particular and fervent regional anthem.
This has always been a family of colossal and shrewdly accumulated wealth. They were banians when the British arrived but they were soon very much more under the leadership of Dwarkanath Tagore, who was Rabindranath’s grandfather. Dwarkanath acquired the makings of his fortune as zamindar and head dewan (chief native officer) of the East India Company’s salt and opium department, but soon he was investing in industry with the advice of Lord William Bentinck himself. He became director of the Calcutta Steam Tug Association, which was so profitable that envious people labelled it The Thug. He bought up the Bengal Herald, the India Gazette and the defunct John Bull, which later became The Englishman and the voice of the Raj. He was Director of the Union Bank, he owned indigo factories, and when the Chowringhee Theatre was burned down, he snapped up the land for Rs 15,000 and began to make a profit on it. He launched the Landowners’ Association in 1838, the year after he had neatly established his own pos
ition in life when he pressed the Government for the appointment of a Deputy Magistrate who ‘should be taken from the respected class of people and not selected merely to increase the salary of those who are at present employed …’ His eldest son Debendranath was just as successful in keeping the family fortune well topped up, and so was every other commercial leader of the clan in generations to follow; the start of the twentieth century saw Surendranath Tagore helping to float the Cooperative Navigation Company with a capital of Rs 2.5 millions at the same time as he was secretary of Hindusthan Cooperative Insurance with a capital of Rs 10 millions.