[Reader-list] july posting from delhi

[debjani sengupta]

Refugee City: Ghoti, Bangal, Football and Other
Divides of the Self.


The city of Kolkata still has an invisible divide that
goes deep into the psyche of the city today - it is
the ghoti-bangal divide, between the East Bengalis and
West Bengalis. In undivided Bengal, before Partition,
the city of Kolkata had offered education and jobs for
the middle classes from East Bengal. Hindu College,
Ripon College, Presidency, Scottish Church College
were filled with students from the East while the
merchant and trading houses, the government
departments had many workers who hailed from East
Bengal. Every year they traveled back home, crossing
the Padma, waking up the sleepy villages with tales of
the multihued city. In return they carried back to the
city their language, the nostalgia for their land, the
smell of their rivers Buriganga, Dhaleshwari, Padma,
Meghna, the tug and pull of memories. Living in
cramped mess 'bari', or rented rooms, they dreamt of
making it in the city. (Satinather Bari Phera) Even
though they lived and worked in Kolkata, it was never
home; in their minds there always existed a division
of culture, of landscapes, of food and flora and
fauna. Calcutta, claustrophobic in its interiors, the
mess room, the restaurants, the cinema halls were
places of isolation. Posited against this was the
community left behind, the village puja mandap, the
laughter and the togetherness of family and friends.
This juxtaposition of landscape and realities is seen
brilliantly in a story by Prafulla Ray, 'Swapner
Train.' (The Train of his Dreams)

Twelve or fourteen years ago Ashok used to have a
dream very often, early at dawn. It was a strange
dream - he was sitting on a train. On both sides of
the tracks were immense rice and wheat fields
interspersed with shrubs of bet, shonal and jungles of
pithkhira, hijal, bounya. As far as the eye went, the
land was bathed in golden light. And drenched in that
golden light, hundreds of birds flew about in the sky.
So many kinds of birds - shalikh, sidhiguru, bulbul,
kanibok, haldibona, patibok, wild parrots. They looked
as if someone has strewn thousands of colored paper in
the sky. Overhead, the clouds floated like cotton wool
and from within their folds peeped the bright blue
sky.

 Ashok used to wake up suddenly. In his sleepy state,
he often forgot where he was. A little later when the
dream train and steamer faded from his consciousness,
he would see he was sitting on a three-legged bed,
overspread with ragged, oily bedding, in a run down
room at the end of a suffocating lane in North
Kolkata. The room had no plastered wall, no whitewash
and cobwebs hung from the corners.  On one side was
the bed, on the other a clothes-horse, next to which
were piled trunks, broken suitcases, tin boxes. Under
the bed was another pile of pots and pans, cane boxes
and broken water jugs. 


The city room in its claustrophobic interiority and
the wide, open space of Ashok's dream landscape is a
contrast between what was real and what was distant.
The dream landscape was characterized by a kind of
munificience - the birds, shrubs, trees were all
unique in their own ways. The evocation of landscape,
the flora and fauna of East Bengal is also seen in
Jibanananda Das's 'Rupashi Bangla' (1956) collection
of poems, whose minutely observed, lovingly sketched
portraits of Bengal's trees, dawns, dusks made this
one of Das's most popular works till date.
 After the Partition, when it was increasingly clear
to the East Bengali that they would never return, that
distant dream fuelled the passion and the strength to
negotiate the city, to make it home and to re-create
in imaginative ways the forgotten villages. 
The reason why East Bengalis felt alien in the city
was certainly contributed by the ghoti-bangal divide
that existed as an invisible but strong line of
separation in Calcutta. Dipesh Chakraborty writes of
his adolescence in Kolkata: 'We had not heard about
academic critiques of essentialism in those days, so
bangals and ghotis proceeded to elaborate and
ritualize their differences with the enthusiasm of
peoples whom anthropologists sometimes call warring
tribes. We both spoke Bengali, but with different
accents; we loved the Hilsa fish, while they loved
prawns; our songs were set to different tunes; our
traditions of courtsey were different; and every act
of intermarriage was noticed and commented upon.' The
ghotis lived in the older part of Kolkata, the north,
while the bangals, especially after the Partition made
south Kolkata their home. Although the East Bengal
gentlemen had made Kolkata his second home, the
ghoti-bangal divide was palpable and quite open. After
the Partition with the influx of thousands into the
city, this divide became even more prominent.
Historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, in his memoirs 
'Bangalnamah' now being serialized in a prominent
Bengali journal, states how he was ridiculed in
Ballygunj Boys School as a bangal from the country who
didn't speak in English. The figure of the bangal had
always been a butt of jokes as early as
Chaitanyamangal where we find jokes about the
inhabitants of East Bengal. In the 50's and 60's
Kolkata, the rivalry went up the notches of a
barometer on the days of soccer matches. East Bengalis
supported their club of that name while ghotis
supported Mohunbagan. Even if one did not follow
football, one knew which team had won by the price
rise of particular fishes. East Bengal's icon was the
Hilsa while the Mohunbagan supporters relished prawns.
I remember many feasts of Hilsa from my childhood that
my East Bengal supporter father initiated on the days
of winning matches.
Given this hostility and resentment against the
bangals, the question then remains why, when hundreds
and thousands of refugees invaded the city of Kolkata,
what made the city accept the newcomers? Why was there
no incidence of violent flare-ups in the nature of
riots between the older inhabitants and the newcomers?
In what ways did the city accommodate and accept this
influx of population? In what ways did the newcomers
negotiate the city that was largely alien?

The answer is probably very simple: through comedy and
football.

Dipesh Chakraborty theorizes that the ghoti and bangal
rivalry was an example of 'proximity', where one
relates to difference 'in which difference is neither
reified nor erased but negotiated.' This notion of
proximity is opposite to 'identity' which is a mode of
relating to difference in which difference is either
concealed or congealed and claims of being identical
are fore grounded. I see the ghoti-bangal rivalry,
especially where football is concerned, as a means in
which larger, more public crises were averted and
nullified. In the 50's Kolkata, football had a unique
place, which was to a large extent associated with
ethnic identity. Manna Dey's song, 'Shob khelar sera
Bangalir ei football' talks of the game as belonging
to Bengalis but this homogenizing aspect of football
was a myth. On the football grounds passions ran high
and smaller violences were common. I like to think
that by shouting and stone throwing in the Maidan, the
bitterness and distrust of bangals and ghotis found a
channel to express itself. Like warring tribes they
fought their battles in the rituals of the football
fields and not in Kolkata's alleys. The madness and
enthusiasm of football is clearly indicated in the
following extract from the sports pages of Desh, 21
May, 1955: 'Every year, in Maidan, the arguments,
researches, rumours, excitements and enthusiams
eddying around football are countless. The question of
whether their favourite team will win is endlessly
discussed in the field, outside it and inside homes.
Mohunbagan and East Bengal supporters, mostly young
colleagues in workplaces, begin with juicy arguments
that often end in laughter
actually it is very
apparent that in the five months of football season,
this game creates a huge tremor in the minds and
hearts of Kolkata's citizens that few other games can
create.'  Identity politics is thus never important
and the human interactions between the two groups are
put to creative use as we can see in the films of that
era. The ghoti-bangal divide and its associations with
football is captured very evocatively in a film Ora
Thakey Odhare (1954, directed by Sukumar Dasgupta)
based on a story by Premendra Mitra and featuring
Chobi Biswas, Molina Debi, Uttam Kumar and Suchitra
Sen. The film revolves around two families, one bangal
and the other ghoti. They are neighbours and often
resort to bickerings and fights, trading insults about
each others cultural characteristics. On the day of a
football match between Mohunbagan and East Bengal a
quarrel erupts as a lady of the house remarks, 'Why
drag a quarrel of the football field into the house?'
Their hostility ensures a budding romance between a
grown up son and daughter of the two families are
nipped in the bud. The film however has a strong
message for the times. In the face of adversity, when
the head of the ghoti family Harimohunbabu loses his
job, the bangal neighbours come to his rescue. In the
last scene, the families are united and they agree
that 'we are two hands, sometimes raised in fists and
sometimes brought together in a clap.' As in the film,
the ghoti-bangal resentments were sorted out in the
football fields, in cinema halls, in theatre, in other
cultural fields. The culture industry after the
Partition fed on a rich source of oppositions of the
divide and films often had caricatures of the
countrified bangal, a butt of well meaning jokes.
Acceptance of the bangals, the refugees, thus came
about through the medium of laughter. In hit films of
the times like Sarey Chuattar, Bhanu Pelo Lottery and
Bhanu Goyenda and Jahar Assisstant, the noted artist
Bhanu Bannerjee and Jahar Roy formed a comic pair that
were box office hits. Comedy and football were thus
able to diffuse the tensions that in reality were
often palpably felt in Kolkata. The large number of
refugees, the huge number of unemployed, the scarcity
of respectable jobs, lack of housing, high rents were
adding to the civic crisis of the city. This crisis
never reached boiling point, all the newcomers were
accommodated and they in turn made a place for
themselves. Kolkata became home to these countless
millions as the East Bengali middle class began a
creative new life in which the interaction between the
ghotis and bangals changed the language, food and
culture of each side. The assimilation of the bangals
into Kolkata's mainstream is a whole new chapter in
the social and cultural life of the city.


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