People often assume I'm a Bengali and I'm quite okay with that. I'm Calcutta born and brought up, and therefore from nowhere else as such, and I can manage reasonably while speaking Bangla. I suppose I have several Kolkataiya traits, such as being argumentative, regularly finding dark humour in horrible situations, being obsessed about my food (except I don't eat anything that swims or crawls in water) and so on and so forth. At times, this being mistaken for a Bengali takes on highly comical over- and undertones. For instance, since my spoken Bong improved in my 20s, I've had to go through this following scene again and again: I'm in a bank, or some office, dealing with somebody in an official position, like a babu or a manager, somebody who is Bengali and surrounded by Bengali colleagues. I'll start speaking in Bangla to this person about the matter at hand and he will respond as if to a fellow Bong - till such time as I tell him my name. 'Jossi! Oh, you are non-Bengali!' Sometimes the fact that I can speak Bangla will warm the person's bureaucratic arteries and smoothen the work, and I'll even get compliments on how well I speak it and so on. A very few times, the babu will look at me as if I've tried to pull a fast one, pretending to be who I'm not, and the requirements will suddenly become tediously difficult.
If one sometimes catches it from Bengalis for not being one of them, what also happens, especially outside Calcutta, is that one also catches flak for being too much like one. For instance, while I like various regional accents in which we Indians speak our English, certain Bengali English accents are, shall we say, not among my favourites. Yes that plural was intentional because there are, of course, many different Bengali English accents. In any case, having heard my recorded voice many times, I have a clear opinion that I speak English in a 'Neutral Indian' Accent, that is, listening to someone speaking this, you would not be able to tell where in India they were from. So while I'm fine if someone tells me 'You look so Bengali', I'll get irritated when they add that there is a Bengali accent to my English. The people will then insist on finding more and more Bongnesses about me, arriving finally at 'never mind whether you're Bong or non, but you must love the phish.' 'It's not phish but pheeesh!' I snap at them before extricating myself from their presence.
To relate another type of thing that happens, I was hanging out with a south Delhi intellectual-activist-academic cabal in the late 1980s. There was, in that particular clique an older man, a Bengali of great learning, who everyone called Nobi. Sitting around the coffee or the rum, Nobi would expound on this or that Marxist theory, or whichever crucial moment in Indian or international history. When addressing him, it was the most natural thing for me to call him Nobi-da - after all I was about 30 and this knowledgeable gent was in his mid-60s. But the crowd around me, all aw-Bangalis wouldn't have any of it. Nobi- da kyahota hai? What is this hierarchical mode of address? How Bong are you, you wannabe Bong?
I didn't know it then, but this dada business was going to become a tricky trope in my life.
Being a Gujarati, the progression of affection-suffixes to respect-suffixes goes thus: when you're small, (a hard 'd' as in the Hindi 'da' with the dot below it), 'di' for a girl, and 'da' or 'do' or an 'ia' or 'io' (second person and third person respectively) is attached to the end of your name. So the summons from elders and same-age cohort would be 'ei, Alka-di!' or Priti-di, or, for a name like Ashish 'ei, Ashu-da!' or for Arun 'ei Aruniya' and for Sumit in the third person, 'pelo Sumit-do!' so on and so forth. At some point in your life, people younger than you would start adding a 'bhai' or a 'behn' to your name, and as the volume of people younger than you overtook the one of those who are older, fewer and fewer people would have the right to call you, say Mamta-di or Lalu-do, while those junior would automatically attach the appropriate bhai/behn. If you lived long enough, that moment would also come when the 'bhai' would turn into 'kaka', that is, father's younger brother but closer to 'grandad'. So you would have a first name kaka, like Mukulkaka say or a surname kaka like Patelkaka.
Coming into adulthood in Calcutta, I always saw the Bong 'dada' as the beginning of the slippery slope that led to 'babu' and then to 'dadu'. But in my early 30s something began to niggle. I was making a documentary on the Bauls and working closely with my friend Mahadeb, who was editing the film. Now, Mahadeb was a good five years younger than me but when I'd get to the editing rooms in the NFDC complex in Behala, the editing room attendants, two young Bengali men, would often come up to me to ask 'Ei Ruchir, Mahadeb-da ki esechhey?' Hey, Ruchir, has Mahadeb-da come with you? The first two or three times this happened, I let it pass, but the fourth time I snapped. You're calling me Ruchir as if I went to school with you! You call Mahadeb, Mahadeb-da but do you know he's five years younger than me? The two boys listened, nodded, and started adding the 'da' to my name after that. But my victory was short-lived. After a while I had to accept the fact that most Bengalis younger to me would invariably use the dada or da for Bengalis but not for anyone who was not Bengali.
It's not that I disagree that these suffixes, dada and didi, are archaic and stem from desiccated habit, my point is either get rid of them completely or follow the requisite protocols. The Marxist prof Nobi-da understood that for a twenty-something from Calcutta to address someone he knew was from Bengal, someone in his 60s, without a Bong honorific was just plain out-of-tune. His reply was, 'What he's doing is perfectly correct. I'm not asking you guys, most of you much younger than me, to call me 'dada'.'
Recently, I saw this whole phenomenon crop up again. A friend, a Bengali from Kolkata, and with considerable achievement in his field, emailed me a transcription of an interview he'd given someone. The chap who'd done the interview and sent it along was a young Bengali. In his covering email he did the same thing - refer to my Bengali friend with a dada suffix while addressing two other men, one a bit older than the interviewer and the other almost the same age as the interviewee, by just their first names. When I saw this, I was both irritated and amused. My first thought was, 'Common courtesy is reserved only for fellow Bengalis, it seems.' But then I thought about it and realized a couple of things.
One, this didi/dada business really matters only in Bengal. Outside the state, people laugh at this suffix, use it as a joke or to ingratiate themselves - look at how 'Dada' has become Sourav Ganguly's branding and 'Didi' that of our chief minister. Second, for many Bengalis, this seems to be a typically Bengali thing, and they may even be embarrassed to address a non-Bengali with a 'di' or a 'da' attached, like my friends in Delhi, they may also see this as archaic. Third, while these Bengali suffixes seem to have some connection with the way 'saheb' is used in Maharashtra and various south Indian respect-suffixes, the widespread use of 'bhai' in Gujarat, north India and Pakistan is a different thing yet again.
As for me, with my closet-lust to be included in Bengaliness, I got my comeuppance a few years ago, when I became pals with a Bengali woman who was a bit younger than me. Again, I asked the same question: 'how can you call so and so, who's so much younger than me 'dada' and not call me that as well?' She looked at my silvering hair and laughed. 'Your dada time has passed. I'm going to call you Jethu.'
