Gopal Haldar asked if I was from Sylhet. No, the communist scholar explained politely, it wasn’t my telltale surname; the question — more of a statement really — was prompted by my unconscious soundtrack. Told that my desh was Brahmanbaria in the old Tipperah district, which became Comilla after East Pakistan switched to Bengali and Tipperah became “Tripura”, which was also the princely state next door, he murmured, “Near enough”.
That brief exchange came to mind when I read of the recent ordeal of Shiraz Ali Khan, the sarod player who also straddles Brahmanbaria and Calcutta. In fact, Shiraz’s great-grandfather, Ustad Allauddin Khan, was spoken of with respect in my childhood in so far as East Bengal’s Hindu gentry accorded respect to distinguished local Muslims. The social divide of the ‘two-hookah culture’ — as Muzaffar Ahmed of the pro-Moscow Bangladesh National Awami Party called it — persisted in East Pakistan but was less noticeable in Bangladesh. Shiraz Ali Khan was booked for a concert at Dhaka’s Chhayanaut Shangshkriti Bhavan, built to celebrate Bangladesh’s syncretic culture, which a violent mob vandalised following the murder of the radical Islamist activist, Sharif Osman Hadi.
Denouncing the killing as “an unimaginable assault on our culture and shared values”, Shiraz kept quiet about his nationality, asking his driver to hide his Indian passport and mobile phone. He himself spoke only in the Brahmanbaria dialect (learnt from his mother, a Brahmanbaria girl settled in India since her marriage in 1968) when his car was stopped en route to the airport.
Lingering ‘Bangal’ inflections have always been said to betray Bengalis with even distant East Bengal roots, lending some plausibility to Haldar’s comment about my speech. True or false, phonetics punditry produced a popular jingle that mocked a well-known Bengali writer whose antecedents were entirely in East Bengal but who projected a determinedly Calcutta persona: According to the rhyme, the writer’s only weakness was that his father and father-in-law were both born in East Bengal.
As a young reporter in Newcastle upon Tyne, I became familiar with similar contradictions in English, especially in Tyneside’s Geordie demonym. On one occasion, a baffled Londoner judge demanded a translation when a youth charged with stealing a car pleaded that he had only broken into the vehicle to sleep because “the missus had hoyed him oot and it was clarty outside.” Defence counsel’s apologetic interpretation was that the accused’s wife had thrown (“hoyed”) him out of the house and the streets were “clarty” (“muddy”) that night. Another Geordie word, ‘hinny’, for honey as an endearment as well as the offspring of a male horse and a female donkey might baffle people but not to the murderous extent of a Bengali Muslim’s deceptively Bangal speech in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Odisha. One fears more such killings if the BJP was permitted to turn West Bengal into a Hindu gurukul confronting Muslim Bangladesh.
East London, where whole areas have been taken over by Bangladeshi youths jabbering away in the Brick Lane vernacular, confirms that Bengalis can be divided by a common language. Yes, the boys agreed, I could pick up the odd Bengali word from their chatter. But though their parents were Bangladeshi, Hackney was the only home they knew. My switch to Bengali provoked a yelp of protest. “Not ‘Dhakai’ Bangla!” they complained, their only Bangla was Sylheti. I explained that Dhaka being an international capital might not be too pleased if its lingo is lumped with a district’s dialect. The distinction was lost on youths who saw themselves as Londoners first and Sylhetis next.
I imagine Anwar Bakht Choudhury, some time British high commissioner to Dhaka, as an older version of those lads. Bangladeshis quipped he spoke no Bengali because Sylhet’s syllables would pour out the moment he opened his mouth. Someone now high in Muhammad Yunus’s administration muttered that Choudhury had passed the Tebbit test. What then of the future hope of Bangladesh whom neighbouring states are courting as if he has already been crowned? They have good reason for optimism for unlike any of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s descendants, the 61-year-old Tarique Rahman has two claims to the masnad.
Sounds are sometimes more meaningful than labels, as when Rissaldar Hira Singh in Kipling’s short story, “The Man Who Was”, spotted a loyal subject of the Queen-Empress in the shapeless bundle of filthy rags arrested on suspicion of stealing carbines. While all the officers in the regimental mess wondered who the creature might be, Hira Singh leapt to his feet exclaiming, “Colonel Sahib, that man is no Afghan, for they weep Ai! Ai! Nor is he of Hindustan, for they weep Oh! Ho! He weeps after the fashion of the white men, who say Ow! Ow!” And, indeed, he was Lieutenant Austin Limmason of the White Hussars, the Tsar’s prisoner for many years because of his stiff-necked British refusal to apologise after a minor altercation.
My erstwhile colleague, Niranjan Mazumder, held that even Jawaharlal Nehru’s spoken English, for all that he was supposedly an honorary Englishman, had a sing-song lilt. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, oracle of all things European, claimed Nehru addressed him “in a very English manner” only as a compliment to Chaudhuri’s own linguistic elegance. “Towards anyone who had the Hindi or Bengali accent in his English he would almost behave like an Englishman to a ‘native’.” If the no longer Unknown Indian is to be believed, my wordless vigil on the only occasion that I was anywhere in Nehru’s proximity must have sufficed to confirm his worst view of natives.
That was on the fringes of the May 1960 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference in London. All of 22 years old, I was elated at having just been appointed unseen by G.A. Johnson, The Statesman’s editor in distant Calcutta, to the paper’s London office after stints on local English newspapers in Stockport and Newcastle. I was unmindful of an Amrita Bazar Patrika columnist’s jibe that The Statesman’s latest recruit in Britain was said to have worked for English provincial papers but no one knew whether he sold them in the streets or actually wrote for them.
Meeting Nehru was the prelude to sailing for Calcutta. Having established that far from being in remote Yorkshire, Harrow School was in North London, I took the Metropolitan Line to Harrow on the Hill and panted up to the school — the only reporter there and also the only Indian — when Nehru breezed in. I made a preparatory — or propitiatory — namaste. Nehru looked at me and through me and walked on.
There’s a sort of sequel. Six or seven years later, I was back in the London office as its first Indian head. My inheritance included four and a half rooms in Whitehall overlooking Horse Guards Parade and Downing Street, a staff of three and a half women, and the designation — unique in global journalism — of London Agent. Contrary to my Patrika colleague’s expectation, I wasn’t called on to hawk the paper in Whitehall: my job title followed the precedent set by British India’s railways and tramways, which took their cue from the Viceroy and Governor-General of India who, until 1858, was also the East India Company’s Agent.
I was told by an English friend
that Major General D.K. (Monty) Palit had once encountered Queen Elizabeth, the Queen-Mother, outside London’s Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall. Uncertain of protocol, the punctilious Palit made a namaste. Her Majesty hesitated for a moment and then slowly raised both hands and put them together. Royal graciousness saved the day.