“The Bengali is at once an existentialist delight and nightmare, cast in perpetual drama,” says Sudeep Chakravarti about his people in the introduction of his latest non-fiction book, titled: The Bengalis, A Portrait of a Community.
In the book, Chakravarti, a seasoned journalist, who has authored numerous bestselling works of narrative non-fiction (Red Sun, Highway 39,Clear Hold Build), and fiction (Tin Fish, The Avenue of Kings), writes with intensity, passion, verve and aplomb. He addresses everything Bengali – their culture, cuisine, politics, social mores, literature, and even the thorny issues of their history, ethnicity and religion, tracking their progress through centuries from the time they first appeared (proto-Bengali) to now.
In a voice that is sometimes witty and humorous, at other times prickly and sardonic, Chakravarti paints a genuine and most authentic portrait of the Bengali community – all the while keeping a sharp eye on his reader. Over an email, he tells me –
He adds how a ‘not-Bengali’ (the word ‘non-Bengali’ is offensive to him) may profit from all this knowledge, too – the Bengalis are a quarter of a billion and the third largest ethno-linguistic group in the world, after all!
Here is an excerpt from the book:
Furthermore, in a market that is inundated with literature on Bengalis – Ramesh Chandra Majumdar’s The History of Bengal, Nitish Sengupta’s Bengal Divided: The Unmaking of a Nation 1905-1971, and Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, to name a few – Chakravarti’s book stands out for the sheer magnitude of its scope.
He adds how he used notes and observations going back a couple of decades, in addition to archival material that was in some cases several hundred years old, but active, to write his book.
If you read the book, you cannot not picture every detail in your mind’s eyes. Here is an excerpt that serves as a good example – this one deals with the Bengali obsession for food:
Or, how about this one that deals with the Bengali obsession for everything not food?
It is not just Chakravarti’s sparkling wit that flavours his narrative, but also the way he peppers it with personal anecdotes – the ones on religion, especially, where he describes how his mother’s side still uses maw and haw to describe a Mussulman and a Hindu respectively. He tracks this deep-rooted religious schism in his family (and his community) to the history of Bengal from the time India was partitioned to the genocide in Bangladesh.
However, he also uses his experiences of visiting his ancestral property in Kushtia, years after displacement, as an example to underscore the pointlessness of carry-forward hatred and of carry-forward hurt. Beyond this great religious divide, there are many more points of unity, of being Bengali that Chakravarti successfully highlights, making The Bengalis an overall wonderful read.
(Vani has worked as a business journalist and is the author of ‘The Recession Groom’. She can be reached @Vani_Author)
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