When first published in 2006, Ghulam Murshid’s Hajar Bachhorer Bangla Samskriti , which grew out of his series on Bengali culture for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio’s Bengali Service, was something of a pathbreaker: a scholarly yet accessible book on a thousand years of Bengali culture written in a delightfully lucid vein, that spoke to 21st century Bengalis about diverse aspects of their culture, including bits that were/are in danger of being neglected and/or forgotten.
Spread over 14 chapters of varying length, and ranging from Suchona (beginning) to Bangali Sanskriti O Bangalir Baisistha (Bengali culture and Bengalis’ distinctiveness, rendered here as The Distinctiveness of Bengali Culture), and including individual chapters on society and religion, the impact of the West, women, music, cinema and theatre, food, attire, and so forth, it was immediately hailed as a magisterial tour de force that ranged effortlessly over a vast panorama with an enviable lightness of touch and sureness of purpose. When I encountered it in the Abosor edition published from Dhaka, my second reaction (the first being one of wide-eyed wonder) was that this needed to be translated into English for a greater, global audience. Thanks to the diligence and skill of Sarbari Sinha, that wish has now found fulfilment.
Comprehensive study
In his prefatory remarks to the first edition of the book (printed here as an Afterword), Murshid had noted how he had realised, when making his BBC Radio series, “that there was no reliable, informative book on the various aspects of Bengali culture” and how he had “also noticed that most historians had written a partisan as well as partial history of Bengal,” one that looked either at the history of Bengali Muslims or Bengali Hindus, and neglected to compose “comprehensive works covering the shared destiny of the entire Bengali-speaking people.” He then went on to say, in words that have taken on even greater resonance since they were written, “... aami kono jati, dhormo, borno, somproday othoba oncholer songe nijeke sonakto korinay ” (“I do not identify myself with any race, religion, caste, community, or area,” p.7 of the Abosor edition, my translation), and so had tried to write an inclusive history of all Bengalis. Curiously, in this book, the crucial word dhormo (religion) has been omitted and onchol (area or region) rendered as ‘country’. (p.616)
While this may seem like a quibble, it is necessary to point it out for two reasons. First, by omitting the word ‘religion,’ Sinha has reduced the full range of reasons that inspired the composition of this wholly secular and syncretic text, one that is a testament to Murshid’s abiding faith in the common cultural history of a people who have seen rather more than their fair share of fissiparousness. Second, this is a rare lapse in an otherwise faithful rendering of the original text, a translation that not only succeeds in capturing Murshid’s broad humanism but also gives glimpses of his often impish humour.
Patriarchal basis
For example, in his chapter on love, sex, marriage and matters related thereto, whose Bengali title is the wonderfully alliterative Pronoy, Porinoy, Poribaar (rendered as the rather more prosaic ‘Love, Marriage and Family’ by Sinha), Murshid makes the delightfully understated comment, after discussing the grossly patriarchal basis of marriage in Bengali society, “Indeed, Bengali society was not very conducive for romantic love” (p.242), using the English word ‘romantic’ in his Bengali original to underscore his point.
Murshid naturally devotes his largest chapter (the fourth, here titled Bengali Culture under Western Impact, pp.96-177) to discussing the impact and reception of Western, especially British, culture by the people who inhabit a large swathe of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and here, too, his ability to synthesise and explicate complex social and cultural phenomena in evocative, and deceptively simple, prose is amply evident. In the subsection on The Rise of the ‘Babu’ or ‘Bhadralok’ Class (pp.105-11) Murshid is both witty and acute in his analysis of a social class which “saved without any objective, earned money to save, pursued an education to earn, and stole question papers to pass examinations” (pp.107-08), nor does he shy away from discussing the reasons for the almost complete absence of Muslims among the Bengali ‘bhadralok’.
Religion and culture
In a world where geopolitics, no less than regional tussles, seems to be driven by an uncritical acceptance of Samuel Huntington’s religion-centric ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, a book which unambiguously demonstrates (without making a big hue and cry about it) just how wrong it is to look upon religion as the main driver of culture, and which goes on to show how all religions must perforce adapt to and adopt the cultural practices of the geographical regions they enter (see, especially, Murshid’s last chapter for this) is a work to be treasured. If you have even the faintest bit of interest in the third-largest ethnic group in the world, a 300-million-strong people who converse in the seventh-most-spoken language in the world, but who have also been repeatedly divided and felled and fought among themselves, read this book.
Bengali Culture Over A Thousand Years ; Ghulam Murshid, Niyogi Books, ₹995.
