TMC, CPM and BJP In Bengal Politics

Posted on May 1, 2026 by secondsaturn

Many posts ask in social media, what’s the difference between the CPM and the TMC? Both are equally exploitative. How did the CPM exploit youm how does the TMC exploit you? To such questions the Bengali has only one answer, ja korechhe na… Kintu korchheta ki? Please list down your complaints specifically. No Bengali has ever been able to specifically state the problems with either of these parties. But there is a problem, there is an inner angst among the Bengali middle class about politics, which the CPM has turned into corruption, violence and unsafe conditions for women. These are exactly the very same stuff of which CPM political crimes were made of; interestingly, it was in the 1990’s in the era of the bhadralok Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, that crime in Bengal and especially against women peaked.

The TMC is a welcome change because safety to life and property returned to Bengal as did peace. What the TMC brought were the uninterrupted supply of civic amenities, electricity, water, fair rations, cleaner and smoother roads, IT enabled smart deliveries and permissions. Infrastructure in terms of roads and flyovers were not only built but built to quality and in no time. The transportation system galloped. The above-mentioned facilities not only enriched the city but also spread into the rural areas making the entire state into one huge livable peri urban area. Within the city, its limits expanded on easier permissions and the real estate sector boomed but with affordability making Kolkata into a cosmopolitan city once over. The CPM created a hoax of the builder raj and now the BJP is hurting the real estate sector with false cases and ED raids because it is this sector that has accelerated the economy bringing in its wake, not only population mobility but services.

The TMC regime must have been honest otherwise the anudaan, or the DBT transfers would not have rankled the BJP and the CPM so much, calling the beneficiaries of these doles as beggars. DBT is part of the strategies of poverty alleviation, part of the basic universal income discourse created by some of the topmost economists of the world!! The many CBI raids on Partha Chatterjee and other leaders with YouTube filled with videos of cash loaded almirahs went for a toss as the CBI failed to present any evidence in the court. These nullified accusations show that the TMC, contrary to name calling, has not been a dishonest party.

The main difference between the TMC and CPM is that the CPM had professionals turned politicians, the TMC has businessmen in its fray. This is why the TMC understands investments very well. Bengal, contrary to social media rumours has industrialized very well under the TMC. It is today the hub for sponge iron and ferro alloys, the mecca for cement and handloom textiles, its sequin work remains the most exported, it leads India in vegetable production, flowers are a Bengali monopoly, and if carbon credits were to be audited, the state would have soared in that too. Cold storage warehousing and transportation are among the most robust industries in the state. The proliferation of cultural spaces such as auditoriums and exhibition halls shows that the TMC has seriously thought of investing in culture.

But the TMC has enormous failings, and these are very genuine and serious ones. The TMC has not been able to create aspirations and ambitions among Bengalis to use their culture to rule the rest of India. Bengal is Bengal only because all through the times since Raja Rammohun Roy, its genius has scripted the destiny of modern India. There is nothing in modern India which is not of a Bengali origin. Bengali business, much of what is lauded today were never mass production facilities, instead it was an innovation based patented products. In invoking the intellectual genius of Bengal, the TMC has failed massively. Mamata Banerjee tried very hard by restoring Bengal to Tagore and heritage and actively encouraged artists and the cinema. She facilitated the world’s largest installation project and art in the form of the Durga Puja. Despite her best intentions, somehow, she could not arouse the intellectual aspirations of the state. Professions such as medicine and engineering, film and theatre, writers and musicians started to clamour for and depend on state patronage. Those who got the official appreciation drew the resentments of those who did not. This resentment blew out of proportions where to punish the Government; a female doctor was brutally murdered by her own colleagues who was envious of the principal as he was seen to have been favoured by the government. Where the government should have inspired, it created a series of disgruntled and resentful intelligentsia trying to get at each other’s throats, plotting murders to get rivals out of the way. But unlike the CPM or the BJP, TMC has never dictated novels to novelists, scripts to script writers, poetry to poets. It has never dwelt on ideological fundamentalism; it also has never imposed one.

The BJP and the CPM use their own failings to project these on to the TMC; BJP says that it is a Muslim appeaser, the CPM says that it is violent and corrupt. Both try to lure in intelligentsia, promising them with those very rewards they coveted under the TMC rule and those which passed them by. Hence by appealing to the rioting Bengali, the BJP and to the ignored Bengali, they are trying to lay traps for the narcissistic Bengali rendered naïve by that narcissism. Both the BJP and the CPM are anti intellectual parties, they are anti middle class, and their politics are oriented towards creating the mob. They are composed of failed individuals, who try to blame others for their failures.

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India’s Iran War

Posted on April 1, 2026 by secondsaturn

India is heavily participating in the Iran War; no. not by negotiating the shortage of LPG cylinders but by harassing, molesting, beating and even killing Muslims in their homes, shops, streets, schools, colleges and as they travel by bus, train or tempo. In all the BJP ruled states, riots happen every day. Hence, it is only to be expected that retaliation is also merciless when Hindu youths are being killed almost for no reason as in case of Tarun in Delhi. Genetically of the same origin, Bangladesh is on a killing spree of Hindus. Ruling political parties in both these countries tacitly are scripting the Holocaust. The intellectuals in both these countries are turning a blind eye respectively. Just like the street corner boys play cricket in gullies of the neighbourhood when the World Cup is streamed on air, we are also killing our minorities as our gully participation in war. We are fighting the war by decapitating Muslims and in Bangladesh by beheading Hindus. Wonderful game play without any concern of an impending fuel crisis; just as we would be oblivious of the difficulties of war when we were young and cherished the fighting as extrapolated exaggeration of game play.

The problem with such civil war is that it uses the principles of cell division. Once started, it tries to divide further. Now Dalits are under systematic violence as a Dalit youth was killed by an upper caste Brahmin family in UP for wishing them Happy Holi, a woman claiming to be upper caste is filmed beating up a lower caste boy in a train compartment. Krishna encouraged division among the Purus into the Pandavs and Kauravs, and the Jadu clan diminished itself in a civil war. You fight against “others” and the “othering” never stops; it starts to divide into still smaller identities – much like the principle of cell division.

But the civil war is kept secret because the moment it comes out into the open, we might face the Nuremburg. Pathetic constructions of Muslim oppression in centuries old invasions, in decades old Partition are like imaging ghosts to feel the sense of fear. Everyone is seeking to fear something or the other. Everything in the everyday is scary. This may be called the sociology of fear, the most opportunistic excuse to turn violent. Those who manufacture fear, circulate fear and masturbate in it are looking to turn violent. This might be something new – violence as agency and not as a reaction. Fear is stirred up within, anxiety is whipped up – signs of masochistic sadism, victimizing oneself to violate the other. This war of victimhood generation and then victim creation is an international war, fought in India as the cosmos of the world. Such a world as India’s can no longer be a peace mediator and this is the final word.

No one can stop the war because no one sees their larger role for the future of humanity and no one can see this because people are fighting, not an economic war, nor a political one but a religious war; Jews are desiring to decimate Islam, Islam is trying to overpower Judaism. The Middle east is territorial and tribal, but there is a clash of civilizations here over world views and world rule. When powers clash over God, there is no fear of death or demolition; drugged with the fervour of fundamentalism, these wars are to end all wars. In such wars, humans become the cannon fodder of some ideology, they are beside themselves in unquenchable anger. Here no reason can enter and hence negotiations are closed.

The only country which could have really worked things out was perhaps India. Its long legacy of Nehru and the Congress of secularism and non-alignment and above all its history of a non-violent mass movement with a successful democracy together with the large population, both at home and spread across the world, gives the country a moral authority to seek a global regrouping of antiwar forces. India can and India should redefine global politics through its commitment to peace where it can rally countries around it to say that let the new UN charter speak against aggression of any country against any other and if and when aggression is absolutely needed especially in violation of human rights and liberty, then let the comity of nations decide the nature, extent, timing of that aggression along with a protocol of prewar negotiations and treaties. Unfortunately, India, despite having inherited this legacy has let go of its power because it has divested of all that its inheritance bore namely, secularism, non-violence and non-alignment.

Indian intellectuals are confused and media is silent for this is a war that neither can understand. This is because, India is no longer out of this war and is very much a part of the anti-Islamic genocidal pogrom that it is playing within its own borders.

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Understanding Jugalbandi: Art, Class, and Competition

Posted on March 6, 2026 by secondsaturn

I was invited to a jugalbandi performance called as a dialogue between a sitar and a violin accompanied by the table recently. The players were young, energetic and talented. They played Malkauns and Maru Behaag, both endearing for the ears and apt for instrumental rendition. The performance started off as soothing and absorbing but soon became loud and cacophonic as the players took up what was supposed to be a collaboration into a competition and one upmanship. In the end, one sensed aggression and even anger at times, the promise of dialogical engagement belied.

A jugalbandi is typically a union, not unlike a sexual union, where each tries to arouse and hence fulfill the other. The goal is to enhance the raga, to discover its many hidden crevices, touching which should intensify pleasure. Only those who are good at sex would know how to play a jugal bandi; those who miss the metaphor of eroticism miss the principle of jugalbandi altogether.

The question we ask about the above-mentioned performance is why did the performers miss the point? Why did they, instead of collaborating towards the same purpose start to compete and eventually outdo each other? We may answer this question in Bishambhar’s words from Jalsaghar, and which is that it is social class.

Social class is difficult to define but broadly we may say that an upper class has more resources at her disposal when exercising a choice while the lower classes are somewhat more constrained while doing do. The lower the social class is the more they compete with one another for the access of resources; they guard those resources more jealously and even zealously and thus jeopardize more easily the common good. The pursuit of public goods such as literature or art is better done by the upper classes than by the lower classes because only the former is capable of a higher level of collaboration.

Arts have two aspects – one, the technicality of the medium. This is easy to achieve especially if the education of arts is organized and institutionalized into easily learnable and repeatable modules. The other aspect of art is its language, the unity of syntaxes, the synthesis of phrases and these are more difficult because these need a command of artistic language. What would be the artistic language? Artistic language is the combination of the signifier and the sign into the signified; since the upper classes have more resources at their disposal, they have higher levels of signifiers and hence the higher level of command over language.

S.M. Krishna’s attempt at the democratization of the Madras Music Academy is not unjustifiably opposed by the upper castes; music is a matter of social class; its development is indeed Brahmanic.

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Work Culture In The City, Work Culture and Cities

Posted on February 10, 2026 by secondsaturn

I loved Delhi and loathed Calcutta. The work culture was the discerning factor. Delhi, not always skilled and efficient, was positive. Everyone attended, listened and obeyed. In Calcutta, everyone was defied and was inattentive. In Delhi, people looked upon work as an opportunity for engagement and earnings; in Calcutta, work was a burden as earnings were entitlement. Bengalis, it was said, were work shy and indeed, in the Annual Statistics of Industries, labour productivity in West Bengal was the lowest in the country.

The poor work ethics of the Bengali was best manifested in the taxi driver. No gos, no shows, dishonesty with fares, constant complaints making the passenger feel as if she has committed a grave crime in oppressing the cab for a ride. Delhi was full of zest, drivers most polite in serving, and the willingness to go that extra mile and well-kept cars.

Delhi and Calcutta were different cities then. Delhi had wide and empty roads, hardly any traffic, roads dotted occasionally with the autorickshaw, middle class rode the two-wheeler. Buses were few and far between. The air was clean, sky was blue. Calcutta, on the other hand, burst in its seams, its teeming people, plethora of public transport, dirty air, grey skies, honking of stuck cars, whistles of hustling buses. Delhi was cheaper to live in, Calcutta – the costliest in the country.

Since then, Delhi grew and grew, past its limits of endurance; it resembles Calcutta now as it is densely populated, buses with passengers stuffed into the chambers, roads with cars halted for hours of traffic, its air heavy with smog and skies always overcast with dust. Calcutta seems to have recovered a bit, its density is manageable, traffic tolerable, roads smoother, and crowds in buses breathable. And with such transitions, the work culture in the cities are gravitating towards each other like in Edgeworth’s box diagram. Delhi cab drivers are now getting reluctant to carry passengers, complain all the time about the dreary nature of their jobs, make the passengers feel guilty about them being the service buyers, look upon work as oppression and not opportunity.

We may infer that the work culture is not caused by ethnicity, nor by history and far less by politics but by immediate sociology. Density of cities, air pollution, costs of living, rising competition in one’s trade and seemingly proliferation of choices of profession can adversely affect work ethics. Growing density of cities also has the risk of downward mobility, second generations of residents find themselves edged out of respectable jobs by the inflow of talented migrants. The work culture of any city is the set of opportunities the city provides.

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Radhe Radhe Vrindavan

Posted on January 10, 2026 by secondsaturn

I spent a weekend at a hotel suite of a friend in Vrindavan located on the outskirts of the temple town adjacent to other posh properties like the Taj Vivanta, Radissons and Best Western. Far from the dusty, muddy and noisy and chaotic town of Vrindavan, this get away was a welcome quiet retreat. Vrindavan, a city usually thought to have been founded in the 16th century by the Vaishnav devotees of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, it was protected by Akbar and eventually the Mughals as a haven for the Hindu women pilgrims, who were mostly the cast away widows and even rescued from Sati. But there is mention of Vrindavan as a place where Sanatan, Jeeb and Rup Goswami did their penance after reconverting to Vaishnavism from Islam, a religion they had to accept because of their employment in the Sultanate.

What shocked me about the city was its saline water and I wondered why no one ever mentions this. The water is not potable at all and unfit for any purpose of even bathing or washing clothes let alone cooking. It is a wonder how the city was ever inhabited and perhaps because of this, the city neither had rich merchants nor was attacked by conquerors. The city was safe because it was uninhabitable due to non-potable water.  The salinity cannot be a recent phenomenon of over extraction or the receding of Yamuna because myth has it that the water is the tears of the Gopis who cried when Krishna left the city to travel to Mathura. The water in Mathura is also brackish and so that of Barsana and other cities in the area called Brijbhumi.

Brijbhumi has been part forest and part pastures for cows as Krishna is a cowherd. The Krishna myth emerged at the 1st CE but he as a cowherd with a specific location in Brijbhumi along with Radha 1300 hundred years later. It was not before the 12th and 13th centuries that Radha Krishna entered the divine pantheon of the Hindus. The myth coincides with the settlement of the town by the Vaishnav saints. It was the myth that made the city.

Vrindavan has got a new lease of life at present. Under the resurgence of religiosity and faith, it poised to become a hot tourist destination. As the Taj Mahal began to be bad mouthed under the Hindutva discourse, young renegade couples went off on get-away trips to Vrindavan instead of to Agra. The craze for Hindu symbols overtook the interest over Mughal monuments and the flow of tourists was collected in the cul de sac of Vrindavan. Hence, hotels of elevated stars emerged and following which posh residential complexes with swimming pool and gym also mushroomed. Vrindavan became the destination for real estate investors. With the air pollution rising in Delhi along with high costs of living, Vrindavan is yet another destination for urban refugees, or refugees of urbanization. Along with the wave of urbanization, comes the migrant labour who intermarry among castes and ethnicities to create composite cultures united by their allegiance to the city and hence the ideology of Lord Krishna.

Vrindavan, even in its modern resurrected form remains the lethal combination of a tourist cum refugee destination. Its religious ideology is crucial to its city life, Krishna and Radha are central to the building of the urban conglomerate, and when such religious ideology engenders a sense of belonging to the city, Vrindavan becomes a city of believers in myths and tales of the supernatural. The city adds an extra opportunity for refugees from reason, refugees from modern industrial life, refugees from the pressures of modernity who can then use five-star facilities to slip into the dream world of stories and folklore.

The rise of Hindutva has set off a new wave of urbanization into pilgrim cities; Varanasi, Vrindavan, Dwarka, Puri, Rameswaram and even Khajuraho, which are now combinations of tourism as well as of refuge against the liberal secular modern world of industrial reason into faith, myths and beliefs. Asylum cities such as Brindavan become hubs of puritanism, as its residents use the dedication to deities and food fads such as vegetarianism to claim a rightful place in the heritage of the city.

New high rises and posh hotels is the way that Hinduism’s tradition competes and collaborates with a secular modernity. As the city grows and that too it grows for an urban elite, elite because she can afford a second home for leisure while keeping her foot in a metropolitan city for  work, there is a greater pressure for the city to develop its civic amenities such as sewage treatment and drinking water, electricity and roads, garbage management and healthcare. This calls for a fundamental change in the governance system, calling for the allocation of new kinds of staff for its municipalities. The new elite pushes out the natives of the city by claiming their lands, searing through their market’s places, upsetting the apple cart of their social networks, their easy pathways in and out of temple complexes as these get cordoned off and cut out to accept tourists of the new India. The temples are no longer to be visited as mere holy places but as modern spaces where worship is modernized as are the spaces. The new development in such cities is thus both sacred and modernistic, the modernity of the sacred.

In Vrindavan, God and Mammon lie side by side; in the name of the irrefutable Divine, human considerations are brutally swept aside with land acquisitions, takeover of fertile agricultural lands, displacing native homes with their livelihoods. Communalism is rife, because swathes of land and chunks of population need to be let go off; the recent SIR survey has clearly shown that all Muslims are construed as foreigners and displaced from their homesteads. The other target are immigrants, while the immigrants are both indispensable as well as invaluable for the cities’ growth through the supply of services, there would be a discrimination on who may come and who may not and hence ethnically divide India. Cities of the present times are ideologically also pursuers of majoritarian discourse and hence intricately interweaving politics and urbanization.

Urbanization in contemporary India is based neither on economic factors, nor on intellectual contributions, nor around political importance but around religious fervor raised to feverish pitch by pushing in investments to make cities comfortable as retirement or holiday homes. Such cities promote political polarization for access to space, money, human capital through ethnically demarcated population facilitating a uniformity fit for political totalization.

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Bande Bharat Express

Posted on December 11, 2025 by secondsaturn

I managed to ride on the Bande Bharat express after all. Once was a trip from Delhi to Jaipur and the second one was a to and fro between Howrah and Santiniketan. In the latter case, the train was attended royally in the prime platform close to the car parking alley inside the station but in case of Delhi it got the Cantonment station where one needed to cross over rail tracks to board the train from the far end of the platform reserved for the goods train. Clearly, while Kolkata honoured the Bande Bharat, Delhi shunned it with a turned-up nose.

Bande Bharat, represents the new India, all show and brag without foundational achievement. Unlike the Rajdhani and the Shatabdi, which revolutionized train travel, Bande Bharat is at best a pretense of progress. Its speed is pathetic, the so-called rapidity is only because stoppages are drastically reduced in number and since it runs on pretty much on the same tracks it leaves us with nothing new to relish. The washrooms are as pathetic as any other train with cosmetic application of vacuum flushes which take so much time to turn on that most passengers have resorted not to flush their excreta at all. The passage doors are equipped with sensors to facilitate the physically challenged, there is brail on the compartment boards and a display board announcing stations for the deaf which are encouraging. Apart from this, there is little else to bat for.

Also, it is better never to travel by the C coaches of Bande Bharat. These are as cramped as Go Indigo planes with barely space to move about. Shatabdi and Rajdhani are heavenly by comparison. Travel only in executive class if you must.

The train serves food which is without imagination. There are puffed laminated packets of aluminum foils with air fried corn and chire. The kachuris drip in oil and packed in butter paper foils found at the street corner chaiwallah shops, except that the ones served on the train are worse.

The propaganda has been so deeply ingrained that passengers travelling on board have ingratiated themselves to imagine that they are having a wonderful experience. This reminds me of a story we read in class VI about a rich Arab who invited a beggar to a feast only make his guest imagine that he was having a great meal. So strong was the storytelling that the beggar also burped in satisfaction. Same with Bande Bharat and its passengers.

Bande Bharat strikes those who have never been on the Rajdhani or the Shatabdi; it attracts the Volvo passengers who rarely ever take the train except the passenger trains to travel short distances. These are the passengers who have not known the high maintenance Rajdhani express, they have not known the Duronto, nor even the Shatabdi. They have avoided these trains as being costly when on purposeful travel and have boarded the Bande Bharat as an experience and not as a necessity.

The high point of Bande Bharat is the staff. Congenial and caring. If we are to look for something to take away from the train ride, then it is the excellent workforce.

Postscript: a post in Face Book complained that while the writer was traveling on a Bande Bharat, a group of non-Bengalis climbed up on the train and loudly started to pay Antakshari. This raised the noise levels to annoyance of the co-passengers. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly this public nuisance is created by a set of uncultured but socially upwardly mobile people who think that creating chaos in public life is smartness. BJP politics is a haven for this kind of low class of people, who through access to some signs of equality and progress have just about made it to the status that they aspire to be in. The train belongs to a class, a class that is fascinated by Modi just as Miranda was by Ferdinando, or Shakuntala by Dushyant; for they have never seen the world, awakened only now, salivate at whatever they get, without discernment or discretion.

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Does Indian Art Have A Theory?

Posted on November 24, 2025 by secondsaturn

A senior and well known academician asked me why was there no theory of Indian art while the theory of Western art is so well developed? To answer this perhaps we need to reframe our questions not so much around art, its nature or the differences between the mentioned parts of the world, as we may need to ask what theory is? Theory is the generalization of repeatedly occurring facts which are systematically observed and recorded. Fact is therefore the foundation of theory. Fact is an activity conducted by the individual; theory answers to what end such activities are conducted. Theory contains three things, an act of will, a goal of the act and its outcome. Such a framework may help us ask not only questions of theory around art but about the nature of theory.

Indian art is a search not for an individual’s meaning but of symbols to represent the society and its life. It seeks those which are manifestations of the law of nature, the will of the Universe, immutable by human endeavor or agency. Art, produced by the Indians are commodities, designed for the consumption of the society and by individuals as social beings. It must overwhelm, overawe and overcome the individuality in the individual. The artist must merge into his creation and produce a work that resonates as an eternal, immutable and universal symbol. Interestingly, this is how one defines religion. Art is produced as religion in India.

In the west, art is the reflection of individuality. Even when the subject is acutely religious, production of artistic forms expresses the individual agency. What is important is that the artist presents his work as the creator would do, claiming the status of an originator of life. The Western artist becomes God; the Indian artist lets God work through him. In the taxonomy of the Vedanta, the Dwaita and Advaita both appear but they do so in different order in the artists of the respective locations. The Western artist is an Advaita is he claims himself as God but places his work as a distinct work to be regarded as the work of an individual and thus emerging into dualism as in the separation between the art and the artist. The Indian artist is a dvaita to begin with but would become one with his creation as the end of process.

Western art flourishes through non royal patrons or the likes of the Medicis, Indian art is guild based, produced on command of the patron, usually the king. Indian art’s purpose and outcomes are fixed; it follows the diktats of religion. The western artist produces both a choice and a decision

With the above-mentioned features of art in India and of the west, we now have a fairly good idea about why theory cannot be generated for Indian art. The western art is an individual act and hence a fact; the Indian art is collective, its outcome defined and purpose fixed. Indian art might be a phenomenon, but not a fact. In the absence of facts, we are unable to produce a theory of art for India, though we may study the matter phenomenologically. In other words, while the western art may be reworded as a social action, the Indian art is not a social action for it represents obedience and an unquestioning faith but not a choice. Art production is thus confined into a caste profession, a group activity, a traditional occupation. Due to the absence of agency and choice in Indian art, there cannot be a theory of art.

Art in India has often been used for political battles, art in the West have been used for ideological battles. Hindu art has competed with Buddhist art, Jain art has tried to impose yet another series of appropriations, but it is the Western art that has conversed with the society, challenging beliefs and perspectives of people rather than be the cannon fodder of kings. Western art has bent beliefs, led ideological warfares, challenged world views and liberated human thought. Indian art has created new symbols of overpowering imagination, overwhelming thoughts and emotions. One can be immersed in it indeterminably but perhaps not converse with it. Hence Indian art is not an activity that liberates human agency, and this is why it never “happens” , leaving us bereft of theory.

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Taslima Nasreen vs Javed Akhtar

Posted on October 2, 2025 by secondsaturn

Taslima Nasreen dropped the atom bomb on the politics of Bengal, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan by observing that the Bengali culture is foundationally and fundamentally Hindu. There cannot be any category like a Bengal Muslim unless as an oxymoron. To this Javed Akhtar added, also in a tone of appreciation that while Dr Nasreen was right, it would also be in place to appreciate the Ganga Yamuna Tehzeeb, or the Hindu Muslim syncretic culture of the country.

The Ganga Yamuna syncretism is the culture of the ruling elite, where Hindus were absorbed among the ruling class in Mughal India. The mixing was in the realm of the highbrow. In Bengal, syncretism was just the opposite, it happened among the lowest echelons of the society, in the peasant societies and those among the simpler communities of the boatsmen. The difference arises because of the different circumstances of Islam meeting Hinduism.

In the north, Islam met Hindus as conquerors would meet the conquered. Whereas, throughout the Sultanate period, Hindus were shut out from any public display of religion and culture , the Mughals opened up the doors for Hinduism to flourish, themselves being deeply interested in the various aspects of the faith. Ganga Yamuna mix was a result of this acceptance, accommodation and even respect.

In Bengal, it was not so much Islam but pre–Islamic Arabic beliefs that came with merchants, saints and medicine men. Bengali syncretism has deities and tithis, rituals and rites that closely resemble those in pagan Arabia. Goddesses like Mannat, Uzza and Ahlat became our Kali, Saraswati and Lakshmi. In the deeper villages, even today while worshipping Monosha, Asan Bibi, Bon Bibi and Loknath Baba, there is little understanding of the lines of difference between Islam and Hindu. When Islam finally barged in with the raised sword in the form of Ikhtiyar bin Bakhtiyar Khiljee, many converted willy nilly because there was already a familiarity with Arab customs especially its ritual foods, like dodhikarma, kodma, shinni and a few others.

The Ganga Yamuna Tehzeeb was cultivated in the courts of rulers, in order to attain richness that diversity and assimilation invariably brings on, musicians, poets and above all theologians were patronized and promoted to create a cultural high ground that would match the moral legitimacy of the Mughals not only across the subcontinent but also as far as the courts of Persia and Turkey. Hence the mix of cultures, the one in the courts and the other among the folk, are two different entities not to be confused.

The spirit of syncretism in the north percolated down from the courts to the folk through the popular Bhakti movements. The legend of Baiju Bawra is a case in the point. In Bengal, the mixed culture osmosed upwards especially in the Hussain Shahi dynasty which promoted the Bengali language. Unfortunately, the conquest of Bengal by Akbar suddenly encouraged a Hindu elite to consolidate themselves and there upon, from then till Raja Rammohun Roy there was progressive cleansing of the syncretic binds into neater segregations. The Muslim was a despised category, to be cast away from any participation in history or involvement in memory. The Muslim endeared in the Bengali memory only as an Abdul Majhi or a Gofur Mian and the jokes of the kutti. Politics of Islam in eastern Bengal was the agony of Bengali Muslims to be reckoned as rightful partakers in the evolution of Bengal’s destiny. In the north, the Hindus razed syncretism out as the insignia of an erstwhile ruling class. The BJP still calls the liberal Indians as “muslims” because of the mix up in the chronology of recall of the ruling class, Mughals, or British or post Independent India.

When Dr Nasreen rues about the Hindu foundation of the Bengali culture, she does not retrieve the roots of the Bengali culture in its historical whole but selectively picks on the spirit of the reclamation of Hinduism of a Bengali ruling class, which under Akbar had almost become fully Hindu. When Mr Akhtar ruminates about the Tehzeeb, he recalls the culture of a ruling elite made defunct by the British rule. They are talking about different things, distinct forces and while they are true in a sense, they are both false in another.

Note: cultural analysis is not child’s play.

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Tikli Bottom

Posted on September 13, 2025 by secondsaturn

My young cousin planned a visit for the family to Tikli Bottom. This is a property at the bottom of the Tikli hills, off Gurgaon, where the Aravallis rise for the one last time to eventually run off in undulations into the flood plains of the Yamuna. This is a property at the bottom of the Tikli hills and hence called as Tikli Bottom. This is a resort opne and yet closed for tourists for the owners, now the late Howard couple, Anne and Martin were discerning as to who should enter their premises. Presently, their daughter being more pragmatic and responsive to inflation and kind enough to retain most of the huge staff on the premises is more lenient towards filmwallahs who seem to be shooting daily there. As far as tourists are concerned, the property holds on to its grounds, allowing very little guests only after detailed scrutiny.

Tikli Bottom is a British bungalow of the days of the Mutiny, but what strikes me is that it was built in the vintage of heritage only in the 1990’s. Every wedge in the wall, every step in the courtyard and every nook of the stairways is constructed with the precision of the aeons of time that the style has seen. Filling the space inside the bungalow are furniture and Knick knacks, curios, paintings, photographs, artefacts and crafts collected carefully from the itinerant banjaras and iterating bazaars of India. While one can still think the building being built in a retro style, one was astounded at the prospect that all of such stuff could also be accessed in the present times, perhaps from auction houses. The owner told us that the collection of curios and paintings and the furniture were part of their ancestral legacy as members of many generations of the family had spent the service careers in India.

As we looked around the grounds of the property, which partly was built as a patio, partly as a drive way, in part a lawn and blending on all directions into a farmland, I sensed that in the mind of the owners space was organized just in the manner of a typical North Indian where dwelling in which a home with a garden must look like a hotel and a farm house all at once.

The hospitality was typically of an English farm as we read in Enid Blyton – the present owner and her staff treated us like children back from hostels, lavishing us with snacks and drinks and then insisting that we eat more of the food laid out generously on tables with white crocheted cloth. When Madhusree opted for a foot massage, the mood swung back into a hotel spa.

The farm makes honey and marmalade, so typical English. But where the property becomes India is in the landscaping of its grounds. Here the idea of the owner is neither to show off her flowers or trees, but to plan each hedge and shrub and the acacias in a manner to bring out the beauty of the Aravallis. The garden of the property is a fashion accessory for the beauty of the Tikli hills to bloom.

What endears in the property is the deep love that the owners have felt for the countryside, this Godforsaken village of a backward state of Haryana, dry, dreary and desperate for civilization. There are a few farmhouse properties along the road to Tikli Bottom, razed out grounds, artificial grass, garish gadgets set up to catch the attention of the passers-by. There is no purpose of these properties other than crass tourism of the loud louts, those of whom must be kept firmly off the grounds of Tikli Bottom.

Aesthetic of the property is its ownership of the Nature in which it not only ensconces itself but defines itself as a sense of belonging. Beauty is not only for the eyes of the beholder, it is a positioning of the soul which engages with and embraces the cosmos, both as its present as well as in its future hope and indeed as its distant origin beyond the dimensions of Time.

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Pause and Rhythm of Birju Maharaj

Posted on August 8, 2025 by secondsaturn

I watched Birju Maharaj as part of the Spic Macay programme in the Jhelum Lawns in JNU. Besides Dover Lane Music Conference, JNU was the other place where my education by exposure to excellence happened in Hindustani classical music and dance. In those days, I had just begun my work on the study of Amitabh Bachchan, as a popular star and was increasingly anxious in trying to find apt frameworks to set up an analysis of the star image. As a sociologist, I was to study the popularity of Amitabh, the superstar, the making of the image, but I possibly, despite an entire school of phenomenology developed out there, could not start with the premise of popularity because of the risk of tautology. I needed to start with the constitution of the phenomenon with attributes independent of the explanandum, which was popularity of the star. Hence, to study the aesthetics of stardom, a set of artistic techniques which made the star and made it possible for me to compare the image of Amitabh Bachchan with a slew of other stars in my range of watching.

Everyone I sought guidance from invariably pointed out of the Natyashastras, the most unhelpful of all tips I ever received. The text is useless on all counts as a guide to the principles of aesthetics. Having trashed it back to the NML Library, I walked towards aesthetic theories. Both Hegel and Adorno made huge sense where the Hindi film was concerned, but the aesthetics for them were in terms of what emanated from the work, and not what was in the work, especially put in with the intent to be a work of art. Heidegger was so-so, Aristotle worse than Bharatmuni. It was then that I watched Birju Maharaj dancing on the underground water storage tank of Uttarakhand, which raised its tip like a giant iceberg to create a stage ideally suited for performances. If I recall well, then strange as it seems it was this very performance that he presented that evening.

As I watched Birju Maharaj dance with rapt attention, I sensed that there were movements and there were pauses. For some movements, he was merely responding to the music, in some he was using music as a prop to create a movement. The former produced small movements and small pauses, the latter, large movements and large pauses. As I watched the dance, it started to appear to me that the intention of the performance was as much about the pause as it was about the movement, in fact the purpose of the movement was to arrive at the pause; and as the pauses became longer, the movements preceding those became more willful than mere responses. In a flash, I understood, the constitutive elements of a star; one needed to study the cinematic image like the dancing image, a series of movements and pause, of speech and silence, or recesses, of suspensions and absences. It was to this pause that all stars must move towards.

We may use the format of movement and pause, of sound and silence, presence and absence to create a template to study stars, compare one with the others, develop a scale of assessing performance and hence attain a theoretical foundation to eventually frame the study of stars.

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