Kolkata rises, shines

By Swapan Dasgupta

On April 2, Kolkata witnessed the spectacular inauguration of this year’s Indian Premier League. Like most opening ceremonies of sporting events, the celebration had less to do with cricket than with Bollywood and contemporary Western music. It had even less to do with the Tagore-centric high culture of West Bengal that Bengalis love to flaunt — although there was a ritual genuflection to the bard’s Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.

It was also an event where the politicians took a back seat. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee did press a huge red button to start the proceedings at the Salt Lake Stadium, which is better known for gala musical events and football, rather than cricket. However, the organisers, with an eye to TV audiences rather than the forthcoming panchayat polls, cut out all celebrity speeches, an omission that also deprived Union minister Rajiv Shukla and the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s point-man for the IPL, his moment of glory.
Having secured the privilege, courtesy a friend who is a big-wig in the BCCI, to get one of the best seats, I can vouch for the fact that the audience loved the show, not least the gyrations of Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif. And Pitbull’s music, though not to my taste, had the youngsters converting the latter part of the proceedings into an impromptu dance party. Overall, it was good, clean fun and an event that Kolkata will not forget in a hurry. Unlike last year’s hurriedly organised felicitation of Shah Rukh Khan and his victorious Kolkata Knight Riders, there was nothing tacky about this year’s professionally choreographed spectacle which, judging by the gimmicks on display, must have cost an absolute bomb — estimates ranged from `20 to `30 crore.

The important thing about the event was not merely its entertainment value but the fact that it was organised in Kolkata.

The decline of Kolkata from a bustling metro which was only second to Mumbai till the late 1960s has been repeated incessantly to the point where the people of Kolkata believe that the growth story of India has bypassed them substantially. The underlying sense of dejection that you encounter in Kolkata, particularly among the members of the old bhadralok families, is sad. An event such as the IPL opening jamboree helps re-establish some faith in the city.
At this juncture, the morale of the city is truly low. This has got very little to do with the physical state of Kolkata. On the surface, it gives the impression of a truly vibrant and bustling city. Unlike the 1980s, when the appearance of Kolkata was grim, there has been a spectacular measure of improvement. New shopping malls are opening all over central and south Kolkata, the New Town in Rajarhat looks promising and many of the old houses, built in the heydays of the 1940s and 1950s, have witnessed renovations and acquired a fresh coat of paint. And although anecdotal evidence suggests that the new wealth is largely concentrated in the hands of the Marwaris (a term that doesn’t always imply those who came from Rajasthan to seek their fortune in the city), Bengalis haven’t lost out entirely. Bengali-dominated suburbs such as Dum Dum, Jadavpur and Garia have shed the appearance of being erstwhile refugee colonies and natural bastions of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The modest revival of Kolkata can be traced back to the Left Front’s change of stance after the retirement of Jyoti Basu. However, to be fair, even Ms Banerjee’s wildly erratic style of governance hasn’t been able to reverse the process entirely.

At one level, the present chief minister conveys the impression of being a complete maverick who hasn’t been able to get over her long preoccupation with street politics. Naturally temperamental, and with an evolved belief in conspiracy theories, her real problem is that she is unable to transcend her abiding interest in the affairs of the mohulla. Whether it is an insensitive off-the-cuff remark on the Park Street rape, her comic intervention at a meeting of industrialists to invite investments and her confrontation with the state election commissioner over arrangements for the panchayat polls, Ms Banerjee has the habit of courting controversy over trivial matters. Burdened with a political organisation whose activists have long been accustomed to agitational politics (sometimes in the face of severe odds), she has systematically given the impression that her interest in the big picture is fleeting.

There is an additional problem that may land her in a big political mess. The Trinamul Congress’ resounding election victory two years ago owed a great deal to the en masse shift of the Muslim vote. This support still remains, but there has been a collateral fallout. For the first time since Independence, there is a growing recognition in the Muslim community that it can make or break governments. There has been a visible rise in communal Muslim politics for the past two years, so much so that last month witnessed a big rally in Kolkata in support of the Jamaat-e-Islami leaders who have been handed out death sentences for assisting the Pakistan Army’s war crimes in Bangladesh in 1971. Shadowy figures such as the firebrand imam of the Tipu Sultan mosque have suddenly acquired prominence and have made a habit of making sectarian pronouncements. Coupled with sporadic disturbances with communal overtones — such as the arson attack on Hindu homes in a South 24 Parganas village and the murder of a policeman in Metiabruz — there are growing fears that the pattern of pre-1947 politics may revive, leaving Ms Banerjee unable to buck the trend.

Many of these problems have their origins in the sustained low economic growth of West Bengal since 1967. The state needs a massive booster dose of economic activity to channel the frustrations of a people whose mental horizons are shrinking with each passing day.

Perhaps Ms Banerjee is aware of this, but her mercurial ways have ended up scaring potential investors who have other choices in eastern India. West Bengal isn’t stagnating, but its low growth cannot tackle the problem of Bengal’s impatience. The state needs a sustained spell of purposeful and predictable government. Tragically, Ms Banerjee remains a loose cannon, a reason why IPL tamashas provide a respite.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, April 5, 2013

Kolkata battles with its schizophrenia

By Swapan Dasgupta

There were two stereotypes of Kolkata that jostled for primacy amid the huffing and puffing over the midsummer euphoria surrounding the victory of the Shah Rukh Khan-owned Kolkata Knight Riders in this year’s IPL.

The first were the voices of dismay from intellectuals and Leftists disgusted by the show of frivolity at Eden Gardens last Tuesday. What compounded the offence in their eyes was the enthusiastic participation of a Chief Minister in a party dominated by Bollywood and Tollywood stars. For those appreciative of a Jyoti Basu who rationed laughter and a Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who found inspiration in revolutionary verse and subtitled films, a leader at one with popular culture was more than a departure: it was heresy. By facilitating a carnival on a humid May afternoon, Mamata Banerjee struck a devastating blow at the over-refined self-image of Bengalis. As one angry Communist MP spluttered on TV that evening, the celebrations had nothing to do with either cricket or Bengal.

Yet, the seemingly irrational over-exuberance also corresponded to a parallel stereotype: that of the excitable Bengali. In the rush to deify the effete Bong, the outsider’s perception of those who inspired Rudyard Kipling’s ‘banderlog’ (in Jungle Book) is often glossed over.

The cruel truth is that Bengalis have preferred collective assertion to individualism. The first Test match in India to experience a full-blown riot happened in Eden Gardens on New Year’s Day in 1967, and was marked—or so legend has it—by West Indian players making a mad dash from a tear-gas filled stadium to the Grand Hotel. In his day, Jawaharalal Nehru called it a “city of processions” and by the time his grandson ruled the roost, it was dying from enforced holidays, when traffic stopped and street cricket took over.

It is tempting to relate last week’s spectacle of a lakh of people gyrating to the rhythm of rock groups Bhoomi and Chandrabindu and celebrating KKR’s success to the Bengali penchant for hujuk—an evocative term that signifies infectious craziness. In the past, Kolkata has gone berserk over Pele, Nelson Mandela and—for those with longer memories—Nikita Krushchev and Fidel Castro. Was the spontaneous frenzy over Shah Rukh and his team in keeping with a tradition of excitability?

The answer is self-evident. From the five days of worship and gluttony during Durga Puja to Shah Rukh’s number with Juhi Chawla, Kolkata has loved street parties and carnivals. Why, even the annual Book Fair sees more food consumed than books sold. There is an inverse correlation between economic activity and collective frenzy, and Kolkata is living proof of that. Why then the feigned outrage over Mamata’s party for Shah Rukh?

The answer, it would seem, can be located in Kolkata’s institutionalised schizophrenia. Like Ireland, middle-class Kolkata is blessed with a diaspora larger than the resident population. The exiles, who look back wistfully at the city they grudgingly abandoned, have nurtured an image of a Kolkata that corresponds to their own self-image: gentle, cultured, idealistic, romantic and blessed with an innate sense of decency. It is not that such a Kolkata has ceased to exist, but that this constitutes a fragment of the many enclaves that make up the city.

In a wonderful novel Calcutta Exile set in the 1950s, Bunny Suraiya narrated the touching story of the intersection between the Anglo-Indian community of Ripon Street and the upper-class Bengali of Ballygunge. It was set in a city that was marked for its creativity, commerce and the good life. That Kolkata disappeared with the advent of the Reds. In its place are multiple ghettos of despondency, each bound by the feeling of having been left behind. For today’s Ryan family, the grand-daughters are in Melbourne and the Mookerjee heir is comfortably placed in a Manhattan job. An unchanging Kolkata is just a memory they want to cling on to.

No city in India has been the object of so much pitiable condescension as Kolkata, a city that has forgotten the taste of success. In the KKR victory the city finally had something to celebrate. For India’s other metros, preoccupied with life and business, T-20 victory would have been just one of those things.


Sunday Times of India, June 3, 2012 

I like my cricket shaken and stirred

By Swapan Dasgupta

‘Curmudgeonly’ is a tongue-twister that, ideally, I would rather not use. However, I can think of no better and appropriate expression to describe the reactions of a Communist MP from West Bengal to the boisterous celebrations in Kolkata last Tuesday when the Kolkata Knight Riders and Shah Rukh Khan came ‘home’ with the IPL trophy.

At the best of times Gurudas Das Gupta sports a scowl and a sneer, and wears his Communist superiority on his sleeve. If Jyoti Basu had a reputation for never smiling, Das Gupta has made a career from being permanently disgusted. When most people say that “it’s not cricket”, they take refuge behind transparent superciliousness. When the CPI Lok Sabha MP said “not cricket” last Tuesday, his expression was sneering. The IPL, he pronounced angrily, was “not even sport”, and KKR “not even Bengal”. The whole thing was, in his expert opinion, a corporate tamasha (or words to that effect).

Whether it is the Olympics, the Queen’s Jubilee, Kaun Banega Crorepati and the IPL, every manifestation of popular culture invites elitist and intellectual disdain. The Puritans, the biggest kill-joys produced by Western civilisation, for example, loathed bear-baiting—once a popular pastime of the drinking classes. But, as Macaulay was moved to observe, the disavowal didn’t stem from compassion towards the unfortunate animal; it was born from a disapproval of the joy the sport gave to the spectators.

Every society produces its own Roundheads. The only difference is that whereas aloofness from the hoi-polloi was earlier a private expression of taste, the made-in-media age has amplified contrariness into a public talking point. Indeed, judging by the shrillness of the so-called cricket purists who have made their mark on TV, it would seem that the IPL tournament is nothing but a tasteless and even criminal enterprise.

The aesthetics of the IPL festival is, of course, a matter of subjective preference. Undoubtedly there are individuals who prefer watching live cricket amid the grandeur of empty stands and a few rounds of polite clapping. To them, the pom-pom girls dancing boisterously each time the ball crosses the boundary is an eyesore. Maybe it is a needless distraction from the art of batting. Yet, at the risk of giving offence to the purists, it is necessary to point out that first the one-day game (which was similarly berated at its inception) and now the T-20 format have done more to enhance the popularity of cricket in India than the combined efforts of W.G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji.

This is not to undermine the worthy cricketers of yore who contributed immeasurably to the development of cricket in this country. It is only to stress that contemporary cricket can be neatly divided into three categories: five-day Test cricket, the 50-over game and T-20. Each form of the game has its own dynamics and requires different skills. Those who persist with the impression that T-20 is nothing but a few cross bat slogs and a few well-aimed yorkers ignore the spectacular improvisations that the shortened format has brought to the game, not least of which is the dramatic improvement in fielding. Whether it is M.S. Dhoni’s incredible helicopter shot—which matches Ranji’s leg glance in improvisation—or the stunning catches taken in the outfield, T-20 cricket has made the game far more energetic than ever before.

Beyond the technicalities, there is another feature of evolving cricket that is worthy of note: the shorter the game, the more its popularity. This has everything to do with the pace of life in the 21^st century plus the fact that the T-20 games are timed to suit our leisure hours.

Yet, despite the growing international acceptance of the T-20 format, what can be said with certainty is that this form of cricket has flowered in India more than anywhere else in the Commonwealth. The IPL is unquestionably the most successful cricket tournament in history, generating interest levels and revenues that would have seemed inconceivable just three decades ago when it was being said that cricket is a dying game. For good or for worse, IPL is India’s most enduring contribution to sports. Nothing before it—not even the string of Gold medals won in hockey from 1924 to 1980—has surpassed its success.

In viewing IPL, we are not merely viewing the evolution of cricket; we are dealing with a great Indian success story. It is the enormous enthusiasm of cricket lovers in India—the breakthrough came with the World Cup triumph in 1984—that is responsible for the shift in the centre of gravity of the game moving from Lord’s to India. Much to the chagrin of England and Australia, the cricket economy of the world is now centred on India. And what is more, this shift has led to global spin-offs.

There was a time when cricketers all over the world hankered for a season’s contract with an English county side. Today, throughout the world, there is hunger for the talented to find a place in an IPL team and spend two rewarding months in India. It does not really matter that KKR had only three or four players who could have played Ranji Trophy for Bengal. The KKR is a private club which, like football teams in Europe, has now become identified with a city.

In today’s India, IPL is possibly the only piece good news. Let us celebrate that.


Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, June 1, 2012