Laughter as Subversion

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Laughter as Subversion in Nineteenth Century Calcutta's Popular Culture Author(s): SUMANTA BANERJEE Reviewed work(s): Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3/4, The Calcutta Psyche (Winter 1990/1991), pp. 186-208 Published by: India International Centre Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002461 . Accessed: 24/05/2012 07:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. India International Centre is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to India International Centre Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org

description

Sumanta Banerjee deciphers the subversive nature of humor in the Bengali tradition of songs.

Transcript of Laughter as Subversion

Page 1: Laughter as Subversion

Laughter as Subversion in Nineteenth Century Calcutta's Popular CultureAuthor(s): SUMANTA BANERJEEReviewed work(s):Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3/4, The Calcutta Psyche (Winter1990/1991), pp. 186-208Published by: India International CentreStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002461 .Accessed: 24/05/2012 07:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

India International Centre is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to IndiaInternational Centre Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

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Lady with Hookah

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SUMANTA BANERJEE

Laughter as Subversion in

Nineteenth Century Calcutta's Popular Culture

W"

hat is so special about the laughter of a people living in a city which Kipling damned as a

"packed and pestilential town on which Death

looked down"? Given the reputation of Calcutta

as a city of stink and sweat, swinging bet

ween outbursts of homicidal violence and withdrawals into suicidal

despondency, to associate laughter with such a city sounds

incongruous. But then, it is the incongruous which is at the source of

all laughter. Theorists of the comic from Bergson and Freud to

Arthur Koestler, their different approaches notwithstanding, have

identified the human perception of the incongruous as the trigger that sets off laughter.

Since I hope that the present article would provide the readers

with what the title suggests—occasions for laughter—they may bear

with me if I indulge at the outset in a brief discourse on the concept of the comic. This is at the risk of subjecting the discourse to

ridicule—as the very idea of theorizing on the comic with a straight face suggests an incongruous situation!

The pattern underlying the various manifestations of humour

is what Arthur Koestler calls "bisociative".1 It involves perception of

a situation or a happening in two habitually incompatible but

associative contexts. There is a confrontation of one matrix against

another, each governed by a different set of rules. The comprehension of this incompatibility, or the incongruity between two different

matrices in a single situation, needs an abrupt switch-over of the

train of thought from one matrix to another. Certain moods or states

of mind cannot follow such acrobatics of emotion, and they take the

line of least resistance by breaking into laughter. It is, to paraphrase Koestler's imagery, like a glass of water spilling on a rocking ship— the glass of our instinctive responses rocked by contradictory waves

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of matrices, spilling over helplessly into the easily available avenue

of laughter. Let me quote the story cited by Freud2 about the courtier of

Louis XIV's. One evening, he entered his bedroom to find his wife in

the arms of the local bishop. The husband walked calmly to the

window, opened it and went through the motions of blessing the

people in the street. When the startled wife asked him what he was

doing, he replied: "The bishop is performing my function, so I am

performing his." Here is a situation where two sets of conventional

rules are colliding. The expected pattern of the husband's reaction

suddenly collides with the expected pattern of the bishop's behaviour.

But unlike Othello's tragedy, the ascending curve of the narration

never reaches the anticipated climax—as the expected roles get reversed. Our tension is relieved, and we explode into laughter at the

sight of the husband blessing the people while the bishop makes love

to his wife.

The French story reveals another important dimension of the

comic. The mood or the state of mind which seeks the line of least

resistance, while responding to situations of incongruity, must to a

certain extent be detached from emotional involvement with the

particular situation. It is what Bergson described as "a momentary anaesthesia of the heart."3 The French husband was sufficiently detached, emotionally, from his wife's act of infidelity, to be able to

behave in the way he did. Koestler went a step further by defining this particular state of mind as "self-assertive", "defensive

aggressive."4 This implies one's ability to detach oneself from one's

ego and laugh at one's own self.

The state of mind of the observer or recepient of the comic is an

important factor. The unseemly sight of the man falling on a banana

skin may be comic to an uninvolved spectator, but can be far from it

to the man himself, or his near ones. We must note that laughter is

always the laughter of a group. Which travels freely—within a close

circle of people who share certain common concerns. Many comic

effects therefore are incapable of translation from one language to

another; they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular group. What was perceived as comic by a group of people (the lower orders

in this case) of nineteenth century Calcutta, might not have evoked

laughter among the contemporary bhadralok gentry of the city; and

they may not inspire a similar reaction among the non-Bengali

speaking people today.

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A less known theorist of the comic was Rabindranath Tagore.

Writing around 1894, he noted an element of cruelty in humour

which enables us to laugh at the expense of others. While agreeing that the perception of incongruity was at the source of laughter, he

pointed out at the same time that all incongruities in human situation

did not necessarily become comic. It is only when the incongruities affect us at the skin-deep level that we feel like laughing. The victims

of what might look like a cruel joke do not feel affected by the

incongruity of their situation. Watching the surrounding reality,

Tagore noted that the death of thousands in a famine could by no

stretch of imagination be a subject of a farce. But a frivolous

Mephistopheles might turn it into an object of raillery by discovering the incongruity between the dearth of sufficient food on the one

hand and the profusion of systems of Hindu philosophy and 330

million divinities on the other.5

Furnished with the situation which triggers off laughter and

the state of mind which can respond to it, the humorist starts

working upon both. The humorist's success depends on his/her

ability to play upon the unexpected—the sudden break in the

narration; the unusual juxtaposition of opposites, the anticlimax.

Secondly, there is almost always an element of exaggeration—the selection of a particular feature and its enlargement to the extent of

the absurd, as in caricatures, burlesques and pantomimes. We can

also discern a tendency to reverse the order of things and turn upside down the familiar world of conventions and rules: the servant

behaving like the master, the woman taking over the role of the man,

etc. Finally, there is often a wish to extrapolate the trends of a given situation to another world, to a different background—the present to the past, the human behaviour projected onto the world of

animals or gods.

What

was the prevailing socio-economic situation in 19th

century Calcutta that created an environment for the

comic? A new urban Bengali society was developing in

the metropolis which was marked by juxtaposition of divergent

attitudes. The new parvenu—the banians and dewans who amassed

fortunes by being brokers and agents for the British traders and

administrators respectively—were trying to be "a la mode", yet they

retained some of their past habits from their often obscure and

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humble origins, that clashed with their attempts to be "modern".

The alien customs of the recently-arrived British colonizers stuck out

like a sore thumb from amidst the traditional practices of the

indigenous population surrounding them. Loud proclamations of

religious morality—by both the Christian missionaries and the

Hindu priests—stood out in sharp contrast with the daily acts of

depredation, skull-duggery and debauchery indulged in by their

followers, among the rich and privileged British and Bengali inhabitants of the city.

It was in this disorderly world of lost bearings that the poor

migrants arrived in search of work and food. Their villages which

had been ravaged by colonial plunder after Siraj-ud-dowla's defeat

in the battle of Plassey in 1757. Unable to cope with the need to switch

over from their rural traditional matrix to the matrix of the new

urban contemporary Calcutta, these lower orders chose the line of

least resistance. Like the little man in Chaplin's films, they turned to

the comic: verbal pranks and visual mimes, making fun of the

hypocrisy of the filthy rich and the corrupt priests, the British rulers

and their indigenous flunkies. These poor people were at the bottom

rung of the city's socio-economic structure; and as a result they could

be sufficiently detached from the rat race that went on in the upper echelons of society, and also from the erudite debates on social

reforms and religious discourses that dominated the educated Bengali

society of that time. They were in that state of mind where emotion

was deserted by thought, where their hearts were "momentarily anaesthetized".

Their humorous creations also reflected the in-group feeling

among them as distinct from the out-group—the group of the

educated and privileged bhadralok. It was often an unconscious

expression of solidarity: a sharing of collective laughter at the

expense of the out-group. Their conception of the surrounding

reality took the form of daily anonymous acts of subversion in

popular jokes, sayings, proverbs, songs and pantomimes.

Every community possesses a distinct comic temperament which expresses itself in its own peculiar forms. J.B. Priestley defines

English humour as "curiously private and domestic ... it is part of

the atmosphere of the place, a hazy light on things; it manifests itself

in innumerable slow grins and chuckles.. ."6 Baudelaire refers to the

"significant raillery of the French, the untramelled, frothy, light

gaiety of the South, and . . . the profound Germanic sense of the

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comic."7If one were to identify a distinctive trait of Calcutta's comic

spirit, one would notice a peculiar tendency to mock at the city itself,

to deflate its claim of superiority. Significantly, from the eighteenth

century—there was never any love lost between the city and its

lower orders. One of the earliest popular jokes that they rhymed about Calcutta sums up the contemporary trends, both among the

British and the Bengalis.

]ai, juochuri, mithye katha

Ei tin niye Kolikata,8

"Forgery, swindling and falsehood. These three make up Calcutta."

Warren Hastings was trying to silence his critics—Phillip

Francis, John Clavering and George Monson—by offering each a

hundred thousand pounds. The Supreme Court judge, Elijah Impey was busy securing a lucrative government job for his relative through

Hastings. The Bengali Ganga Gobinda Singh, Dewan of the Calcutta

Committee of Revenue was amassing a fortune by extorting money from zemindars. The Deputy Collector of Calcutta, Gobindaram

Mitra, was acquiring vast plots of land illegally. When asked to give an account of his farms and profits from them, he gave out the story that all the documents had been either destroyed by the great storm

of 1738, or devoured by white ants!

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Calcutta society had

apparently blossomed forth spreading newer and newer sprouts of

perfidy and dissipation. A popular street song of the period pays tribute to the city in these words:

Ajob shahar Kolketa,

Randi, badi, judi gadi,

Michhey kathar ki keta?

"A strange city is this Calcutta. Whores and palaces, carriages and cars abound. And how fashionable it is to lie!"

The habit of lying and deceiving which had become ingrained in the city's moneyed circles was a running theme in popular jokes. One such story which travelled from mouth to mouth is about the

arrival of a boat loaded with "European lies" at the banks of the

Ganges. The officers of the East India Company, their Bengali

subordinates, the banians, moneylenders, traders—all came and

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Drawing by Mickey Pat

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collected their respective shares of lies. The hero of the story reached

the spot late, by which time the boat had been emptied. Sorely

disappointed, he was about to drown himself in the Ganges when

the goddess of the river, Canga, appeared before him and asked him

to take heart. She granted him a boon that he would never speak the

truth and would become "one hundred percent liar."10

Some of the popular sayings gained currency as proverbs like

Company latgiri parer dhoney poddari. "Usurping the wealth of others,

the East India Company servants have become aristocrats." It

indicates a surprisingly accurate perception of the process through which the Company's traders and officials became "nabobs." The

nineteenth century Bengali babu was fond of lounging, dressed in an

expensive dhoti with its front tuck (called koncha in Bengali) flowing in folds. This familiar sight in the streets of Calcutta gave rise to a

popular saying: Baire kochar patton, bhitore chhunchor ketton, "while

he parades his koncha outside, back in his home there is utter poverty

making his womenfolk screech like musk-rats." Women dancers

from the lower orders, known as khemtawalis, whose swinging steps in the city's streets and marketplaces retained the liveliness of

traditional folk dances, were looked down upon by the bhadraloks as

shameless creatures. But they became heroines of a contemporary

Bengali saying: Ghomtaradaley khemtar nach: a khemta dance performed behind the veil of a sari. This was flung back at the hypocrisy of the

bhadralok who indulged in improper acts under the cover of refined

manners.

Some of these proverbs were directed against the British,

particularly the Christian missionaries who went around

proselytizing. In fact, the new colonizers' need to understand these

proverbs led one missionary, Rev. W. Morton to compile the first

book of Bengali proverbs in 1832, called Drishtantabakya samgraha with an English translation. Explaining the background to the

compilation, a reviewer in the Calcutta Christian Observer of March

1834 wrote about his own experience as a missionary. He reports that during delivery of a solemn sermon, quite often "through the

repetition by a mischievous hearer of some proverb", the entire

congregation would dissolve into laughter. He explained his

helplessness and incomprehension "through the peculiar conventional meaning attached to the leading words in the sentence,

we could not at the moment understand, and to which therefore we

could offer no appropriate reply..

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These proverbs were thus often a weapon in the hands of the

urban poor, who sought to cut down to size their superiors— whether the colonial missionaries or the Bengali babus. Here again, we find two opposite types of self-representation colliding—the comic irreverence image and the serious "know-all" image. Within

the psyche of the poor, there was an antagonism: a contradiction

between pragmatic acceptance of a daily compromise with their

superiors, the colonial regime and its rules and customs on the one

hand, and rebellion at the symbolic level through lampooning these

situations.

In

these popular jokes we find the usual comic techniques: the

exaggeration of a particular social vice; in a reversed mechanism,

lifting this voice to the position of a precious commodity, and

giving the vice as important a value as the traditional virtues like

honesty, truth, etc. in a mock heroism. Typical is this verse which

lampoons the habits of the rich and their addiction to the numerous

intoxicants that were proliferating in nineteenth century Calcutta. It

is in the form of a street-guide supposedly directing pilgrims to

religious spots:

Baghbajare ganjar adda, gulir Konnagare, Battalae mader adda, chondur Bowbajare. Ei sab mahatirtha je na chokhey herey, Tar mato mahapapi nai trisansarey.u

"Baghbazar is the centre of hemp-smoking, Konnagar of opium

pills. Battala is the centre of drinking, and Bowbazar of opium

smoking. If anyone fails to visit these places of pilgrimage, there

can't be a worse sinner than him in heaven, earth and hell." Here

again is the world upside down. The traditional pilgrimages—Gaya,

Banaras, Vrindaban—have been replaced by the new dens of

addiction of the nineteenth century metropolis.

Among other entertainments of the nouveau riche were lavish

rituals, expensive parties for the city's British elite, and setting of

birds to fight for sport, which became subjects of raillery of their poor

neighbours who lived in the slums surrounding the palatial buildings of the Bengali rich in the Black Town (the part of the city inhabited

by the indigenous population, as distinct from the White Town,

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reserved for the Europeans). One such popular rhyme records their

habits:

Durga puja ghanta nere, khoka holey bajey dhak, Kakatua chherey diye khanchae kina pulley kak.

Bishoy-kammo gollae galoe, lodiye kebol bulbuli, Prakriti-bikriti hai hai! Mara geloe lokguli.n

"Bells ring at Durga Puja, Drums beat at the birth of a son. They let fly the parrot from the cage and bring in the crow. Their business

goes to the dogs, and the only warriors are their fighting cocks. Thus

they die—their nature knocked out of shape!"

Maharaja Nandakumar, a one-time protege of the East India

Company, during his heyday (before he fell foul of Hastings and got

hanged) invited 100,000 Brahmins to a grand feast at his house to

fulfil some religious obligation. The city's poorer classes ridiculed

the scramble among the invitees and described their plight in a

verse:

Keu khele machher mudo, keu khele bonduker hudoP

"Some were treated to the delicacy of fish-heads, others to the

thrust of the musket-butt."

Later in the 1840s, when the poet's grandfather Dwarkanath

Tagore established the Carr, Tagore and Company, he used to throw

sumptuous dinner parties for the city's English top brass at his

garden house in Belgachhia in north Calcutta. The lower orders

went around the streets mocking at these parties:

Belgachhiar bagatie hoy chhuri-kantar jhanjhani, Khana khaoar kato maja, Amra tar ki jani? Jane Thakur Company.14

"Knives and forks are clanging in the Belgachhia garden house; what fun with all that food around! But what do we know of it? It's

all an affair of Tagore Company." At times, the disparagement oversteped the class boundaries,

its target being not only the upper classes, but members of the entire

Bengali community. There is a tendency towards laughing at oneself

in some of the popular sayings. In the daily acts of subservience and

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increasing erosion of self-respect, these poor people could escape the

humiliation only by taking the line of least resistance—often by

lashing out at themselves. The following is an interesting specimen:

Tantir shobha tantkhana,

Dorjir shobha suto.

Bangalir shobha betraghate Juto ar gunto.K

"The handloom becomes the weaver; the cotton thread befits

the tailor. As for the Bengali, his reputation is that of getting

whipped, kicked and butted."

This self-flagellatory element in the thinking of the Bengali

community survives even today in the comic spirit of Calcutta. The

wall graffitti are the best examples. A few years ago, a Bengali chauvinist organization called "Jago Bangali" sprawled on the walls

of the city the slogan: Bangali, jegey othoe, "Bengalies, wake up!" The

next day, an anonymous slogan appeared underneath the original: Kancha ghum bhangiyo na\ "Don't wake them up from their doze."

Such repartees actually hark back to the nineteenth century when folk poets, known as kobials, engaged in verbal duels of

extempore verses. These duels or kobir larai as they were known, were popular in Calcutta from the end of the eighteenth till the

middle of the nineteenth century. Most of the versifiers came from

the lower classes, the most popular of them being Gonjla Guin from

a caste of cow-owners, Keshta Muchi or Keshta the cobbler,

Raghunath Das, variously described as a blacksmith or a weaver,

and Bhola Moira, the sweetmeat maker.

Although patronized by the rich, these kobials retained their

own independence. When not directed at each other, the raillery of

the kobials was focussed on their patrons—sometimes in scathing barbs of satire. Thus, during a contest in the house of a zemindar,

when one sycophant kobial flattered the host and described his

landed estate as Vrindaban, Bhola Moira retorted:

Orey beta, gabi, poisha lobi, Khoshamodi ki karon?

"Stupid fool! sing a song, and take your money. Why go for

flattery?" He then turned to the host and asked him to pardon him

if he did a bit of plain-speaking, by describing the host's avarice and

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tight-fistedness in these words:

Pimpre tipey gud khaye

Mufoter modhu oli.u

"He squeezes out molasses from the ant that sticks to it, and is

greedy like the bumble bee hovering over free honey."

f ■ 1 opics of such verbal duels, and other forms of Calcutta's

popular culture like jatra, panchali, etc. were not confined only JL to the social vices of the rich. An interesting characteristic of

these cultural manifestations was the verbal desecration of the

Hindu divinities. There were couplings of serious myths with their

earthy, abusive parodies, of gods with their comic doublets in

rhymed ripostes. The ethereal, the heavenly, the sublime were the

staple of the Sanskritized romantic poets. The latter's heroes and

heroines, as well as the images and metaphors, were highly

glamourized, dressed in the robes of the gentry and identified with

the elite. The songs of the Calcutta street composers, the kobials and

jatrawallas on the other, represented as it were, the counter culture of

the lower orders. They delighted in turning upside down the myths of Radha and Krishna, or Shiva and Parvati, and in deromanticizing the nature and landscape from which the poets borrowed their

metaphors. Let us take a few examples. The first is from a panchali by Dashu

Ray, a folk form of songs interspersed with recitation of short

rhymes about Hindu divinities. Although Dashu Ray cannot be

strictly called an urban poet, his panchalis were highly popular and

sung in Calcutta during festivals. In this song, living women

characters called kula-kalankinis or fallen women seek to demystify the Hindu mythological characters:

"Take all the ages—satya, treta, dwapar and koli—nowhere

will you find women who can claim to be chaste."

They then come out with a long list of the heroines of

Mahabharata—the progenitors of the Pandavas and Kauravas, who

through several generations gave birth to the future heroes out of

Satya, treta, dwapar, koli juga chatushtoy Dekho cheye sakal nari sati kichhu noy.

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wedlock by mating with a god or a sage—Satyavati, with whom

before her marriage, the Sage Parashara fell in love which resulted

in the birth of Vedavyasa, the composer of Mahabharata; Ambalika

and Ambika, who on the death of their husband, Vichitravirjya, slept with Vedavyasa and gave birth to Dhritarashtra and Pandu; Kunti,

who before her marriage, slept with the sun-god Surya and became

the mother of Kama. Then, the "kula-kalankinis" ruefully sing:

When it comes to the gods, it is drummed as mere sport But when we do the same thing, it is called sin}7

A common theme in these popular verses and songs was the

desertion of Radha by Krishna after he left Vrindavan and went to

Mathura to become the ruler there. There were several interesting dimensions to this episode in Krishna's life—the rise of a poor cowherd (which he was in Vrindavan) to the position of the ruler of

a kingdom, his abandonment of his beloved Radha and his cowherd

friends of Vrindavan, and his refusal to recognize them when they sent messengers to Mathura. They had significantly, their parallels in contemporary Calcutta society: the rise of obscure people from

humble origins to the position of the nouveau riche in the city, their

desertion of their wives and former acquaintances in villages where

they left them behind, and their subsequent attempts to erase their

past, of which they were ashamed, to climb up the social ladder.

In these popular songs, Krishna was often projected as an

archetype of the nineteenth century Calcutta parvenu; and his new

consort in Mathura, Kubja, as the counterpart of the ugly urban

mistress who makes herself up to seduce the parvenu. Here is how

Dashu Ray makes fun of the cowherd-turned-king Krishna's love

for his new-found mistress:

Ekhon notun peerite jaton berechhey. Tumi banka, kubja banka, dui bankatey milechhey.

Khanda nakey jhumko nolok duliyechhey

Mathar phankey taker upon parchuletey gherechhey. Bhalo Bhalo gahona ganta, tate abar diamonkata,

Porey jeno bhangon budi shejechhey.18

"In your new love affair, you are pouring now more affections

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on your beloved. Both of you are crooked—you stand knock-kneed

and Kubja is hump-backed. So, you are a well-matched pair She

hangs a pendant from her snub nose... she hides her bald pate with

a wig. The decrepit hag decorates herself with rich jewellery with

bevelled ornamental patterns." The term "crooked" or banka in Bengali in the song, alludes to

Krishna's classic tribhanga pose, playing the flute with the three parts of his body, the head, waist and legs, bent in a curve. Dashu Ray

picks upon this twist in Krishna's image to turn it into a symbol of

his crookedness—implied in his seduction of Radha and subsequent desertion of her. In mythology his new-found consort, Kubja was a

maid in the royal family of Mathura. She was hump-backed, but

cured of the deformity by Krishna after she had offered him perfumes when he was on his way to Mathura to kill his uncle, Kamsha and to

conquer Mathura. Dashu Ray however ignores Kubja's physical transformation, and chooses to portray her as a decrepit creature

who is bent on bedecking herself with jewellery—in a bid to impress his listeners with parallels with the contemporary situation, where

diamonkata jewellery was a much-coveted possession both among the wives and the mistresses of the Bengali rich.

A funnier reinterpretation of the Krishna legend is provided by

Rupchand Pakshi—a versifier living in early nineteenth century Calcutta who was quite an institution in those days. Although not

from the city's lower orders and therefore not strictly eligible for

inclusion in Calcutta's popular culture, Rupchand yet needs to be

recognized as a part of the city's comic culture. Born as Rupchand Das, he became a favourite of the fashionable members of the

Calcutta gentry. Associated with the famous hemp-smoking club at

Baghbazar in north Calcutta (started by Shibchandra

Mukhopadhyaya, the idle son of a rich dezvan who made money by

serving English officers), Rupchand indulged in a flamboyant

lifestyle. As a leading member of the Baghbazar club, where the

members were allotted names of birds according to their capacity to

smoke hemp, Rupchand went around the town in a carriage designed as a bird's cage and chose the surname pakshi or bird. From among

many of his songs, I choose one in particular which should be easily understood. The song is composed in a jargon of Bengali mixed with

English words—fashionable among sections of the educated Bengalis of that period, who spoke that hybrid to snuggle up to their English bosses as well as to impress their less-educated Bengali neighbours.

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The song describes the plea made by a messenger sent by Radha from Vrindavan to Krishna in Mathura. The messenger, a

woman, seeks an interview with Krishna and pleads with the

gatekeeper of his palace at Mathura. Describing Krishna as a

"blockhead" for having deserted Radha, she claims that he is bound

to Radha as a servant by a written agreement, and therefore needs to

be taken away forcibly to Vrindaban. She then refers to his moral

character which is blemished by his record as a thief when as a child

he stole butter from his mother's kitchen; and later when he seduced

Radha by playing on the flute. It is this thief who is today the king of Mathura!

Let me go orey dwari, I visit to Bangshidhari, Eshechi Brajo hotey, ami brojer puronari,

Beg you doorkeeper let me get, I want to see blockhead, For whom our Radhey dead.

Ami tare search kori.

O Radhar kena servant.

Ei dekho achhey das khato agreement, Ekhoni korbo present, Brajopure labo dhori.

Moral character shuno or, O Butterthief, noni-chore,

Blackguard rakhal poor, Chore Mathurar dandadhari

Kahey Rupchand Birdskin, Black nonsense very cunning. Fulutete korey sing

Majayechhe Rai Kishori

Here we find a comic extrapolation of the contemporary social

trends to a different background—the mythical past. There is also

the bringing together of two incompatible associative contexts:

English and Bengali, the divine and the profane, the sacred and the

sacrilegeous, Krishna the god and the parvenu of nineteenth century Calcutta—all derived from the traditionally solemn and religious

concept of the divine love of Radha and Krishna! The comic in these

songs innocuously annihilates greatness and dignity. One recalls the

words of Karl Marx: "The final phase of a world-historical form is its

comedy. The Greek gods, already once mortally wounded, tragically

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in 'Aeschylus' 'Prometheus Bound' had to die once more comically in the dialogues of Lucian."20

While mythological characters and divinities became objects of

caricature and parodies, religious practices of the Hindu priests became targets of scathing satire. The Vaishnavite "gurus" in

particular, who had become notorious for their lechery and hypocrisy were the favourite butts of ridicule. This is how one popular couplet described them:

Magur machher jhol, jubotir kol

Mukhe hari bol, hari bol.

"Fond of fish curry and the lap of a young girl, while chanting Hari! Hari! all the time."

The Brahmin priests were known for their cupidity and gluttony. One proverb says:

Mara Bamun gange bhashey, Chinde doier name uthey ashey.

'The dead Brahmin floats on the river, but comes up alive at the

very name of food."

Another popular vehicle for exposing the hypocrisy of the

upper classes and the religious hierarchy was the street pantomime or sawng, as it was known in Bengali. These started as illustrations of

common proverbs and were brought out during occasions like the

hook-swinging festival of Chadak in April-May. Although sometimes

patronized by the rich of Calcutta's artisan colonies, such as

kansaripada, the colony of the braziers, they were acted out by the

urban poor. A Bengali newspaper describes a procession of sawngs in Calcutta during Chadak Puja in 1833. It mentions a sawng

caricaturing the bloated rich by depicting an old man covered with

flowers, with a foot afflicted by elephantitis. Another sawng was

worshipping his foot with all the piety of a devotee. This was

followed by a wooden platform borne by some sawngs. On it sat a

religious "guru" counting the beads of his rosary and muttering

prayers. As the bearers moved him round and round, he kept

turning his lecherous eyes now to the women watching the procession from the balconies and the next moment upwards in gestures of

prayers to his god.2'

Sawng processions were also accompanied by songs, known as

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sawnger gan. Here is an example of a song taking a crack at the

Bengali gentry's craze for titles like "raja" and "maharaja", which

were granted by the British rulers to their loyal subjects among the

Indians.

Ami raja bahadur,

Kochubaganer hujur. Jomi nai, jama nai, Naiko amar proja...

Andorey abola kande

Kheye amar saja.

Orey baja, baja, baja, Ta dhin ta dhin nachi ami,

Kochubaganer raja.22

"I'm a noble raja, the king of the garden of trifles. I've no land,

no savings, nor do I have any subjects ... I punish women in my home and make them weep. Beat the drum! Let me dance! I'm the

king of the garden of trifles."

We

must also note a process developing at the end of the

nineteenth century which reveals the temporary and

shifting nature of the boundaries between politics and

everyday life. Considerable areas previously segregated and

marginalised were becoming open to politicisation. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards,the new generation

of educated Bengalis were becoming more articulate, demanding civic amenities, equal positions with their English counterparts in

government jobs, political rights to organize, etc. Meetings and

debates in the columns of newspapers on these issues were a

common feature of Calcutta's social and cultural life. How did the

city's street poets react to these developments? Here again, they took

recourse to a double-edged device. They took on the mask of the

obtuse fool who pretends to praise the educated and the powerful, but ends up appearing wiser than them. A village poet, Baradaprasad

Ray, came to Calcutta, saw the civic facilities like roads, tap water,

gas light and telegraph wires. He composed a poem praising them

and paying homage to Queen Victoria for having introduced them.

He then ended his poem by raising a few questions:

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Kotha ma Victoria?

Pet bhorey pai na khete, kaj ki pathey? Kaler jaley kaj ki gasey?

Chai na ma tarer khabor

Dudiner parey Kar khabor key korbey deshey?23

"Where are you, mother Victoria? ... I don't even get two full

meals a day. What's the use of roads? What's the use of tap water and

gas light?... I don't need news through the wire, mother. After some

time, will there be anyone left among us to exchange news?"

This is a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the much touted urban

amenities—in a country where they were irrelevant for the majority of the poor.

The dialectical connection between the image of the ignorant fool, or the self-proclaimed coward and the astute joker has a central

place in popular culture. Ishwar Gupta was a middle-class poet

living in Calcutta in the first half of the nineteenth century. But

because of his early training in the composition of the popular kobial

songs, his idiom had the ring of the Calcutta street songs and the

cunning satire that underlay them. The following lines addressed to

Queen Victoria mock at the subservience of the Indians:

You are a generous mother, And we are your tame cattle. We haven't even learnt to raise our horns.

We'll only eat oil-cake, straw and grass. We only hope the white boss doesn't file a suit

And break our pots and pans.2*

Pretended cowardice which threatens to turn into accusation,

as in the above verses, often slips back into self-irony, like in the

following anonymous song:

Ma ebar moley saheb habo

Ranga chuley hat bashaye Pora native nam ghochabo. Sada hatey hat diye ma,

Baganey beratey jabo. Abar kalo badan dekhley parey Darkie boley mukh phirabo.25

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Drawing by Micke

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"Mother, I'll be born a white man in my next life. Putting on a

hat on my blonde hair, I'll get rid of this despicable term 'native'.

Arm in arm with a white woman, I'll go for a stroll in the garden. And

if I set my eyes on a black face, I'll turn away calling him a 'darkie'."

We find again the same propensity towards self-flagellation.

Significantly, this tendency was not confined to the popular poets

only. A host of nineteenth century educated Bengali authors at one

time or another, took recourse to farces, in order to attack their own

class. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's short sketches in Loka

Rahashya and Kamalakanter Daptar, Michael Madhusudan Dutta's

two plays—Budo Shaliker Gharey Ron and Ekei Ki Baley Sabhyata? and

Kaliprasanna Sinha's unforgettable Hutom Penchar Naksha are only a few of the many satirical writings, picaresque novels, humorous

belles-lettres that flowed all through the nineteenth century. The

bhadralok writers like Bankim and Michael always suffered from a

dichotomy. They were torn between a fascination for the raw, lusty

vigour of the folk culture on the one hand, and the obligation to write

in accordance with the fixed norms of the new educated Bengali

society on the other; between aspiring nationalistic feelings, and the

perpetual sense of humiliation of working under foreign masters.

But unlike the city's poorer popular poets, they had a stake in the

system. They could not opt out from it, given the comfortable

material existence provided by government jobs or professional

occupations in the colonial set up. In such a situation, their line of least resistance could only be

self-irony. The objects of irony were their own peers: the English educated Bengali lawyers and petty bureaucrats, the Anglicized "babus", the middle class clerks, the drunkards and debauchees

who came from their own families. While lashing out at them—and

themselves too—these bhadralok writers borrowed both the spirit and the language of Calcutta's street culture, often using the same

colloquial expressions and pungent barbs. This was the only cultural

output of the nineteenth century Bengali bhadralok writers which

came closer to the city's popular culture of that period.

It

is necessary to remember that the comic in Calcutta's popular culture was a response to the new social contradictions in urban

life, which the poor could not resolve within their inherited

framework of social and religious norms and beliefs. Their perception

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206 / SUMANTA BANER/EE

of the causes of their misery was often confused, as evident from the

social ambiguity found in their songs and poems. In particular, male-dominated values directed against women marked a large number of their compositions. In the melting pot of Calcutta's social

environment, like many other traditional norms and customs, the

behavioural pattern of women was also undergoing a change. Social

reforms were aiming at educating middle class women according to

Western standards. Widow remarriage was being introduced.

Women themselves were also asserting their rights—often in

aggressive forms, by leaving their homes and husbands, eloping with their lovers. Although such trends were not widespread, they were perceived as threats by conservative Hindu society. The popular

poets and songsters shared this perception too, anxious as they were

to secure the subordination of women within their own community. Educated women were particular butts of ridicule. Having

seen the manners of the English educated Bengali males, who were

too eager to ape their foreign mentors, these popular versifiers felt

that English-educated Bengali women would also behave in the

same way. A deliberate exaggeration in the description of these

newly educated women helped to create a stereotype that appears

again and again in numerous songs. Thus one song says:

Haddomoja Kolikale killey Kolketaye

Magite chadlo gadi, feting judi,

Hatey ghadi, hat mathaye...

Arshitey mukh are dekehey na, Ekhon kebol photograph chaye...

Goshalkhanaye khanshamatey Towel diye ga mochhaey... Abar purusher hat dhorey Public lecturey jaye.2(1

"Kaliyuga has turned Calcutta into a funny place. The wenches

are travelling by cars, phaetons and carriages... They carry sticks in

their hands and hats on their heads... They've forgotten mirrors and

only want photographs... In their bathrooms, they get themselves

wiped with towels by their servants... Arm in arm with their men,

they go to listen to public lectures. "

These images of educated women, painted in exaggerated colours, provided the street poets with a chance of comic inversion.

A reversal of roles, with the woman on top, helped them also to

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ridicule the submissive male—often described in these songs as

"bhedua", or a henpecked husband. The familiar motif appears in

the Kalighat "pats" too, where the husband is represented as a sheep

following his wife.

Such symbolic reversals of roles were treated in a different way in the popular songs composed by women of the lower orders. Since

the educated Anglicized Bengali woman, being alien to them, could

not become their heroine, they turned to the goddess Kali. Her image as an omnipotent female authority standing on the chest of a supine Shiva was worshipped all over Bengal. Here is a specimen of a song that used to be sung by a jhumurwali of those days, expressing her

unabashed glee at the discomfiture of Shiva:

Magi minsheykey chit korey pheley Aiye

Bukey diyechhey pa. Ar chokhta julur julur, mukhey neiko ra.27

"The hussy has thrown the bloke flat on his back. With her foot

on his chest, wordless she stands glaring in anger."

Looking back at nineteenth century Calcutta, one finds an

element of compulsion behind the humorous compositions of the

city's poor people. Humour operated at two levels. At one level,

there was their urge to escape from an increasingly depressing situation of squalor of slum life, the unhealthy environment and

poverty. At another level, there was the need to protest against what

they perceived as a total collapse of their own value system, as well

as against the social humiliation of inequality which they faced in

daily living. Their songs and rhymes, their dances and pantomimes concealed a certain malice. Yet, these forms of creativity allowed

expression of aggression—without becoming a direct threat to the

establishment. The lampooning of the foppish babus in the street

songs, the caricatures of the rich gentry in the sawngs, the

demystification of the deities and romantic heroes and heroines,

afforded them a temporary feeling of superiority. It was the in

group's sense of having the last laugh at the expense of the outer

group. In the process, they created as it were a second world: a second

life outside the official world of the respectable, educated classes. It

was an irreverent and inconoclastic world in opposition to the

bhadralok world of strict rituals and stiff restraints. Basically, there

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was a sense of anguish and distress at the social behaviour of the rich

and the powerful, a sense of being let down by those to whom they had always looked up for social norms and guidance. There was also

the feeling of defeat and frustration in their inability to cope with the

disorderliness of city life, a failure to switch over from one matrix to

another. Deep down perhaps they were a sad people, and chose the

line of least resistance—laughter. As Abraham Lincoln once said: "I

laugh because I must not cry."

References

1. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, London, 1978, p. 45.

2. Quoted by Koestler, op. cit., p. 33. 3. Henri Bergson, Laughter, London, 1935, p. 5.

4. Koestler, op. cit., p. 52.

5. Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. II, Calcutta, 1975, pp. 624-26,

(first published in 1894). 6. J.B. Priestley, English Humour, 1929. 7. Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter, New York, 1956, p. 128, (first

published in 1855). 8. Harihar Seth, Pracheen Kolikata, Calcutta, 1934, p. 314.

9. Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hu torn PencharNaksha, Calcutta, 1977, p. 46, (first published in 1855).

10. Chandrasekhar Bandyopadhyay, jatadharir Rojanamcha, Calcutta, 1982, p. 5,

(first published in 1883). 11. Harihar Seth, op. cit., p. 322. 12. , op.cit., p. 316. 13. -—-—-—op. cit., p. 315. 14. Soudamini Devi, Pitrismriti, Pravashi, Calcutta, 1319 (Bengali era), p. 232.

15. Harihar Seth, op. cit., p. 333.

16. Pramathanath Mullick, Sachitra Kalikatar Itihash, Calcutta, 1935, p. 83.

17. Harimohan Mukhopadhyay, Dasu Rayer Panchali, Calcutta, p. 639.

18. Baishnav Charan Basak, Bharatiya Sahasra Sangeet, Calcutta, p. 257.

19. Durgadas Lahiri, Ed., Bangalir Gan, Calcutta, 1905, p. 403. 20. Marx and Engels, Worke, Berlin, 1956-68, Vol. I, pp. 381-82. 21. Jnyananweshwan, April 27,1833. 22. Anusandhan, Asadh 17,1304 (Bengali era). 23. Unpublished diary of Kumudbandhu Ray, Arkandi, Faridpur (now in

Bangladesh). Quoted from a private collection.

24. Ishwar Gupta Rachanabali, Calcutta, 1974, Introduction, p. 11.

25. Sangeet Shastra, Calcutta, 1891, p. 359.

26. Baishnav Charan Basak, op. cit., p. 457.

27. Mahendranath Dutta, Kolikatar Puratan Kahini O Pratha, Calcutta, 1983, pp.

29-30.