by Sharmila Sen
In time, Anglo-Indians developed their own culture, their own slang and cuisine. Due to the policies of the British Empire, many of them found jobs in the Indian Railways and Indian Telegraph Services. Some of them became schoolteachers in English-medium schools where they could teach children like me how to say Please and Thank You and Excuse Me and How Do You Do and Good Morning and Good Night prettily. Miss Solomon was quite a few shades darker than me, but her fluent English and her clothes made her more Westernized than I was. She taught me the English alphabet and introduced me to numbers. Most importantly, she gave me the ability to comprehend new information in a language that was still foreign to me. The first report card I received from her in 1975 has survived many decades and is still in my possession. I feel more sentimental about that old report card than I do about my Ivy League diplomas. In it, I can see a gentle teacher inviting a Bengali child into a new world of English. If I could see her today, I would surely rise from my chair and curtsy just as she taught me, and say, “Thank you, miss.”
What Miss Solomon began would be carried forward by a series of teachers—Hindu and Christian; Bengali, Punjabi, and Tamil. Very soon all of us girls were responding to our teachers in fluent English, gossiping among ourselves in English, and reading English books in our free time. I was formally introduced to reading and writing in English when I was four. At the age of five, I was formally introduced to reading and writing in my mother tongue, Bengali. I comprehended Hindi just as well as Bengali, but I would not learn how to read and write Hindi until I was nine. The Bengali girls spoke in Bengali to one another during recess, known as “tiffin time” back then, but we spoke in English to one another during class. The girls who came from other ethnolinguistic groups—Tamils, Biharis, Punjabis, Marathis, Marwaris—no doubt understood Bengali. Most of them had lived all their lives in Bengal. Yet, through some unspoken agreement, we spoke to one another only in English. It was to be our “link language”—the language that glued us girls from diverse linguistic groups together. Thomas Babington Macaulay would no doubt be very pleased at this turn of events.
We were all distant descendants of Lord Macaulay’s “interpreter class”—a group of English-educated Indians prescribed by the British politician’s infamous 1835 parliamentary speech, known as the “Minute on Indian Education.” Many historians jokingly call it the longest minute in Indian history because one change in educational policy—the language in which some Indians were to be instructed—would bring about a seismic shift in Asia whose effects can be felt in global politics, business, and artistic production to this day.
Language joined us and divided us. Bengalis love stark binaries. We are born knowing there are two kinds of people in the world: Bengali and Non-Bengali. Black, white, Christian, pagan, Hindu, Muslim, straight, gay, rich, poor, skinny, fat, man, woman, friend, foe, Gryffindor, Slytherin—these categories vanish in the face of the main categorical divide in our world. Bengali and Non-Bengali. Bangali. Abangali. Once we separate out all the Non-Bengalis from the Bengalis, there is yet another division within the Bengali universe. Are you from paschimbanga, West Bengal, or from purbabanga, East Bengal? The question is of great importance to Bengalis and means absolutely nothing to other South Asians. West Bengalis are nicknamed ghoti and East Bengalis are nicknamed bangal. In the 1970s, we kept track of exactly what percentage of each category of blood ran through our veins, looking back at least two or three generations. When marriages were arranged, gossipy aunts asked leading questions in order to decipher if the bride’s family was ghoti or if the groom’s family was bangal. During soccer season in Calcutta, ghotis supported the Mohun Bagan team and bangals supported the East Bengal team. Three of my four grandparents counted places in purbabanga—Comilla, Khulna, Sylhet—as their ancestral homes. One grandparent counted Barrackpore in paschimbanga as his ancestral home. That made me 75 percent bangal and 25 percent ghoti. During soccer season, I quietly rooted for the East Bengal team. When Mohun Bagan won, the fans celebrated victory with tiger prawns cooked in coconut milk. Hilsa fish cooked in a fiery mustard paste was the delicacy of choice for East Bengal victories. Small differences will always prove to be more divisive than the big ones, just as little traditions have more adhesive power than the great ones.
All the girls in my Catholic convent school—girls who repeated the Lord’s Prayer four times a day, attended daily English elocution classes, learned Wordsworth poems by heart—knew who was Bengali and who was not, who was Hindu and who was not, who was ghoti and who was not. With the exception of one Sikh girl, the only non-Hindu girls were the Christian ones. The Christian girls kept themselves apart from us. In their case, it was not faith that divided us but social class. The religion once associated with the ruling Europeans was now largely the religion of converts from poorer segments of society in modern India. There were a few aristocratic Christian Indian families no doubt. In my school, however, the Christian girls were all “scholarship girls.” A Christian charity paid for their tuition. They received free food during tiffin time. When we asked our Father in heaven to give us our daily bread, I did not understand that the Christian girls were receiving free loaves at school.
The Catholic nuns praised us for memorizing the Lord’s Prayer and for reciting it with the correct English pronunciation. Among ourselves we knew that it was important to learn the prayer and the language, but stop short of conversion. We lived in a Hindu majority state in a Hindu majority nation. Being part of the dominant group meant being able to carelessly pick up some styles, words, affects of minority cultures, while maintaining our dominant status. A truly dominant group is unthreatened by minority cultures as long as they can be domesticated, consumed, transformed into an accessory, a condiment, a bit of swag.
I attended the convent school from the age of four until I was nearly twelve. This was where I learned algebra, geometry, biology, chemistry, physics, grammar, recitation, history, geography, literature, needlework, and art. Yet, I did not learn that my school was named after a Christian religious order founded on a mountain range in northern Israel in the twelfth century. I did not learn that the Book of Kings tells us there was an important altar to God on this very mountain. Pythagoras may have visited it. Tacitus wrote there was an oracle on the mountaintop. I did not know these stories.
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Each morning a gray school bus took me to the school and each afternoon the same bus dropped me home. We rented a one-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a three-story building. It was a typical south Calcutta house built around the middle of the twentieth century. The windows had wooden shutters and vertical iron bars. The bars were intended to provide security while still allowing us to buy small items from street hawkers throughout the day. The Kwality ice-cream man, the seller of savory flattened chickpeas, a neighbor who was returning a borrowed book—none of these people had to come inside our house to conclude their business. The iron bars were spaced just wide enough for us to pass a small ice-cream bar, a paperback, or even a little packet of snacks. If I wanted a balloon from the balloon man, or if Ma wanted to buy a new stainless steel cooking pot, the iron-barred windows would be our first point of contact. The final exchange would have to occur at our doorstep. Printed cotton curtains fluttered from each window, keeping the sun out. The walls in each room were painted a different pastel color and the floors were terrazzo. Tube lights lit up each room at night and ceiling fans cooled the rooms. The tube lights went dark and the fans came to a standstill when power shortages led to frequent brownouts. We called these power cuts “load shedding”—the electrical grid was overburdened and needed to shed its load. During load sheddings, everyone resorted to candles, kerosene lanterns, and hand fans made with palm leaves. Water shortages were common as well. Several plastic buckets filled with clean water always stood guard in one corner of our bathroom, in anticipation of that moment in the day when the taps would suddenly run dry.
Our home was loca
ted on Dover Lane—a residential street in the southern part of Calcutta. Our landlords were a middle-aged couple from Serampore, a small town near Calcutta. Once an important center of cotton and silk weaving, the area was colonized by the Danish in the eighteenth century, and subsequently came under British rule. Our landlords were part of a feudal family with a large estate in Serampore. The Dover Lane house was their city home. When I was a toddler, my parents had moved to this house from Asansol, a provincial town in West Bengal. Baba worked as a sales representative for an international pharmaceutical company in Calcutta. Ma looked after the running of the household. I was an only child, an increasingly common sight among educated, urban Indians looking to make a break from large households of the past.
All my memories begin in Dover Lane, Calcutta. I called our landlords Dadu and Didi—colloquial terms for grandfather and grandmother. Even though we were tenants, as the only child in the entire house, I was allowed to roam about every floor as I pleased. Dadu and Didi lived on the second and third floors, along with their two unmarried daughters and a maid. Their eldest daughter was married and lived outside Calcutta in a small coal-mining town where her husband was the colliery manager. The two younger daughters eventually married and left as well. Dadu, Didi, and Sushila, the maid, lived upstairs and acted collectively as my proxy grandparents.
Our ground-floor residence was adjacent to the living quarters of the doorman, Hriday Singh. He lived alone in a single room that was creatively divided into three separate areas with plywood partitions. Darwanji, as I always called him, had come from a village in Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India, and was a widower. His only child, a daughter, died young of a mysterious illness. He sent remittances back to his village every month. To make extra money he would wake up at four each morning and wash our neighbors’ cars. Occasionally, he gave me a taste of the delicious food he cooked for himself on his kerosene stove. Okra stuffed with tangy spices and dal puris—crisp little fried flatbreads stuffed with asafetida-scented lentils—were his specialty. He took me for walks when my parents were too busy to go out in the evening. Our favorite destination was the clothing shops on Gariahat Road with mannequins displayed in the front. We would walk on the crowded sidewalks and he would point out all the mannequins draped in beautiful saris. For some reason unclear to me, he and I referred to the mannequins as “mummies.” Some evenings, Darwanji would knock on our door and ask my parents if I wanted to go “see the mummies.” If my parents assented, I would eagerly put on my sandals and walk out to bustling Gariahat Road, holding tightly on to Darwanji’s hand.
Perhaps because he missed his own daughter, Darwanji was always kind to the neighborhood kids. The little stoop outside his quarters was a popular hangout spot for children, maids, cooks, and drivers from all over the neighborhood. In a city where people rarely mixed outside of their social class, this stoop was a special spot. Hindi-speaking migrants who worked as drivers or cooks sat beside the Bengali-speaking children of their employers. We chatted in a mix of languages, watched neighbors go about their daily life, listened to the barking stray dogs, and enjoyed the Hindi film songs broadcast by All India Radio.
Sushila worked as a maid for Dadu and Didi upstairs. She was an elderly widow who had been in their service since the family’s Serampore days. She put so much red chili paste in her fish curries that I would rarely eat the food upstairs. Ma and Baba employed a number of people as domestic help, and many of these people became an important part of my childhood. There was a live-in maid who usually helped with the cooking and attended to me. Another maid came in a couple of times a day to wash the dishes, do the laundry, and clean the floors. The jamadar, a man whose low caste condemned him to handling other people’s waste, arrived each morning to clean the bathrooms and take away the household rubbish. The ironing was done by an istriwallah who set up shop in the neighborhood and ironed huge piles of starched cotton saris, shirts, and school uniforms. Without appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners, daily household tasks provided employment to a small army of people who moved in and out of our flat throughout the day.
Of the series of live-in maids who worked for us, Mundi and Jamuna were my favorites. These girls—no older than fifteen or sixteen, roughly the same age as my daughter as I write these words—came from villages in Bengal. Their fathers visited us once a month to collect their wages. I do not know if the girls received any portion of their wages. Mundi pierced my ears secretly one afternoon when I was five, at my own behest, and for her good deed was fired from her job by my parents. I can still recollect with perfect clarity Mundi’s teenage hands confidently pushing an ordinary sewing needle through my earlobes. Wherever she is today, I wish I could tell her that each time I adorn my ears with jewelry, our stolen afternoon of girlish adventure shimmers into life for a brief spell. Jamuna told me wondrous stories about man-eating tigers that roamed the jungles outside the village from where she came. Minor deities from the Hindu pantheon played an outsize role in rural life and Jamuna brought all those gods and goddesses—the ones who protected villagers from diseases, who ensured a good harvest, who kept snakes and tigers away—to my Dover Lane home. She told me ghost stories and taught me folk dances from her village. Ma did not like these dances and promptly enrolled me in a local dance school where I began to be trained in the classical bharatanatyam style before Jamuna’s low, rural movements could leave an indelible mark on my body. Sometimes, when Ma was taking her afternoon nap, Jamuna and I still danced together in the small verandah behind the kitchen, our bare feet stomping on the ground, our hands on our swiveling hips.
Mundi’s and Jamuna’s villages were in the Sundarbans, a dense mangrove forest in the southernmost part of West Bengal. I had never been to the Sundarbans. In the Bengali imagination, the Sundarbans are as magical as the Forest of Arden in As You Like It or Prospero’s island in The Tempest. It is a wild and primeval place, replete with danger and eroticism. Jamuna told me of life in this mangrove forest, where tigers roamed free and shrimp were so plentiful that one could merely scoop up a bit of pond water with a piece of muslin and come home with enough tiny crustaceans to make a delicious lau chingri—a Bengali dish of bottle gourd cooked with shrimp. In the big city, shrimp and prawns were expensive delicacies. I dreamed of living in Jamuna’s village and feasting on lau chingri and rice every day.
Most of the residents of Dover Lane were middle or upper middle class. The majority of our neighbors were Bengali, with the exception of a Marwari family who lived right across the street from us. Marwari traders, originally from the northwestern state of Rajasthan, comprise an important community in Calcutta. Although we lived as neighbors, nodded to each other across our little street, politely attended each other’s wedding feasts, we rarely socialized with them. An imaginary line divided the Marwaris from the Bengalis and each group coexisted without too many instances of intermarriage.
We had a few neighbors from the southern Indian states as well. We lumped them all into one category and derisively called them Madrasis. Whether they were actually from Madras—present-day Chennai—or not, they were all Madrasi to us North Indians. Now we must add yet another marker to our list of social divisions in India—North Indian and South Indian. A linguistic line divided the northern states from the southern ones. In the north, we spoke Indo-European languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, and Marathi. In the south, they spoke Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada. Each group had negative stereotypes of the other and saw themselves as possessing the superior language, the more refined culture, the better food.
I recall no Muslims in our neighborhood. I naively believed all Muslims lived in a neighborhood in Calcutta known as Park Circus. Occasionally, Baba would bring home shemaiyer halua, a rich dessert of vermicelli cooked in thickened milk and scented with cardamom, saffron, and rose water. It is often served around Eid al-Fitr when Muslims mark the end of Ramadan. Baba knew Mu
slims through work and some of them would send us special dishes to mark the holidays. My grandfather had Muslim graduate students whose doctoral theses he supervised. In neighboring Bangladesh millions of Bengali Muslims resided. I saw Muslims in Hindi films—usually caricatured as men in fezzes with kohl-lined eyes or tragic courtesans who sang of moths and flames—but I never played with Muslim girls in my neighborhood or sat next to one in school. Muslims were either poor minorities or legendary emperors of the past who built the Taj Mahal in Agra. We studied Mughal history in school. We knew that the Muslim nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, had lost the battle of Plassey in 1757 to Robert Clive, ushering in British rule over India. Yet, those Muslims in the textbooks seemed to have no connection to the Muslims who lived in Park Circus and sent us shemaiyer halua.
The Bengali language is particularly rich in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish words. The common Bengali words for color, weather, temperament, fort, court, lawyer, client, crops, carpet, paper, pen, and inkwell were all brought to us by people who prayed facing Mecca. The list can go on. We do not normally think of these as loanwords. Just as you probably do not think of “algebra” or “horde” or “jungle” or “thug” as loanwords from Arabic or Turkish or Hindi when you are speaking in English. It is a wonderful thing that living languages can continually absorb new entrants and not impose visa restrictions on them. Bengali is no different from all other living languages in this aspect—its borders are open to immigration. It includes a treasure trove of words derived from Sanskrit, as well as from Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Even China and Portugal gave us some words. Bengalis refer to an elected politician as mantri. Bengalis love to drink tea, or cha, multiple times a day. Both mantri and cha are words we have inherited from our neighbors to the north, the Chinese. Some mornings we Bengalis eat a slice of toasted pao ruti during our breakfast. The Portuguese brought us the word pao, but we rarely recall that at the breakfast table. Similarly, we do not always remember that our Persian brethren gave us words for color (rang) and weather (aabohawa). I did not grow up parsing words for their religion or place of origin. Unfortunately, I cannot say I treated people in the same way.
