In Bengal Today, Mamata Banerjee Represents the Bawdy Politic

Mamata Banerjee’s use of foul language exposes her hostility towards the Bengali bhadralok, writes Chandan Nandy.

Is Mamata trying to conceal her insecurities while resorting to invective in public domain? (Photo: The Quint)

Cuss words come naturally to Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee. She stops at nothing, even if it means putting to shame some of her male party colleagues with a rich and varied repertoire of Bengali invectives which burst forth as staccato when they speak in private.

But Mamata goes a step further. Expletives are employed not just in private but also in public. Take for instance her “speech” at a public rally in Jalpaiguri in north Bengal on December 4, 2014. Fulminating against the CPI(M), which had moved the Prime Minister’s Office while seeking a full and honest probe into the Saradha chit fund scam in which several of her party colleagues are allegedly deeply embroiled, Mamata let loose a volley with which many Bengalis, regardless of their social station, are familiar with.

Her allusion to “bamboo” being shoved up “our backsides”, complete with the accompanying hand gesture, left little to imagination. The rustic in the Jalpaiguri crowd regaled as she went after the CPI(M). But in Kolkata, genteel Bengalis were horrified at the public use of coarse and unrefined language said to be unbecoming of a woman chief minister.

Crude Language

Cut to May 1, 2016. Campaigning in Chandipur in East Midnapore, the red bastion she stormed in the wake of the March 2007 Nandigram police firing in which 14 persons lost their lives and sunk the CPI(M)’s fortunes four years later, Mamata’s uninhibited articulation, equating the state and Kolkata police with “pimps” (dalal) siding with the CPI(M), the Congress and the BJP, was vitriol. Of course, she was quick to add, much in the fashion her party storm-troopers, toughs and the neighbourhood mastaans, that she would settle scores alright.

There was more. “The manner in which central police forces were deployed in Kolkata for the conduct of polling (on April 30), it is in one word chyangramo (impish),” Mamata said, crudity laced with ordinary Bengali. In a comment, Ananda Bazar Patrika, the much-respected Bengali daily, wrote recently that “we find it distinctly uncomfortable that Mamata Bandyopadhyay the chief minister, the politician and the ordinary lady could employ such language.” The newspaper went on to warn that people often lose their common sense when the end is near.

The Leader’s Paranoia

Bengal first got a taste of Mamata’s foul tongue in her outburst following the infamous Park Street gang-rape. At that time, responding to media questions, Bengal’s first woman chief minister retorted that the ghastly incident was a shajano ghotona (cooked up incident). This was followed by her paranoid description of journalists, who questioned her government’s mishandlings, as “Maoists”.

Bengalis were appalled, more so because the soft and gentle façade that Mamata put up by instructing the traffic police establishment to play Rabindra Sangeet at traffic intersections and her paintings had finally begun to crack to expose a crassness that had clung to her since her childhood, adolescence and adulthood in South Kolkata’s Harish Chandra Chatterjee Street neighbourhood where she grew up.

Masked to Disguise

The chief minister’s penchant for inane paintings and Rabindra Sangeet was a cover, a message to fellow Bengalis that she was as genteel as they were and, therefore, someone who must be acceptable in bhadralok (respectable) society. She tried desperately to retain and burnish that image, but it did not take very long for the mask to come off. In a twisted way, Mamata herself tore away the mask, knowing fully well that the real visage would be recognised and respected by the plebeian.

As the mask melted away, what came to the fore was anathema to the refined and elegant Bengali. Shock and disbelief quickly replaced hero-worshipping a woman who had single-handedly dislodged the hated and haughty Marxists from Writer’s Building. The urbane bhadrolok, with his putative notions of modernity and progress, and brought up on cultivated tastes and civilised manners and marked by composure and high levels of education, was suddenly confronted by the chhotolok or lowly person – the bawdy.

West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee leads a party rally in Kolkata on April 28, 2016. (Photo: IANS)

Is Mamata Losing the Plot?

• After being voted to power, Mamata Banerjee has tried hard to project herself as someone who’s acceptable among Bengal’s bhadralok society.
  
• With her insensitive remarks be it on Park Street rape victim or invectives hurled at her adversaries, the mask of refinement is coming off.
  
• Lumpen elements dominating the political turf is not Mamata’s doing alone, some credit goes to the Left as well.
  
• As Mamata battles the CPI(M)-Congress alliance, her deployment of crude language is being interpreted as signs of insecurity.
  

Bhadralok-Chhotolok Divide

For years, the cultural pattern or mode of intergroup behaviour in Bengal have been guided by the great divide between the bhadralok and the chhotolok. But even as the two categories remained embedded in the social psyche, it did not burst onto the surface as dramatically as it did once the Trinamool Congress came close to and finally captured power in the state.

It is not that Mamata’s TMC heralded the lumpenisation of society and polity. That honour must go to the CPI(M) and some other Marxist parties who, by the middle of the last decade of the 20th century had begun to attract the underworld as Kolkata witnessed a construction boom. By the time the Marxists knew what hit them in 2011, the army of criminals and wannabe neighbourhood toughs had moved across to the TMC, bringing with them their strongarm and underarm tactics that served their new political masters as well as themselves.

As Mamata Banerjee the street fighter of yore battles the CPI(M)-Congress alliance on Bengal’s electoral turf with her back to the wall, her denunciation and railing accusations are being interpreted as a political expression of the slipping ground beneath. Whatever the outcome, this election is in many ways a contest between the cultured and the uncultured, the lettered and the unlettered, the crude and the sophisticated. It is a pitched battle the bhadralok seeks to fight to hold on to the vestiges of its declining culture and glories past.

Also read:

In Poll’s Decisive Phase, Questions Over Mamata’s Moral Authority

In Mamata Banerjee’s Kolkata Bastion, Is Trinamool in Trouble?