CROSSING THE BENGAL FRONTIER

“The exams consisted of papers in Accounts and Law ( with books and without books) and a language paper, and it was compulsory for non- Bengali officers to pass  in Bengali which consisted of three parts- Written, Oral or Viva and Dictation. Officers who passed all papers at one go were also rewarded with an extra increment, like the ones who underwent a vasectomy after two children. The Bengali paper for abangalis deserves a separate narration, and I would do it shortly.”

- from The Departmentals and Mister Sho Hai.

I really had trouble in learning to speak Bengali , which for a Hindi speaking person should have been actually easier since roots of both lay in Sanskrit . But I think learning language is more of a knack than due to any shared linguistic ancestry. Had it been so, I, brought up in a predominantly Bengali neighbourhood in Dhanbad , would have learnt it very early.

But I had no such knack , and studied in a Jesuit school which had been unfortunately split into separate sections for Bengalis and non Bengalis in what was Bihar's most cosmopolitan district. Even though I counted the Bengalis Anupam, Anil and Jude amongst my closest friends, the language of interaction would always remain Hindi.

If I had learnt to speak Bengali later on , it was primarily because of the encouragement from people in West Bengal. Bengalis profoundly encouraged anyone trying to learn their language- I guess it is so with most of the provincial linguistic communities in India. There was no question of anyone laughing to make you feel conscious if you mispronounced a word or committed any howler which incidentally one did with dead certainty and alarming frequency those days.  In my entire two years of learning to speak the language , only once I had someone make fun of my Bengali. It was in a village under  Galsi Police station where I had been undergoing my thana training . We had gone to attend to an information about  suicide by a married woman, and in the course of the visit, I must have said something and a young lad of 16-17 laughed , mimicking me. His laughter had not even died down when the local Pradhan took hold of his hair, and violently boxed his ear.

' Shala, tor kono lojja nei,ekhuni khoma cheo', he rattled him up and the poor boy immediately apologized.

Contrast this with the way the Hindi wallahs make fun of other Hindi spoken by Bangali babu or Sardarji or a Madrasi. Forget this, within the Hindi world, there is a linguistic hierarchy so that even a Balliatic laughs at Bihari's Hindi only to be sniggered at by the fellows in Allahabad and Lucknow - the UPites, despite having the holiest city Benaras and Ram's Ayodhya never got over the fact that it was the kings of Bihar who had  ruled over the mightiest empires in India!  The Dilliwala , ruling India for the seventh time in the country's history, as in so many other things, takes a dig at the Hindi spoken not only by the Bihari, but also by the guy from Etawah and Bhopal and Sonepat. Even the Bihari, whose Hindi occupied the lowest rung in the language varna system, was derisive of the Bengali Babu's Hindi. Making fun of language was a trait that the Hindiwallas passed on to the Bengalis as well, so much so that the Bongs who would never laugh at a Bihari's Bengali would roll over with laughter at another Bong's Hindi- they also inspired the care- a -fig -for- gender Hindi of Marwaris in Kolkata.

It wasn’t, however,  just due to the generosity of the Bengalis that I managed to learn to speak the language well enough to pass the Oral Test. `It was also due to the magnanimity of the Board for Oral Test which was Moderate, unlike the Extremist Written Bengali group. It would  even pass guys from the Land of Five Rivers who spoke Bengali not with a rosogulla in their mouth but sugarcane clenched between their teeth,  and rarely failed anyone thrice. Most cleared at one go, I did in the second.

It was only our lack of knowledge of Bengali punctuation signs that led to our failure in the first attempt at Bengali Dictation- most of us did not know that that the full stop or poorna viraam was called Daandi. The result was that whenever the person reading out the passage from Kapaalkundala would say daaNdi, we would write it as a word and not put the punctuation sign instead. The upshot of this all was that passage  was splattered with the word "daandi" and most failed. Soon after the exam, the fault was realized, a note made and all passed during the second shy.

The Bengali Written paper in the Departmentals was a tough one to crack. It consisted of a pair of passages for translation- Bengali to English and English to Bengali, comprehension, one essay and a letter, generally to one's mother. Translations from Bengali were from Kapaalkundala again, highbrow sadhu bhasha stuff, written by Bengal’s first Calcutta University graduate, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya. This made the start torrid like the first few overs of swinging pace bowling on a dreary English morning. As such,the Bengali script became difficult as soon as it entered the world of juktakkhors ( not only is their construction very complex, their pronunciation, at times, unrelated to the sound of their components) and if you combined this with the very limited vocabulary, the paper appeared to be too insurmountable a challenge. I think the paper setters and examiners took it as a personal affront if some abangali would pass in just one or two attempts , and would, therefore, be ruthless in setting and parsimonious in evaluating.

Sometimes I wondered whether setting the written Bengali paper was their way of getting a revenge for shifting the capital from Calcutta over 75 years ago and giving Subhash Chandra Bose a short shrift, an occasion to demonstrate the richness of the language of Tagore, remonstrate against Centre for withholding funds to Bengal and to protest against Rajiv Gandhi for calling Calcutta "a dying city". The more the Khottas, Udes, Hindustanis, Shordarjis, Meros , Madrasis assembled together for the Bengali Written exam, the more the mirthful banter at the expense of the Bengalis flowed - ma bokbe, aloo posto dim shiddho, supercillous aan”tlami, fish in pulses and other peculiar culinary practices.

I was not alone in finding Written Bengali difficult . A senior IAS officer once confided that he would get chits prepared for the likely questions in the exams and hide them inside his socks , but the problem was that when he would take them out, he did not know which chit was for which question! Another senior recently commented that one officer took to wearing uniform and carrying his service revolver to the examination hall as signs to prove how no- nonsense -dead- serious approach he had towards clearing the exam. Most of them relied upon the ability of a friendly colleague to sit outstretched from the seat to allow copying. One even arranged for a look alike imposter to write the paper ( but he somehow failed). Most of us took tuitions, and I also did when I had just one chance left before I was due for my promotion.

Despite the tuitions, I was a bit diffident and had requested a batchmate to arch out a bit to enable me to confirm that I was on the right track. I had cajoled him  to sit in front of me , a decision I had made during the Settlement Camp. The camp,  held the previous winter  over six weeks in Alipurduar for Revenue, Police and Judicial services recruits,  was memorable for many reasons : my first exposure to the incredibly beautiful Jalpaiguri district where if you took an eastward ride from Coronation Bridge you came across miles of tea gardens, a few dots of army units  and some famous forest sanctuaries on either side of the road, the southern  Himalayas  hills giving you snow-capped company right through while white rivers like Leesh, Geesh and Teesta  streaked playfully across your path ; field visits carrying Gunter's chain; lots of tennis ball cricket in a  ground around which we had shacked up in tents , played mischief like school kids in the lazy afternoon classes sparing neither the Camp Commander nor the Divisional Commissioner and reviewed the day’s proceedings in the Old Monk's Tent.

The Land and Land Revenue Department which conducted the Settlement Camp was one of the oldest departments in the state, and as such departments go, had an obsession for changelessness. It insisted that the Settlement Camp officers wear shorts during field visits and use service latrines, perpetuating, at public expense, the abominable practice of manual scavenging even after forty five years of our Independence and fifteen years of of one of the longest elected communist governments in the world!  The joining instructions , we read with a chuckle, contained directions on do's and don't's of bringing and keeping cycle and servants, storing firewood  and cleaning of lanterns.

But the camp was also memorable for exposing to me the precocious proficiency of a batchmate in Bengali.  I saw him carry thick novels of Bankim Chandra and Sharat Chandra and heard him speak in chaste Bengali with a dazzling fluency. I had made mental note of this mastery for future use, and finally after flunking in Written Bengali for a third time ( which is not as bad or rare as you think it seems), I picked on him to bail me out. To be fair to him, he cooperated like a true friend. But after sometime, I realized that  my benefactor was not batting properly.

‘I  don’t think you are going to pass ,’ I told BN and got up, some fifteen minutes before the bell,and handed over my Bengali answer script to the invigilator who accepted it  with a smile. He proceeded to fold his hands in a namaskar and extend a warm invitation in Bengali to come again.

'Abaar aashben,' he said.

'Nischoy dhekha hobey', I also waved an affectionate goodbye to Guin Babu to acknowledge his  invitation. The kind - hearted ministerial staff, one of the many such invigilators, had become a familiar face for people like me who kept on coming back to to the exam hall at West Bengal Public Service Commission building at Tollygunge  every six months for writing our departmentals.

He must have seen me struggle with my paper, not just from what I was writing but also from where I was trying to copy . It is not that  what my benefactor batchmate wrote would have been substandard stuff on that  balmy afternoon . I was sure he must have answered his paper quite well, but his problem, in my view, was  homesickness in matters scriptural.  He  was  a  proud Telugu bidda, with great longing for the script of his mother tongue . When he wrote Bengali which had a much more pointed script, like the present POTUS's , he wrote with such an overwhelming homesickness that the end product morphed into letters which resembled Odiya more than Bengali. If I could not follow what he was writing in his letter to his mother about his first day in office, there was little chance that the jabakusumed examiner would.

It is a different matter altogether that on being let down by by my batchmate ‘s handwriting I had to fall back on my knowledge of Bengali brushed up by Tamluk mastermoshai.

As luck would have it, I passed and he flunked yet again.