Garga Chatterjee “It is the land of anger, an exasperated land. A land which spits and spews, which spews life. That is what we must be worthy of. This creative part must be nurtured. This anger must be continued. We must continue. And not fall asleep into a sort of acceptance and resignation. There is a kind of challenge from history and a challenge from Nature. ”
- Aime Cesaire, master philosopher, founder of the Negritude movement and teacher of Frantz Fannon, while speaking on his native land Martinique.
On 2nd August, the West Bengal state cabinet decided to change the official name of the state from West Bengal to either Bongo or Bangla. The official “English” name will be Bengal. The immediate impetus for this name change seems to be the long-time problem that West Bengal representatives face at meetings called by the Union government where states are called to speak in the English alphabetical order of their names, where West Bengal comes last and hence generally doesn’t get enough time or audience. It is another matter why, in a decolonized republic, English alphabetical order is followed at all. In most subcontinental alphabetical orders, West Bengal would come much earlier. Mamata Banerjee herself was cut short at the Inter-State council meeting convened recently at New Delhi, where she was slotted at the very end. It is extremely unfortunate that a decision as important as changing the name of a state was provoked by a reason so bureaucratic. This problem was faced by the state government before and 5 years ago, Mamata Banerjee's government had decided to change the official name to Paschim Banga, the Bangla version of West Bengal. This would have pushed up the state's name in the English alphabetical order by a few notches. That name, perfectly fine, was arrived at after wide-ranging consultation and debate in media and among political parties and civil society. But New Delhi never “approved” it for unknown reasons. No such consultation or debate happened this time around before the cabinet decision. The change of name has been decided. A special session of the assembly will finally pass the already made decision. West Bengal's Parliamentary Affairs Minister Partha Chatterjee said that the change is for the sake of our “heritage and culture”. Ironically, writer Nabanita Deb Sen counters exactly that when she says, “The term West Bengal is our history, our heritage. How can we erase that?” Since 1947, the term West Bengal has also come to mean what we are. It's at least a term rooted in the real past as opposed to one of the proposed alternatives called “Banga”. The historical janapada called “Banga” from where the term originates is wholly outside the borders of West Bengal, largely in the Faridpur-Magura-Shariatpur-Dhaka areas in the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The western part of Bengal has not been a historically continuous political unit, except since the 1947 partition when Bengal was divided into the Hindu majority western half called West Bengal. The Muslim majority eastern half was called East Bengal till 1955, when it was renamed as East Pakistan and then after the national liberation struggle was politically constituted as the People's Republic of Bangladesh. Interestingly, Bangladesh as a name for the whole of Bengal and also for either Bengal was a name that was in wide currency till 1971 when the sovereign nation-state came to “own” the name Bangladesh while many people of West Bengal (except a few holdouts, the present author included) slowly gave up that name when they referred to themselves in common parlance, even as it continued to be the western part of historical Bangladesh, the desh of the Bangla speaking people. That historical ethno-linguistic reality of Bangladesh is as true now as it was a couple of hundred years ago. Bengal is the historical homeland of the more than 250 million Bangla speaking people, representing nearly 1 in 25 human beings, in the most densely population contiguous stretch on earth. This is no ordinary land. Between the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal, this land of active rivers teems with life and survival on this great fragile delta whose ongoing formation and sustenance is a daily epic, where Creation intended magic, anger, dreams and struggle. As Aime Cesaire might say, “a fantastic land, of extraordinary birth, its worth more than any big bang”. And its brutal Partition of 1947 politically divided this land like nothing before. The “West” is a reminder of what happened, of short-sightedness, of anger, of betrayal, of a cataclysmic event of almost cosmic rage channelized through human agents. For some, the “West” is a painful memory that is best forgotten by deletion, for some it is a painful memory to be reflected upon, for some it is a historical cross-road, for some it is the quiescent womb of future dreams, possibly permanently deferred. To dismiss that memory, however irrelevant it might be to the present populace whose historical memory was distorted by official post-1947 foundational myths, is to deny a people a way of expressing their identity, is to treat the present as being detached from the past. West Bengal without ‘West’ tries to invent a wholly-contained make-believe identity limited within its physical territory, as if another cosmic Creation of Bengal happened at Partition. This make-believe identity is especially paradoxical for the West whose primarily Hindu, roll-call from Bengal’s glorious past has no East but has Satyendranath Bose’s professorship at Dhaka University, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s deputy-collectorship at Jessore, Rabindranath Thakur’s literary productions while lounging in Kushtia, Masterda Shurjo Sen and Pritilata Waddedar’s armed insurrection in Chittagong. Thus events, ideas and conceptions, various ownerships get projected schizophrenically onto Bengal’s western sliver. This psychological phenomenon – where trans-frontier locales get uprooted from their real location but are not quite embedded on the other side of the frontier, thus leaving places, faces, spaces, events in a strange purgatory of cognitive inaccessibility – is a major consequence of Partition, giving rise to misshapen, constricted visions of one’s cultural past, severely restricting engagements in the present. Dropping “West” will only add to this smugness of being complete. But it is not.