Banerjee S - Laughter As Subversion

Laughter as Subversion in Nineteenth Century Calcutta's Popular Culture
Author(s): SUMANTA BANERJEE

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: 06/11/2013 06:07
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 support@jstor.org.
India International Centre is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to India
International Centre Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Lady with Hookah

SUMANTA BANERJEE
Laughter as Subversion in
Nineteenth Century Calcutta's Popular Culture
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
W" 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.
I hope that the present article would provide the readers
Since
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, by a different set of rules. The comprehension
each governed
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

188 / SUMANTA BANERJEE
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 reachesthe 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 situationsof 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.

Laughter as Subversion / 189
A less known theorist of the comic was

Tagore.Rabindranath
Writing around 1894, he noted of cruelty in

an element 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.
was the prevailing socio-economic situation in 19th

century Calcutta that created an environment for the
What 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

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

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 any love lost between

never 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 century, Calcutta
of the nineteenth 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

Drawing by Mickey Pat

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..

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.
these popular jokes we find the usual comic techniques: the
exaggeration of a particular social vice; in a reversed mechanism,

In 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,

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
and forks are clanging

"Knives 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

1 96 / SUMANTA BANERJEE
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

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:
Satya, treta, dwapar, koli juga chatushtoy

Dekho cheye sakal nari sati kichhu noy.
"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

1 98 / SUMANTA BANER]EE
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

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 awas
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.

200 / SUMANTA BANER/EE
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

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

202 / SUMANTA BANCRIEE
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 raja, the king of the garden of trifles. I've no land,

a noble
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."
must also note a process developing at the end of the

nineteenth century which reveals the temporary and
We 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:

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

Drawing by Micke

"Mother, man in my next life. Putting on a

I'll be born a white
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. BankimChandra Chattopadhyay's short sketches in Loka
Rahashya Kamalakanter
and 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-lettresthat 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.
is necessary to remember that the comic in Calcutta's popular

culture was a response to the new social contradictions in urban
It life, which the poor could not resolve within their inherited
framework of social and religious norms and beliefs. Their perception

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 andhusbands, 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

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

was a senseof 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,
(firstpublished 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,
(firstpublished 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.


Banerjee S - Laughter As Subversion

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Banerjee S - Laughter As Subversion

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Laughter as Subversion in Nineteenth Century Calcutta's Popular Culture

Author(s): SUMANTA BANERJEE

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

hat is so special about the laughter of a people

"packed and pestilential town on which Death

despondency, to associate laughter with such a city sounds

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

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

of matrices, spilling over helplessly into the easily available avenue

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

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

particular situation. It is what Bergson described as "a momentary

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

ego and laugh at one's own self.

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

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

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

speaking people today.

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

A less known theorist of the comic was

Writing around 1894, he noted of cruelty in

Mephistopheles might turn it into an object of raillery by discovering

working upon both. The humorist's success

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

was the prevailing socio-economic situation in 19th

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

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

indigenous population surrounding them. Loud proclamations of

religious morality—by both the Christian missionaries and the

depredation, skull-duggery and debauchery indulged in by their

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

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

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.

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

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

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

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

century—there was any love lost between

]ai, juochuri, mithye katha

"Forgery, swindling and falsehood. These three make up

perfidy and dissipation. A popular street song of the period pays

Ajob shahar Kolketa,

"A strange city is this Calcutta. Whores and palaces, carriages

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

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

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM

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

Bengali saying: Ghomtaradaley khemtar nach: a khemta dance performed

particularly the Christian missionaries who went around

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

proverbs led one missionary, Rev. W. Morton

compilation, a reviewer in the Calcutta Christian Observer of March

congregation would dissolve into laughter. He explained his

helplessness and incomprehension "through the peculiar

This content downloaded from 14.139.45.243 on Wed, 6 Nov 2013 06:07:56 AM