In the last week of June, when a young Naga woman in New Delhi was denied entry into the pretentiously titled club called Urban Pind, the talk of the town became all about racial profiling. The issue was still raging fire when animal rights activist Ambika Shukla scribbled an obnoxious canine caper in some newspaper about what she derisively thought about Nagas and “other Northeasterners” relishing dog meat. And all this after the Times of India, in March, apologised for carrying a piece underlined by a reprehensibly racist remark about women from the Northeast in an article on spas. For some reason, perhaps for all good reason, all the incidents were related to the Northeast.
Now, that’s one kind of racial profiling that will always leave you seething in anger. Yet, there are other kinds (i.e profiling of people from other parts of the country) that amuse you as well. Irritate you too. Like that of Bengalis like me.
Ever since I grew up into adulthood, I had either lived in West Bengal or lived and worked in the Northeast where I not for once even realised that I happen to be a Bengali by birth. Till, I moved over to New Delhi in the second half of 1998.
The first major incident, if you can call it one, happened when Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. “Must be a proud moment for you,” was a remark that greeted me next morning at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) where I was working at the time. It came from a colleague. “Shouldn’t it be a proud moment for all of us?” I asked a bit defensively, for a moment wondering if this fella didn’t consider himself to be Indian by any yardstick. “Arrey, he is Bengali, no?” I didn’t have a Bengali identity till then, I had one dumped on me that morning. That day onwards I became a ‘non-resident Bengali’ working in New Delhi. Such diversity in our Constitutional unity! You may be born Bengali by default, yet you have this Bengaliness thrust upon you by others.
Over the years in the country’s capital, I have been subjected to all kinds of profiling on basis of my being a Bengali. Let me share some experiences.
- People take it for granted that you are a fishy, I mean fish-loving character.They seem to be shocked, surprised, tickled pink all at once when told on their face that I, indeed, am not one. They find it hard to digest this fact for some drawn-out reasoning on their part. On the other hand, I cannot comprehend why being a Bong one has to have fish, come hell or high water. That makes it more arduous for me to rationalise to such people that I cannot stand either the taste or the smell of fish. That I don’t take to fish, like fish take to water. Some even take umbrage and call me an apostate sicne I don't have maachher jhol. Huh.
What I feel like doing in such circumstances: Tearing my hair. - People are equally cocksure that you will devour sweets by the tonne. Oh yes, I do have a sweet tooth, but not so much that I will have sweets before dinner, after dinner, and at dinner. I must be quite a tasteless sweetheart, isn’t it?
What I feel like doing in such circumstances: Going on a hunger-strike. - People are dead sure that you are a Commie and out to unfurl the red flag all over the country. Oh yes, I am left-of-centre, but that doesn’t mean I am a commissar either. Oh yeah? Left-of-centre, and Commie, what’s the difference, they will ask like naïve schoolchildren. Everywhere outside West Bengal, especially in New Delhi, apparently you are a Commie unless proven otherwise.
What I feel like doing in such circumstances: Banging my head against a wall. - People will ask you what you feel about Sourav Ganguly. It doesn’t matter if I tell them that my interest in cricket waned ages back and that I see no difference between a Dhoni and a Gony. But a no for an answer is something they don’t take. You don’t feel proud (when Ganguly’s going great guns)? Or, you don’t feel discrminated against (when Ganguly is dropped)?
What I feel like doing in such circumstances: Whacking a cricket bat on their heads. - People assume you are soooooooooo intelligent. Intelligence, my two feet! Four decades and on in this world and I am yet to find any empirical evidence to prove that all Bengalis are soooooooooo intelligent. I keep meeting all kinds of people from all walks of life, here and there. I know of soooooooooo many non-Bengalis who are supremely intelligent. And soooooooooo many Bengalis who have not an iota of intelligence dwelling anywhere inside their thick skulls. Leaving aside the pseudo-intellectual bullshit of soooooooooo many other Bengalis, of course. We Bongs even have a wonderful word for that – aantlami.
What I feel like doing in such circumstances: Stomping my feet in despair.
I am sure people from other parts of the country would have similar, maybe funnier, maybe more exasperating, experiences to share. So far, the going for me in New Delhi has been hilarious in some ways, annoying in some.
If anything angers me, it is the way people pronounce my first name even after being politely told the correct one. Now, why should S-U- be pronounced as "shu" is what they irksomely ask as if I have a major problem with the Queen's language. My retort to such phonetic pseudo-Anglophile freaks is: how do you pronounce 'sugar' which begins with S-U-? They mouth \ˈshu̇-gər\ and shut the hell up.
But then again, the danger I see lies in the future. We, after all, live in times where one kind of ethnic chauvinism begets, perpetuates, and protracts another. I only have so much Bengali pride in me as one can have as a token of self-respect. Period. I hope I never have to assert a Bengali identity as a counter-measure.
PS: I love ethnic jokes, including the rib-tickling ones about Bengalis.
