Ashmita Politics

Does being a Bengali still feed into stereotypes?

- Agnideb Bandyopadhyay

Two men, both lanky and grey-haired, in phatuas (cotton tunics), stood in front of the shuttered gates of Mirtyunjoy Sweets, a popular sweet shop in Hooghly.

The notice, which stated that the shop would remain shut owing to the LPG crisis, somehow offended the men, whose days begin with a visit to the shop. When asked about their opinion, Bijon, nearing 70, blurted out the rhetorical obvious. “Bangali mishti chara bachte parbe?” (Can Bengalis survive without sweets?), he quipped confidently. The other man quickly politicised the conversation, “What more do we have to see with Modi at the Centre? Beg America to allow us to buy oil, implore Iran to let tankers pass? Now, there’s no mishti. It’s a travesty and we can only watch.”

As election dates loom, conversations on the streets of Bengal are politically charged—most of them dramatic, half-baked, and confusing, but essential to the ethos of the state. Shiny TMC banners, besides having Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee welcoming people into the city, sound a stark warning: that the state wouldn’t bow down to anti-Bengal forces. And amid the rumble, a foundational question emerges—‘Who is a Bengali?’

Threading both sides of the border together, the Bengali identity has always been a simple one on the surface—a composite cultural tag. Does being a Bengali still feed into stereotypes? The land of the dhoti-clad intelligentsia, the opinionated woman, the chain-smoking pseudo-intellectual, or of an identity shaped by cultural richness, liberal ideals, and the vision nurtured by nineteenth-century Bengali nationalism standing on language, education, and reformist thought?