While in Bengal, my native State, for a few days I kept on thinking of the prominent characteristics of the people living there—of why they, particularly those who are leading the race, are different from others. I also pondered over whether there are similarities between the Bengalis and the Uttarakhandis in matters of temperament and the like and also over how the two people are different.
Doubtless, the Bengalis have never been a practical race. They have not thrived much in the domains of commerce and politics. Rather, they have flourished most in the realms that give precedence to radical idealism rather than to the severity of practical worldliness. The self-effacing idealists and the poets are dearer to the race than the ‘successful’ politicians and the tycoons of industry. The politicians presently seem to be reigning supreme in the landscape of Bengal when viewed from the surface, but the deeper reality is different.
The race remains enamored of the galaxy of the towering giants that emerged during what is known as the Renaissance, the time of the national awakening that came under the impact of the West seeking to sweep them off their cultural moorings. Significantly, none of the stalwarts was a politician. Subhas Chandra Bose was an exception. Yet, he was more a tragic hero in the Shakespearean sense, ‘a victim of Delhi’s murky intrigues’, rather than a politician per se. The same is true of the people of Uttarakhand. Steeped in the spiritual ethos that give them their unique identity, they seem to have been left behind in things practical by others who have settled here from outside. Politics is here in abundance too, but it is used in a pejorative, abusive sense. Their icons are the spiritual giants whose influence remains undimmed despite the passage of time.
By way of differences, we might cite the element of non-conformism that is taken as the quintessence of the Bengalis’ mental makeup. What is generally found is that the revolt of the mentally awake Bengalis against materialistic obsession takes the form of radicalism - non-conformism vis-a-vis the existing order and a dream for better things. This is what can account for a section of the Bengali intellectuals passionately embracing Marxism during the latter’s heyday. The Uttarakhandis are not radically minded in the sense the Bengalis are.
The Bengali race is a fine instance of a hybrid race. Numerous races - Aryan, Dravidian, Mongoloid, Semitic and Negroid — came here with their peculiarities, both physical and temperamental, got mixed in blood and contributed to the complexity of the race.
Many anthropologists are of the view that such an enormous measure of blood-mixing has happened to a very few among the races that inhabit what is known as the Indian sub-continent. The Aryan civilization seems to have left little influence on the Bengali culture except on the surface of its superstructure. The custodians of the former steered clear of Bengal perched on the eastern fringe of the Aryan-dominated region. There is no mention of any warrior from Bengal fighting on any of the two warring sides in the epic battle of Kurukshetra.
Bengalis retaliated by refusing to emulate the Aryan civilisational tenets for long. Several of the non-Aryan religions like Buddhism and Jainism aside from the numerous cults like Tantra, Bajrajan, Mantrajan and Sahajjan emerged here. Buddhism flourished in Bengal and thrived for ages, withstanding the re-conversion drive by Adi Shankaracharya on behalf of the orthodox school of Brahminical Hinduism. Sri Chaitanya refused to conform to the conservative tenets reigning in north and south India. He stressed on the Bhakti cult that encompasses all the strata of the Hindu society with particular emphasis on the subalterns. This was ages before the English rule was established in Bengal - something that signifies the oldness of the non-conformist propensity of the Bengali race.
The typical Bengali mind has remained free down the ages from the grip of cut and dried conventions stereotyped as traditions. This freedom from the conventional clichés, nurtured as an open space in the subjective domain, accounts for the race’s ceaseless experimentations with the myriad forces moulding life—a certain measure of unshackled intellectual restlessness that moves the race to tread the least travelled road, signifying non-conformism. Uttarakhand, on the other hand, extolled as the land of the gods, embodies the soul of eternal India the effulgence of which has not dimmed despite things contrary seeking to sweep it off its feet. Kedarnath, for instance, is not merely a shrine. It epitomizes the inherent unity of India - the spiritual/cultural oneness of what is called ‘Hindu India’. Things can hardly be otherwise as it is destined to remain so.