Remembering 'Parashuram'

The Statesman yesterday carried this article reminiscing about Rajshekhar Basu, who wrote under the pen-name of Parashuram. I am writing this particularly for my literate Bengali readers, though that shouldn’t make it uninteresting for all lovers of good culture, even those who are not Bengalis. To read more about Parashuram’s multi-faceted genius, you might try this blogpost too.

In the days when Tagore was still shining like the mid-day sun in Bengal’s cultural firmament – meaning the 1920s and 30s – a lot of people began to worry that the next generation of creative people would be eclipsed in that awesome glare: after all, they said, only grass grows under a banyan tree! The truth is, however, that Tagore in his most glorious but waning years saw a thousand talents bloom in the arts and sciences, commerce and politics all around him. Though most of them acknowledged his immeasurable superiority in almost all works of the mind, they were – by the Lilliputian standards of today! – giants in their own right. I have in mind talents as diverse as Sukumar Ray and Satyen Bose and Prasanta Mahalanobis and Nandalal Bose and Saiyyad Mujtaba Ali and Subhas Bose and Biren Mookerjee and Radhabinod Pal… Rajshekhar Basu was one of the worthiest members of that splendid galaxy. 

This is an age when millions of Bengalis are growing up to be ‘educated’ without reading anything outside textbooks and cram sheets for examinations (and ashamed or scared of reading anything but, especially in Bengali), when numberless doctors and engineers and accountants and suchlike are comfortable if not proud about the fact that they know virtually nothing outside their narrow areas of specialization (and yet get very angry if compared with carpenters and cobblers and plumbers – though I have never yet managed to understand what is so utterly contemptible about a man who can fix my water pipes, and so immensely admirable about someone who can mend boilers or bones but knows nothing else); an age when the vast majority of us can neither speak in chaste Bengali nor confidently speak or write anything better than pidgin English (witness the cover of a ‘Bengali’ magazine like Sananda, where half the stuff is English phrases like ‘latest beauty tips’ written in Bengali!); an age when we are all too ‘busy’ to read or engage in any of the fine arts seriously, though so many of us do little beyond going to (or taking our children to) tuitions, and indulge in pleasures none of which exercise the mind or even body in the slightest. It is also, weirdly, an age when most of the ‘educated’ among us are happy to imagine that we have ‘advanced’ greatly in the last half century. Well, Parashuram died almost half a century ago, and thinking about his accomplishments takes my breath away, especially when I compare him with 'achievers' among my contemporaries. 

Well-enough qualified as a chemist to be hired by the legendary P.C. Ray for the Bengal Chemical Company, competent enough as an administrator to become general manager and secretary of the same company (which position he held for thirty years), also a trained lawyer, single-handed compiler of the first (and arguably still the best) real dictionary of the Bengali language, a brilliant word-spinner and illustrator who wrote some of the most idiosyncratically funny stories we Bengalis have read (I won’t even begin to discuss such gems where most readers will either not know what I am talking about or won’t understand), he also had time to write what, I believe, remains the most erudite yet lucid 700-page summary of the Mahabharata that has ever been written in Bangla, an absolute must for all those who will never get around to reading Kaliprasanna Singha’s magnum opus (which, I guess, would be 99.9% of today’s Bengalis!)… and maybe I am forgetting, or still don’t know about, other things that he did besides. He lived a life in the mould of the universal man, and he was truly a citizen of the world, in the best sense of that expression. 

If that, even half a century ago, was what it meant to be a ‘successful’ man in Bengal, worthy of respect and emulation, how many of my countless students and ex-students under the age of 35 even understand what success means, let alone think of trying to reach for such standards? And how can they justify their not trying, except by either ignorance or apathy? Alas, as a cover story in a certain edition of Desh magazine firmly announced a while ago, there is no denying the fact that, for all our fancy outward show (so many NRIs, so many shopping malls, so many cars on the road), Bengali culture has become a matter of modhyomedhar joyjoykaar (a celebration of mediocrity): we may be moving about much more and much faster these days, and chattering our heads off, but inside our minds we have chosen the stagnant little pond in place of the ocean that we once loved and aspired to. And so those who still talk of oceans are regarded as weird, if not as enemies of the people: I shudder to think of what almost happened to the only man who could see in H.G. Wells’ horror story The Country of the Blind.