Bittersweet nothings

The tourism department of West Bengal has been promoting the State as the “sweetest part of India”. That claim got a fillip recently when the Geographical Indication (GI) authorities ruled that West Bengal is the origin of the famed sweet rosogolla , that white spherical ball of chhana oozing with syrup.

The Bengal government had prepared long and hard to achieve this tag, and the sense of accomplishment showed when chief minister Mamata Banerjee tweeted saying, “Sweet news for us all. We are very happy and proud that #Bengal has been granted GI (Geographical Indication) status for rosogolla.” While this was received with elation by some Bengalis, Odias were not amused. For they, too, had a claim on this tag for something that is similar to rosogolla but not quite it. That beautiful thing is Odisha’s rasagola .

Never before has this much sweetness generated so much bitterness. Odisha is on course to file a claim for GI tag for rasagola . I, as a Bengali, wish them success.

***

There are, of course, friendships and enmities galore in this world. However, between intimate neighbours, these become special friendships and special enmities. Bengalis and Odias are two such neighbours, whose lives became intertwined in many ways, especially after the British conquered their respective homelands and put them under one administration.

The Hindu Bengali upper caste was one of the earliest collaborators of British imperialism in South Asia. Thus, they raked in the first-mover advantage by placing themselves in intermediary professional positions of profit such as lower-level administrators, petty officials, lower-court judges, lawyers, teachers, postmasters, station-masters and all that formed the human resources base of loyalty through which the British ruled.

It is also this class that came to represent the fountainhead of dissent and resistance against British imperialism, reaching its peak influence during the movement against the 1905 Partition of Bengal.

However, the clout enjoyed by the British-collaborator Bengali groups also translated into their dominance not only of profitable professions in provinces such as Assam and Odisha, it also meant that these groups served as the interpreter of things native for imperial policymaking.

Thus, Odia language was, for some time, classified as a dialect of Bangla — not by any merit of logic but by sheer clout of Bengali dominance in the written literary and academic sphere in the areas of the erstwhile Bengal presidency, which included Odisha.

For some years, Bangla was the medium of education in Odisha. With the development of a critical mass of Odia bourgeoisie, many of these wrongs were successively corrected, culminating in the administrative separation of the province from Bengal. The evolution of the Odia national consciousness owes much to the Bengali dominance over Odisha, and the inspiration that Odia students of the late 19th-century Kolkata received from political narratives of that metropolis cannot be overlooked. The sweetmeat culture of Bengal and Odisha, as well as the rosogolla dispute are bittersweet reminders of that legacy of closeness and mutual learning.

The concept of GI was spawned by the White anxiety of protecting trade monopoly on their products in markets of coloured people — suitably aided by the capital and know-how acquired from lands that once belonged to coloured people — without which items such as the Scotch would have remained at the level of liquors of the colonies, which did not have the money to fine-tune production processes or access captive markets. In some micro-sense, the same might have been the case for rosogolla .

With the tradition of employing Brahmin Odia cooks in colonial Bengal, who is to say what role the circulation of artisanal knowledge between the two neighbours played in the making of rosogolla ?

After all, the depth of pockets, market access, business ownership and advertising trump the particularity of artisanal knowledge any day. Authenticity becomes a matter of packaging. Thus, one encounters the sad spectacle of a product called the ‘Nagpur Rasgulla’, sold by a Delhi entity which originates from Rajasthan. If the GI tag of rosogolla for Bengal helps in creating a level playing field for artisans vis-à-vis the ‘Nagpur Rasgulla’ marketeers, it will indeed be a good thing. But I doubt it.

For nothing today is outside the sphere of money, even in terms of representation. Thus, the Wikipedia article on rosogolla names it as a variant of rasgulla — a distortion in both pronunciation and product. But the dominance of the channels of representation by Anglo-Hindi players makes the macabre appear normal. The distortion becomes the standard. The authentic becomes a variant of the distortion.

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Let me return to neighbourliness. Neighbourliness assumes tight borders. In reality, there are no such things. During my student days at the Medical College, Kolkata, those from Medinipur, a Bengal district bordering Odisha, would be ridiculed as being part-Odia ( Oodey , in colloquial Bangla). But that is the reality of borderlands. Hence, the lived fluid reality of many people in the borderlands on either side of the Bengal-Odisha border was aptly captured by a friend who said that he had learned to be an Odia in Cuttack and a Bengali in Medinipur.

Garga Chatterjeeis an assistant professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and a commentator on South Asian politics and culture

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