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The Alignments of the Middle Class
There is much to learn about middle-class anxiety through the eyes of three of West Bengal’s most prolific auteurs.
At a time when the West Bengal public is increasingly being pushed into extreme political positions—be it the Trinamool Congress’s nativist Bengali line or the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu essentialist one—the decade of the 1960s in Calcutta, West Bengal, and Bangladesh comes to mind. The 1960s were a time of change, tumult, and violence in West Bengal. The Naxalite movement, then in full force, was being actively brought to its knees by police and military interventions, and violence. Mahashweta Devi’s novel, Mother of 1084 (1974), describes those years as
The whole sequence of national events, the elephant cubs airlifted to Tokyo, the film festival at Metro, the writers and artists who addressed the meeting on the Maidan, and the fortnight of celebrations at the Rabindra Sadan dedicated to the great poet … Did it matter, after all, if a few thousands of young men were no more?
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