The Bengalis are very proud of being civilised and cultured. Indeed...
HindolSengupta@HindolSengupta
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Apr 11, 2025
~1 min read
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The Bengalis are very proud of being civilised and cultured. Indeed many are. But there is a bit of myth-making in this. The Bengal Renaissance was an elite project, and almost all its products were Kolkata-based elites or 'middle class'-es. The culture at the bottom remained
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crude and violent. This is why Bengal still has the most violent elections in India. In an earlier age, people like Buddhadeb Bhattacharya etc. kept alive the facade of intellectualism because they were personally erudite and the faces of their violent, mob-rule movements. Now,
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that veneer has fallen, and the hooliganism has spread to the top-most rungs of Bengali politics. That's why even so-called leaders now sound abrasive, crude, and so 'chottolok' (a word used in the recent fracas), which means 'little people' or déclassé, that one wonders how
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Bengali culture will ever survive this onslaught.
