BackKolkata Chromosome | Bengal’s proverbial Everyman
The 'babumoshai' has moved up and down the social hierarchy in less than a century, but he dresses like it's still the 1950s
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Birkrishna wore a diaphanous silk dhoti, a collar, a shirt with motifs of cups and saucers (much like the sort one uses to cover a chandelier when not in use) and a wrap from Dacca with slanting patterns, a handkerchief tucked in his waist. A gold key chain dangled on the shirt and dhoti pleats, off-setting the chain of the (pocket) watch."
Published in 1861 as Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, satirist Kaliprasanna Sinha is razor-sharp in his description of the Bengali babu’s dressing style. In the introduction to her 2012 translation of Sinha’s work (Sketches by Hootum the Owl, published by Samya), Chitralekha Basu, echoing Sinha’s views, terms it “the babu’s uninformed fashion faux pas", which went with the babu’s patronage of crude entertainment, nightly visits to whorehouses, and a lack of real devotion for the deity, among other failings.
The babu of Sinha’s time is a framed memory in a cobwebbed corner of north Kolkata mansions. The babu’s move up and down the social hierarchy in less than a century has been ephemeral and rapid. Today, the Bengali babu is the proverbial Everyman.
“He is a middle-aged, middle-income, office-going Bengali man. He dresses like it’s still the 1950s, complete with a plain shirt, pleated trousers, sweater-vest, an over-sized pair of spectacles and an inimitable hair-do," says Mumbai-based photographer Aparna Jayakumar on her website, describing the babu in her photography project, Babumoshai, done in 2012. “He likes to eat rice and fish curry and baigoon bhaja (fried eggplant) for lunch, always with a mishti (sweet) to finish the meal. He likes to engage in long-winded discussions about history and politics, read great literature and poetry, and smoke numerous cigarettes. There will invariably be a very sombre portrait of Rabindranath Tagore hanging on a prominent wall in his house," says Jayakumar, a former student of art history, ancient Greek literature and silver photography at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Italy and Greece.
When she started work on the project, in 2012, Jayakumar, who teaches photography at Mumbai’s Sophia College for Women, was attending a workshop in Kolkata that had been organized by Drik India, a photography and new media agency, and the University of Oslo, Norway. Her inspiration was Bengali films and literature, she says, especially Satyajit Ray and the graphic novels of Sarnath Banerjee. “I was fascinated by the urban Bengali male of Ray’s films and the quirkiness of Banerjee’s characters," she says.
Jayakumar headed towards the business district of Dalhousie Square and started photographing people she felt fit in with her construct of the babu.
“Unlike the standardization you see in other Indian cities, each of these men have a unique personality. While all of them wear shirts and trousers, there will be a little flourish, be it by way of the sweater-vest or colour of trousers, which will differentiate them," says Jayakumar. “While in Delhi or Mumbai, their fashion is more current, you see the unwillingness of the middle-aged Bengali babus to budge. That’s what makes Kolkata charming as well."
Occasionally, a subject would refuse to pose; on one occasion, a gentleman, heading for the high court, poured his heart out to the stranger-photographer on his impending divorce.
The young in Kolkata dress no differently from those in other metros, which is what makes her feel that the quotidian style of the office-going babu needs to be archived. The Babumoshai project, however, is but a fragment of the babu culture that still survives in the city and Jayakumar wants to return to the artist and intellectual communities that have so far remained outside this ongoing project.
“The babu style has made a comeback in social circles and you see that in the traditional wear of men in social occasions like weddings," says fashion designer Sharbari Datta, who made a splash when she featured coloured dhotis at an exhibition in 1991. Datta possesses a photograph of the Hindu ascetic, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, wearing red socks, shoes, a coat and a dhuti—a kind of mix that veteran Kolkata chronicler Binoy Ghosh mentions in his Bengali book, Kolkata Shohorer Itibrittyo, as Engo-Bongo, taking off from the blend of English and Bengali cultures. While the Bengali gentry in Kolkata were taking to European culture, the Europeans were puffing on local tobacco and chewing on paan (betel leaf). And like the first Britisher, Job Charnock, marrying local women.
To see more pictures from ‘Babumoshai’, visit the online photography magazine Tasveerjournal.com.
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