Review of “Kolkata r Firiwala r Daak ar Rastar Awaj” by Radhaprasad Gupta
Book- Kolkata r Firiwala r Daak ar Rastar Awaj (The calls and cries of the street vendors of Kolkata)
Author- Radhaprasad Gupta
Publisher- Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, India, 1984
History is a metanarrative, as Jean Francois Lyotard has mentioned in his works, which promotes the grand deception that history is constituted by those moments of exceptional achievements or monumental failures. History is not only written by the victors but also history dictates what should not be included inside the strict contingent defined as the body of history. Historiography, which can be simply decoded as the art of writing history, is always governed and regulated by those who are in power. Not every incident or discipline can be worthy of being included as ‘body of history’ and that was the stringent norm for ‘history as text’ until the theoretical turn to postmodernism and postcolonialism. Since the induction of these two disciplines in theoretical and philosophical praxis, the historicity of ‘history’ has come under scanner. We have tried to look into the systematic and chronological evaluation and establishment of events and disciplines which erstwhile were not considered to be worthy enough to be studied and discussed as history.
One such unexplored history is regional or localized history. This is like reading events or incidents in isolation, without mounting them against the large backdrops of history. These discussions of history do not dare to disturb rubrics of the universe; rather they affect a small community, culturally inter-dependent. These discussions of history includes historical researches beyond the text books of history. One such historical research is Radhaprasad Gupta’s book Kolkata r Firiwala r Daak ar Rastar Awaj (The calls and cries of the street vendors of Kolkata).
Radhaprasad Gupta was not a trained historian like Amalesh Tripathi or Atul Shur or Acharya Jadunath Sarkar. He worked in the corporate sector as a liaison officer and led an adventurous and colourful life. Born in 1920, he came to Kolkata from Cuttack, Odisha during the Second World War for his higher studies. His grandfather was Prof. Bipinbehari Gupta, whose book Puratan Prasanga (Anecdotes of Old) is a treasure for the readers and researchers of 19th century Bengali intelligentsia. Radhaprasad obtained a master’s degree in Economics from Calcutta University, but his chief affection remained with the local history of Kolkata. There are authors like Gupta who cannot be called as historians of the city, rather chroniclers of Kolkata- like Purnendu Patri, Shripantha (Nikhil Sarkar) and others. Gupta discusses in this book about a least conversed subject about a city’s history, categorizing the ‘dins and bustles’ of the city.
He is indebted to two of his predecessors in the field, Amrit Lal Basu and Sashi Chandra Dutt, who wrote sporadically about the busy lives of the streets of colonial Calcutta of 19th century. Gupta takes a leaf out of the pages of Amrit Lal Basu’s book Puratan Panjika (Old Almanac) and gives long descriptions of various professions and trades which have become lost now. One of those lost professions is the group of men who were used to pull out valuables from the depth of the wells. They were the first street hawkers on the scene and people got to know from their cries that it was soon to be morning.
The ‘firiwala’ or the street vendors had their own schedule. The early batches to hit the streets of Kolkata were the more essential ones. They were the pullers of valuables from the wells, followed by the men who used to whet the shil-nora (grinding stones and pestles) and kitchen knives, followed by the vendors of vegetables and fish. Then there were ‘bhistiwala’ who used to carry drinking water and the pious ganga-jal (water from the river Ganges) essential for every religious Hindu household. Each different street vendor had his or her distinct cry of trade. They used to cry in different intonation and pitch. Gupta refers here from Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-room Ballads, and Other Verses,
“Of all them black-faced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Ganga Din”
Gupta recalls one such bhistiwala, named Gurucharan from Basu’s book. Gurucharan had to muster three trades throughout the day to sustain his family. His meagre income as a bhistiwala was not sufficient enough. This gives us an idea that even these hawking and street vending professions on those days were not profitable- similar to our present times.
Sashi Chandra Dutt’s brilliant essay, “The Street Music of Calcutta”, was probably published somewhere in 1920s. We cannot be entirely certain whether Dutt was inspired to write this essay after reading Joseph Addison’s essay “The Cries of London” which was published in The Tatler in 1711. But Dutt’s essay is the first document in vernacular English about the description of the street vendors and hawkers of Kolkata. Many of the professions he mentioned in his essay, had survived during Gupta’s stay at Kolkata. He roamed through the city streets to witness hawkers selling ‘beloari churi’ (glass bangles), ‘kulfi-borof’ (ice candy), ‘topse maach’ (mango fish) and the most enigmatic ‘sare batris bhaja’ (assorted fritters) and ‘abak jalpan’ (a mixture of puffed rice and other spices). Sukumar Ray’s eponymous play Abak Jalpan is a homage and intended pun on one of the most celebrated evening snacks of late 19th and early 20th century Kolkata. Although Gupta’s book is a strict non-fiction but it gives us a tempting description of the streets of Kolkata which no longer exists. Most of the hawkers or vendors I have mentioned here are lost into oblivion. No historical researchers will pay attention to archive these noises and cries which carry such a wealth of regional history and culture.
Gupta was a voracious reader. He has used anecdotes from past and present. He has referred literary stalwarts like Tagore and Bankimchandra as well as fellow chronicler Radharaman Mitra, Shripantha and lesser known, obscure authors of Bengali literature like Kedarnath Dutta and Girish Chandra Basu. What is unmistakable in his writing is his casual method of story-telling while giving us a lecture on the lost properties of this city. He is incomparable when you want to pick up a book on history of Kolkata which is witty and resourceful at the same time. I put Radhaprasad Gupta in the same league with Syed Mujtaba Ali and Shibram Chakraborty as the authors of great urban wit and discretion.
Subhajeet Singha teaches in the Department of English at Deshapran Mahavidyalaya, Contai, Purba Medinipur under Vidyasagar University.
Email: subhajeet112singha@gmail.com.
Comments
Post a Comment