Sunday, August 26, 2001		Speaking generally

A BANGLADESHI cookbook lists 54 kinds of sweets and two Calcutta-published books name 25 each. Kolkata recently held a workshop on Bengali sweets graced by two ministers where the talk was of how important a trade sweet-making was.

The Bengali sweet story is one of innovations (like rasmalai and sohanpapri) on the one hand and great lack of enterprise on the other. In history, East Bengal has been ahead in sweets and, even today, Dhaka sweets are better — if one excludes London or New York because the ingredients there are purer! Anyway, East Bengal had famous zamindari seats like Natore, Porabari and Bhagyakul which had sweets special to them known throughout undivided Bengal. Surprising is the fact that few of them have been reproduced in West Bengal and, if so, in a very muted way. In my hometown in East Bengal there was a sandesh called Raghavshahi and a kheer-filled sweet called Rasakadamba which are almost unavailable in Kolkata. Rasakadamba, I saw listed among the 54 in the Dhaka book.

The best sweet shops, in glitz and display, in Kolkata today are owned by non-Bengalis like Marwaris. The Bikaner people and Haldirams have become great attractions whereas the well-known sweet shops of the Bengalis remain, in appearance, hygiene, and service, the same they were 50 years ago. Not much of chrome or marble, no striking gift-wrapping, often no greeting or smile.

With globalisation, we now get in our shops Scottish shortbread and Huntley and Palmer’s Cream Puffs or Jacob’s Cream Crackers. Of Bengal sweets, perhaps, only the rasgulla has been canned, first by that pioneer K.C. Das and then by some other confectioners. To can one kind out of 54 possibilities is a poor try at export. For rich Bengali NRIs to have sweets flown over from Dhaka or to have Ganguram’s mishti doi advertised as having aroused the wonder of Khruschev and Bulganin when they visited Kolkata is fine. But it is not at all the same as tickling new foreign tastes. The famous Maveli Tea Room (MTR) of Bangalore has shown how South Indian specialities and ingredients can be packaged and exported.

From the Bengal end it was, perhaps, only KC Das who opened a branch in another city, Bangalore. Well-situated though it is, the shop is no great shakes. There are shoals of Bengalis sweets placed all over the country and, quite often, they are ably managed and staffed by non-Bengali. Again, it’s a story of lethargy. In Delhi’s Gol Market , the Bengal Sweet Home, fatally struck after its owner’s death, flickered like a small candle for a few years and has now closed down altogether. In Kolkata where are Dwarik’s and in what state is Puntiram famous in the detective stories written by Saradindu Bandyapadhyay?

An art gallery in London is exhibiting photographs of the Viet Nam War taken by photo-journalists from all over the world. Some of them have to do with torture which was usually censored (perhaps not legally by governments but by newspapers and channels themselves. One of the two photographers who have put together the exhibition said "The war (in Viet Nam) was about torture. It took place every day and was denied every day".

As Amnesty International and other organisations against torture say, over 153 countries in the world still use torture. And it’s not just Africa though that is a continent that relies on it a whole lot. Mutilation, broken bones, electric shocks, severe beatings are handed out often in the name of "national interest and security". India’s police and prison systems are known to be beaters and every now and again there are stories about someone arrested and then found dead from "natural causes".

A victim from the Congo, after a description of what he went through, appealed over radio the other day to the international community to close ranks, pressurise and stop something which has been prohibited by the U.N. and by international law. Unfortunately laws are not preventive. If one remembers books like The Godfather or Omerta by Mario Puzo, it would appear that hundreds of thousands of people like to read about torture. Like everything else, torture has now become hi-tech and equipment for it is exported from advanced countries. Fortunately, like candles in a dark world, there are organisations like Amnesty International which stand foursquare against all the winds that blow. Locally they are not strongly- based in South Asian Countries.

Three hundred years is what we have known Kolkata’s age to be but a suit before the Kolkata High Court claims that Kolkata is much older than August 24, 1690 when Job Charnock, as Chief Agent for Hooghly, arrived in Sutanuti village and is said to have founded Kolkata. The petitioners say that Kolkata is mentioned in Abdul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari (of 1585) and there is a 400-year old map which shows Kolkata. The Court has issued notices to the Central Information and Broadcasting Ministry, Calcutta’s Mayoralty and the West Bengal Government to reply.