Wendy Doniger on her memories of Calcutta and Santiniketan as a student of Sanskrit and Bengali

December 5, 1963, chez Dimock

Last night we went to see Pete Seeger and he was terrific, all apple-piously American, sang like a bird, all left-wingish, sang We Shall Overcome, and generally behaved as if he were at a Hootenanny at the 92nd street Y, while all the time he was out in the middle of the Calcutta Maidan, with the moon rising and the smoke rising from the burning ghats. It was a great evening, and afterwards we went and talked to him and felt very we-happy-fewish.

I’m going to Santiniketan for two or three days now, just to pick things up and bring them back here to the Dimocks’ house, say goodbye to friends, etc. Chanchal and I will still see each other frequently, as she will come to Calcutta, and the formal structures of Santiniketan can be replaced by Calcutta elements....

It appears that the net profit of the Ford Motor Company last year was greater than the total national income of India, and it has been suggested that Nehru sell India to Ford to see if it could be run at a profit. And as for Nehru’s unpopularity in Bengal and Punjab, I have discovered that Gandhi himself is also unpopular, and the hatred stems from the Partition, as does so much in modern Indian life; these were the two provinces that were divided, because of their position (according to the government, quoting statistics of Muslim percentages, etc) or because they were always the two centres of revolution and criticism of the government (according to the Bengalis and Punjabis).

Whatever the reason, the Partition dealt a terrible blow to their economy and they have hated Gandhi and Nehru ever since, in Bengal all the more so because they have their own Bengali leaders, notably Subhas Chandra Bose (Netaji), to reverence as the rest of the country honours Gandhi.

A wry note on the persistence of religious sectarianism even in modern intellectual life. The two great living poets of Bengal are Bishnu Dey and Buddhadeb Bose, and there is great rivalry between them and between their followers, who are known respectively as Vaishnavas and Buddhists.

I get a peculiar sense of time, like that when watching the crazy hemlines in old movies, seeing all the Kaisers and Frazers around Calcutta. I haven’t seen one in years at home. Petrol is very expensive here, so every single car going anywhere is always full. Taxi drivers always bring two friends with them for the joyride in the front seat.

The trams are unbelievably crowded, making New York rush hour subways seem deserted by comparison; people ride on the roof, ducking each time the tram aerial hits a crosswire, and sit on the windows, and hang onto the outside, so that you can’t even see the signs on the outside, they’re so covered with people swarming like ants over a piece of sugar.

And whenever you hire a taxi to take you somewhere far away, like a temple or a lake, somehow the driver’s whole family suddenly materialises, wife and five kids, all piling into the car with you, and along the road they stop several times to go to the bathroom by the side, or to worship the idol in a roadside shrine.

December 11, 1963, c/o Dimock [and Santiniketan]

This last week’s visit to Santiniketan, after all the travelling and excitement, made me love it all the more as a place to come home to, and as a place that has remained uniquely Indian in the face of the encroaching modern world. The glorious climate, with the thin blue air and deep blue sky and pale golden sunniness in the afternoons, the constant sound of several songs being sung at once, the bougainvillea and poinsettia, the country and jungle sounds at night, everyone getting up at five and singing, and the familiarity of it all – I know the faces of the rickshaw boys and the dogs and the lizards, a hawk catching a field mouse, and all my friends.

After the terrible schizophrenia of Delhi, the unity of life at Shantiniketan was a welcome thing, although the basic fallacy of imposing the personality of a single nineteenth-century genius upon an entire community still causes obstacles to the process of education. There are such marvellous people there, though, such personalities that could never be bent to the Tagore image: Chanchal with her marvellous Punjabi English (“I hate it when the fat in the pan makes ‘Phut! Phut!’” and referring to something she likes but can’t think of the word for as “such a rubbish this thing”).

There is a little Santhal woman who sweeps and cooks; when I told her I was leaving she went and told Chanchal, “Everyone I love goes away,” and later when her friend admired the complicated patterns that Chanchal was knitting, the Santhal woman turned to her and said indignantly, “Do you think it is for nothing that they read such small writings?”

And others: The girl who, when I tried to explain what it was to go to the movies “Dutch Treat” instead of letting her pay for me as she wished, said, “Oh, you mean self-help”; the Greek boy learning Sanskrit who complained about all the retroflex consonants, “I have to put my tongue in so many places in my mouth, I’m afraid I’m going to swallow it”; and all the lovely long, long talks at night, wrapped up in blankets and shawls against the country night air, walking outside under the astonishing tropical sky.

It seems that all the best times I have had in India have been connected with singing, especially now that I know a lot of Bengali songs. Yesterday I went to Mishtuni’s house for lunch; there are three sisters, Mishtu, Chiku, and Thuku (like the Marx brothers), and they all love to sing, and to dance. They have some records of things like Granada and La Paloma, and they insisted on being taught to rhumba, in return for which they taught me some East Bengal folk dances, usually done by bride and groom in a competition between the two houses.

Gradually the afternoon degenerated into a kind of free-for-all with some rhumbas done to classical ragas, Bharatanatyam done to When They Begin the Beguine [a 1938 Cole Porter song], folk dances done to the theme from Limelight [a 1952 Charlie Chaplin film], ballet to Rabindranath songs, and like that, until we were all too exhausted even to laugh any more, and settled down to a lunch of chicken stewed in coconut milk and a compote of papayas, tomatoes and dates.

Mishtuni teaches a class of five-year-olds English and Bengali, and one morning when I came by and saw them under the trees in a circle around her I stopped for a minute, and they demanded a song, and then a story in English. I told them Goldilocks – “Oh,” one of them said, “you mean tinte bhalluk,” which is Bengali for three bears – and I had to really ham it up for them to understand, because they don’t know much English.

If they missed something, they’d raise their hands and I’d say it in Bengali, and they’d laugh and laugh at the mistakes I made in Bengali and then they said poems for me in English (Little Tommy Tupper, etc, deliciously mutilated), fighting for a chance to be next, and then poems in Bengali.

One poem, about a crazy land where the kites fly boys, where you open your mouth to eat a candy and it bites you, and where in order to see clearly you have to close your eyes, was reminiscent of the Walrus and the Carpenter [from Alice in Wonderland] and the Big Rock Candy Mountain [the American country folksong]. Then they all tried to give me their oranges and eggs and bananas, and for the next days, every time one would meet me, he’d say, “Wendy-di Namaskar”, as you greet a teacher, and ask me if I would come back again.

When I finally did leave Santiniketan, there were two people in my train compartment. One was an all-India football player who composed and sang original devotional songs all the five hours to Calcutta, and when we crossed the Ganges he went to the door, threw it open, and sang a song to Mother Ganges. At one point he asked me my name, and I said, “Wendy,” and he said, “Oh, Bindi,” and I said, “No, Wendy,” and he said, “Oh,” and then he said nothing for about five minutes and then suddenly said, “I have forgotten it already. Would you say it again?” and when I did he took out a notebook and wrote down, WENDY, and that was the end of our conversation.

The other man in the compartment was a philosophy professor whose books are published by Macmillan, a grand old man of the old school, and he asked me if I knew any songs, and when I told him the ones I knew he asked me to sing them, and then he sang a lot of Sanskrit verses from the Gita Govinda for me, stopping every few verses to apologise, “I’m afraid it’s a bit erotic.”

For a while another man came in, and he sang, and at the same time the football player and the philosophy professor were singing, each one to himself, but quite loud, as all Indians sing, and each one “sculpting” the song with his hands in the Indian way, paying no attention to anyone else.

Then the professor asked me why I had brought no lunch along, and I explained that I had bought some bananas but had left them by mistake at Santiniketan, and when we stopped at the next station he jumped out and came back a few minutes later with a bunch of bananas, which he would not let me pay for, because, he said with a sad and compassionate look, “You left your bananas at Santiniketan.”

Excerpted with permission from An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64, Wendy Doniger, Speaking Tiger.