A few years ago, one of my friends — a senior bureaucrat — told me that the history of Bengal was primarily one of a gradual ‘conquest’ of the city of Calcutta by the small towns and the villages — the mofussil. This intriguing thought came back to me afresh in the context of the recent controversies about the alleged influence of the so-called ‘North Bengal lobby’ in the affairs of the government medical colleges in Calcutta. While this, too, purportedly smacks of a kind of ‘conquest’ of the city by the mofussil, this is not the place to test that theory. But can the original claim be tested with reference to the historical evidence available?

My generation grew up digesting the contention of left-wing historians that the so-called ‘Bengal Renaissance’ was not really a Renaissance — certainly not on the scale of fifteenth-century Italy — because Bengal’s much-vaunted literary and cultural ‘efflorescence’ was limited to urban, upper-caste, bhadralok elites and had little impact on the masses dotting the countryside. Maybe this dichotomy between the ‘Country’ and the ‘City’ in Bengal — which the literary and cultural critic, Raymond Williams, thought never really existed in Britain — needs a little revisit.

Originating from an Arabic term meaning ‘different’ or ‘separate’, the term, ‘mofussil’, appeared in Hickey’s Bengal Gazette to refer to people from regions outside of the urban centres. Hobson-Jobson, the 1886 glossary of Anglo-Indian colloquial terms, defined the term as “the provinces” — country stations and districts distinct from “the Presidency” — or the rural localities of a district, as distinct from the ‘sudder’ or chief station. This meant, essentially, anywhere in Bengal out of Calcutta. The British in India scoffed at what they considered to be the essential forgettability of the mofussil. W.W. Hunter wrote in his The Annals of Rural Bengal (1868) that while “every country, almost every parish, in England, has its annals,” the districts in India “that have furnished the sites of famous battles, or lain upon the routes of imperial progresses” were merely the faintest of ripples on the tide of time, sinking into oblivion even “before the eye has become familiar with their uncouth names.” Clearly, at least in the perceptions of those who mattered in the nineteenth century, the mofussil was not headed towards a conquest of the city.

So does the claim of my bureaucrat friend have any credence at all?

The greatest Bengalis before Calcutta’s ascendancy were, of course, all from the mofussil; for example, the eleventh-century Buddhist religious guru, Atish Dipankar (Vajrayogini village in Bikrampur, Dhaka), the fifteenth-century founder of Vaishnavism, Shri Chaitanya (Nabadwip in Nadia), and his near contemporaries, Raghunath Shiromani and Vasudeva Sarvabhauma (Bhattacharya), the founders of the famous Navya Nyaya School of philosophy (ditto). This continued into the early period of the colonial ‘encounter.’ In eighteenth-century ‘Nawabi’ Bengal, with its capital at Murshidabad, it was the court of Maharaja Krishnachandra Roy in Krishnanagar, Nadia, that was the centrepiece of intellectual activity. When fortune-seeking banyans, mutsuddis, and merchants of this period migrated from the villages to Calcutta, they carried mofussil culture to the city. This gave its neighbourhoods village-like caste and occupational labels — Dorjipara, Kansaripara, Sankharipara, Beniatola, Ahiritola, Kolootola, Patuapara, Khalasitola and so on — an unmissable mofussil signature on a proto-urban landscape.

Moving on to Calcutta’s ascendancy as the ‘second city of the Empire’, it’s not difficult to identify some of the key themes buttressing it: the growth of English education and women’s education, social and religious reform leading to the Brahmo movement among others — all of which fed into what came to be known as the ‘Bengal Renaissance.’ Looking at a ‘match-up’ between the ‘Country’ and the ‘City’ in this respect, it’s worth noting that local elites in the mofussil often acted as patrons for English schools. For instance, the English-medium Uttarpara Government School, set up in the Hooghly district by Raja Joykrishna Mukherjee of Uttarpara in 1846, was a prototype of good schools with distinguished historical traditions of teaching that came up in the districts around the same time. Such examples included the Krishnagar Collegiate School, founded on land donated by the barrister and nationalist leader, Monomohun Ghose, and its twin, the Krishnagar Government College, founded on land donated by the zamindari families of Nadia and Cossimbazar and headed initially by Thomas Macaulay’s favourite, David Lester Richardson, earlier the principal of Hindoo College. Such schools then came to dot the Bengal countryside. Nirad C. Chaudhuri shed some light on this by revealing with pride in his provocative examination of the Bengali psyche, Atmaghati Bangali, that his much-esteemed command over the English language owed itself entirely to the unassuming teachers of village pathshalas in erstwhile eastern Bengal, with not an iota of credit due to any Englishman.

A random sample of iconic or pioneering Bengalis born and raised in the city — even leaving out the towering figures of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray — might include Gooroodass Banerjee, the first Indian vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, Ashutosh Mukherjee, a judge, mathematician, and visionary vice-chancellor of the same university, Romesh Chunder Dutt, civil servant, litterateur, and economic historian, Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian ICS official, the political leader, ‘Rashtraguru’ Surendranath Banerjea, Swami Vivekananda, and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. It turns out, however, that the mofussil can offer a more or less even match-up in the form of (the equally randomly chosen figures of) Raja Rammohun Roy (Radhanagar, Hooghly), Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (Birsingha village in Midnapore), the literary giants, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Naihati in Hooghly), Sarat Chandra Chatterjee (Debanandapur in Hooghly and Bhagalpur, Bihar), and Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay (Bangaon, North 24 Parganas), Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa (Kamarpukur in Hooghly), Kadambini Ganguly, the first woman doctor in British India (Barisal), the pioneering Muslim educator, activist, and author, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Rangpur, Bangladesh), the peerless physicists, Satyen Bose (developer of the famed ‘Bose-Einstein statistics’ when teaching in Dhaka) and Meghnad Saha (Dhaka), and all of Bengal’s premiers and chief ministers before the 1970s. These samples — random, imperfect, and idiosyncratic as they are — bear out one thing: that the mofussil certainly didn’t play second fiddle to Calcutta at any stage and indisputably stamped its own footprint over the city’s social and cultural fabric over time. I would desist from bringing the contribution of mofussil politics into the discussion here because that would merit several instalments.

Maybe a good endnote would be to recall the emotional refuge that the mofussil has provided to the city in times of distress. Back in the early-twentieth century, after the emotionalism and the village-city camaraderie of the Swadeshi movement had subsided, realist novels such as Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Pallisamaj (1916) helped develop a stereotype of the Bengali mofussil as a den of factionalism, caste-based discrimination, and malarial diseases. And yet, in sharp contrast to this, another image — clearly mythicised — sought to project the village as a place of idyllic beauty and an unending source of peace and tranquility buttressed by a self-sustaining community-life. This softer image, located in the lush landscape of East Bengal, was celebrated, for instance, in Jibanananda Das’s Ruposhi Bangla, written in the 1930s. These two kinds of representation, the polar opposites of each other, were often found to be inseparable in bhadralok descriptions of the village. There can be little doubt that the mythicised image of the village-mofussil as an Arcadian idyll was a piece of ‘crafted’ nostalgia that offered an escape from the bleak realities of city life. When city and mofussil recently joined hands in ‘reclaiming the night’, they were re-calibrating bonds of synergy whose historical roots go back a long way.

So, as enamoured as we are with our urban lifestyles, perhaps it’s time for me to give my friend a call to concede that he had been right.

Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com