My favourite outstation footballer of all times is Majid Bishkar, who was part of the Iranian team in the 1978 World Cup, and was East Bengal’s star player in 1980. I had a poster of him in curly hair above my reading table. The moment an outstation player joined East Bengal, he was as intimately loved and eulogised as any local hero. Majid later joined Mohammedan Sporting, a team I supported in their matches against Mohun Bagan. The intense rivalry with Bagan for East Bengalis came from the refugee sentiment that revolved around language. Once, after an East Bengal victory against Bagan in a Calcutta League match, the special Bengali radio news programme that used to appear at 10.15 pm had fans exuberantly proclaiming in the ‘East Bengali dialect’ (used as a pejorative by old Calcuttan Bengalis), “Amra jitsi!” (We won!). My elder brother remarked, “This is unthinkable from a Calcutta radio station.”
Since the anti-foreigners movement started in Assam during the winter of 1979, not only did the Calcutta teams stop coming to play for the Bordoloi Trophy, it also ended our evening games at the school playground. There were frequent curfews. We had to restrict ourselves to playing in the narrow lanes of the neighbourhood. Football suffered the divisive machination of communal politics. The refugees of football were once again accused of being outsiders, people carrying the stigma of being on the wrong side of a territorial dispute. A nation’s rules are so much worse compared to the liberating rules of football. No wonder the not-so-famous goalkeeper, Albert Camus, had said in 1957, among all his experiences, what he knew about ‘morality and obligations’ he owed ‘to football’. Football is Marquezian, Alejo Carpentier’s world of ‘marvellous real’. If there was any flash of magic in post-Enlightenment Europe, it could be found either in surrealism or football. Football runs in the opposite direction to the way Kant defined the Enlightenment. It is a game where chance score over reason, where chance scores, not reason. Football is a game of dissolving maturity, adulthood at play, a space of mischief and genius, where rules allow what they disallow. The dream of a goal signifies a forbidden place to be penetrated without violence and left unconquered. Football defines a strange territory where the magic of becoming can take place.
That is why it is sad when Rana, a young football player who lived close by in the Railway Colony, who chose to play for his club, White Dragon, against the team from his neighbourhood, was slapped and abused by a gang of boys while returning home after the match. The gang tried to mark Rana’s territory and teach him the wrong lessons of loyalty. Loyalty is love, and love is a matter of the heart. The refugees of football, struggling against a politics that tried to ridicule their possibilities, were violating their own necessity to be free.
In the end, I imagine if football existed during Vyasa’s time, the battle of Kurukshetra could have been decided by a match between Kauravas and Pandavas. The trophy would have been the kingdom of Hastinapur. Before the game, Krishna would explain the Gita of Football to Arjuna, that football is maya, scoring a goal is the mind’s delusion and the ball is the metaphor of an evanescent universe.
"I told myself before the game, 'he's made of skin and bones just like everyone else'. But I was wrong.” Tarcisio Burgnich, the Italy defender who marked Pele in the Mexico 1970 Final
“The difficulty, the extraordinary, is not to score 1,000 goals like Pele – it’s to score one goal like Pele.”
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazilian poet
“The greatest player in history was Di Stefano. I refuse to classify Pele as a player. He was above that.” Ferenc Puskas
“In some countries they wanted to touch him, in some they wanted to kiss him. In others they even kissed the ground he walked on. I thought it was beautiful, just beautiful.” Clodoaldo
“After the fifth goal, even I wanted to cheer for him.” Sigge Parling of Sweden on a 5-2 defeat by Brazil in the 1958 FIFA World Cup Final
“I arrived hoping to stop a great man, but I went away convinced I had been undone by someone who was not born on the same planet as the rest of us.” Costa Pereira on Benfica’s 5-2 loss to Santos in the 1962 Intercontinental Cup in Lisbon
"Pele was the greatest – he was simply flawless. And off the pitch he is always smiling and upbeat. You never see him bad-tempered. He loves being Pele.” Tostao
“When I saw Pele play, it made me feel I should hang up my boots.” Just Fontaine
“Pele was so focused on winning the Trophy. It was like he knew it was his destiny. He was like a child waiting for Santa Claus.” Mario Americo, Brazil’s masseur, on Mexico 1970
“Pele was one of the few who contradicted my theory: instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.” Andy Warhol
“You may be right. But you know nothing about football and I’ve seen Pele play.” Vicente Feola to the psychologist who said Pele was too immature to play at Sweden 1958
“Pele was the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic.” Johan Cruyff
“His great secret was improvisation. Those things he did were in one moment. He had an extraordinary perception of the game.” Carlos Alberto Torres
“I sometimes feel as though football was invented for this magical player.” Sir Bobby Charlton
"Pele played football for 22 years, and in that time he did more to promote world friendship and fraternity than any other ambassador anywhere.” J.B. Pinheiro, the Brazilian ambassador to the United Nations
Malcolm Allison: “How do you spell Pele?” Pat Crerand: “Easy: G-O-D.” British television commentators during Mexico 1970
But the two that stand out for me are these:
1. “The greatest goal I ever scored was a one-two with Celeste – we named him Edson Arantes do Nascimento.” Dondinho, Pele’s father
2. My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the President of the United States of America. But you don’t need to introduce yourself, because everyone knows who Pele is.” Ronald Reagan
Football fans Pannalal and Chaitali Chatterjee have been to nine World Cups
Their first World Cup experience was in Spain in 1982
Couple delighted that India is currently hosting the U-17 World Cup
Pannalal and Chaitali Chatterjee are not a couple who can visit any restaurant in Kolkata and eat without caring to look at the prices on the menu card, and neither can they decide to take off on vacations to coveted destinations like England, France or Mexico.
Yet, this couple is already making their preparations to attend their tenth FIFA World Cup™ in Russia in 2018. A recent guest at the unveiling of the FIFA U-17 World Cup Winner’s Trophy in Kolkata, learning about Chaitali's World Cup experiences was nothing short of taking a virtual trip with her to Spain in 1982, Mexico in 1986, and right up to Brazil in 2014.
Reminiscing about her very first World Cup, Chaitali spoke about how her and her husband’s chance visit to Spain 1982 was a pure stroke of luck without which they might never have found how deeply their love for football ran.
“My husband’s childhood friend lived in Sussex and he was soon to become the Mayor of the province. He wanted all his friends to be there for him to share the special moment, so we decided to go," Chaitali said. "Incidentally, the World Cup was going on in Spain and two old friends couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the happy occasion than going to catch some football. Being there in the stadium, purely on an impulse, I realised how this is something we have to do every single time. I will always consider this a gift of God since if we had not gone to England, Spain would never have happened and our lives would never have taken the turn that it did.”
The decision to visit every World Cup came with a hundred sacrifices, from curtailing on food they liked, to always living on a budget, and making sure that their World Cup fund was not compromised with. It was not such a bad decision, one could tell, from the way her face lit up when she was asked what her most memorable World Cup moment was over the past 35 years.
“Of course, it was watching [Diego] Maradona’s brilliance at the 1986 World Cup," Chaitali said. "I saw him leave defenders helplessly looking at each other, as there was little they could do when the tiny fellow had the ball at his feet. Watching the Hand of God occurring right before my eyes, well, how can you expect anything else to top that memory?” Moreover, in spite of being a quintessential Brazil-supporting Bengali (she and her husband were even photographed with Pele), she had no qualms in admitting that Maradona would always be her favourite footballer.
Her love for Brazil was further apparent when asked about being in the stadium in Belo Horizonte when hosts Brazil were beaten 7-1 by Germany in the semi-finals in 2014. “You have no idea what it is like to watch something that heartbreaking happen before your eyes. If you support someone, you just do," she said. "You don’t need to be a Brazilian to struggle with the waterworks when the team fell like a pack of cards.”
Brazil, though, has to play second fiddle to her true allegiance at home in Mohun Bagan. Having watched 31 Santosh Trophy matches in different parts of the country, her love for Indian football was far from fickle. “You can cut open my wrist. You will see Mohun Bagan running in my veins and nothing will ever change that,” she added with a grin.
In spite of her frail and sweet demeanour, she did a rather poor job of disguising the tinge of football snob in her when she spoke of the differences between watching a match on TV and watching games live. “When you watch a match on TV, the camera is just following the ball. Of course, there are a lot of people who are satisfied with that," she said. "I need more. How can you not pay attention to how the defender takes the position when he sees an attack brewing? So much is going on without the ball. It’s all part of the game.”
And watching the beautiful game live just got a whole lot easier for the couple, with the U-17 World Cup currently taking place in India. They are very grateful that Kolkata hosts 11 games, including the final on Saturday. Nevertheless, one should expect to see the Chatterjees in Russia next year for the latest edition of football's showpiece event.
This has been discussed multiple times before at IFN. Government cannot decide or bring any bill that will decide that who can/cannot be any office bearer in Sports Bodies. They are independent under the aegis of International Olympic Committee. Elections are held in their supervision. Remove politicians-okay and then what? who will take their place-employees of Reliance Group? In past, various federations have been banned due to interference by Government. This proposed Bill also will cause the same thing- Banning of India to participate in international events.
Are Bengalis racist and discriminatory when it comes to Marwaris in their state? Why?
A new book, ‘The Bengalis’, offers a modern-day portrait of the community, warts and all.
The roots of Bengali racism and discrimination are watered by the stupendous sense of self of the Bengali cultural elite and their applauding, aspirational fan club of the Bengali middle classes, one feeding off the other in a congratulatory loop. Of course this is an ultimately fragile imagining where, by diminishing others the Bengali diminishes himself – herself too, certainly – in obtuse xenophobia our women are frequently out there with the men.
But of all the not-Bengali who live around us and among us, special ill will is reserved for the Marwari, the transplanted trading and compound-interest wizards who have travelled the subcontinent and beyond from a patch of the western Indian state of Rajasthan. This relationship is more complicated, the Bengali arguably less gratuitous with rudeness. Indeed, disdain and a sense of superiority may actually flow the other way – from the Marwari to the Bengali. The flow from the Bengali to the Marwari could even be a feeling of hatred drizzled with envy.
The East Bengali will usually say Maura, the West Bengali Mero, with a hard rolling “r” closer to a “d”, but both mean the Marwari, ubiquitous in Kolkata and other cities of Bengal, the traditional business community that in so many ways controls Bengal’s economics and has played a prominent part in it for several hundred years. Maura or Mero is a self-contained curse.
I would hazard a guess that the hatred of the Marwari probably goes back to the time of the boy-king Siraj-ud-Daulah and his run- in with the legendary bankers, the Jagat Seths, and their collusion with the East India Company representatives to undermine the influence of that nawab of Bengal. As always with “John Company” there was commercial reasoning: the young nawab had, after a series of disputes, withdrawn concessions given to the Company, limited its sphere of activity, attacked its eastern bastion of Fort William in Kolkata and had several Britons locked up in a small, suffocating room – leading to their death, and the dramatic birth of the “Black Hole of Calcutta”. The nawab had to go. The Jagat Seth at the time, Madhab Rai, with a cousin, Swaroop Chand, who held the title of maharaja, evidently threw his lot in with the eventual rulers of Bengal. Jagat Seth – banker to the world, a title given by the fading line of Mughal emperors in Delhi, but here was grandeur backed by acumen, by flourishing practice.
As much as the bitterness that exists in contemporary and subsequent Bengali sources, mostly Hindu, about the petulant nawab and his mistreatment of people, in the Bengali imagination, Shiraj, as we sometimes familiarly refer to him, is seen in popular imagination as the last hold out against depredations of John Company, and its subsequent humiliation and domination of Bengal and the Bengali. This was a gigantic step in the embellishment of the British East India Company and the British Indian empire that would follow a hundred years later, in 1857, after the great mutiny (if you’re a textbook Indian nationalist feel free to call it the First War of Independence), when the Company’s administration was taken over by the British government.
The Company’s general, Robert Clive, conspired with – indeed, partnered – the Jagat Seth, effectively treasurers to several nawabs of Bengal, to sway Siraj-ud-Daulah’s traitorous general Mir Jafar, and had Polashi – Plassey – go against the nawab. Ergo: for the Bengali it marked the end of Bengal, all because of a greedy Mero to whom poysha, coin, will always ring truer than morjada, pride, and honour.
This oral and written history of stigma has passed down to generations of Bengalis since Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757. It was repeatedly reinforced in times of crisis. “The Marwaris were the ones to make the most out of the disruption of normal trading channels during wartime,” the journalist and economic historian Harish Damodaran writes of Marwari acumen during both World War I and World War II. In the Bengali scheme of things this is a gentle estimation. The “speculative profits” Damodaran writes of were made in commodities like jute and cotton. But none probably hurt the Bengali mind, body and soul like the speculation and hoarding of rice during World War II, precipitated by British policies to stave o a possible Japanese invasion. Along with a few stalwarts of the ruling Muslim League in Bengal, the Marwari is implicated, historically and, perhaps more damagingly, in the public imagination, in denying vast swathes of the Bengal countryside of grain. Up to three million dead is a fair number for complicity, and Marwari heroes, visibly and invisibly close to Mohandas Gandhi, providing moral support, underwriting parts of the freedom movement in a delicate balance of Crown and conscience, haven’t quite been able to escape Bengal’s Nuremberg of the mind. The famine of 1943 was our Holocaust till the war for Bangladesh twenty-eight years later. And then we had two.
Comments
An Outsider Between The Posts
Since the anti-foreigners movement started in Assam during the winter of 1979, not only did the Calcutta teams stop coming to play for the Bordoloi Trophy, it also ended our evening games at the school playground. There were frequent curfews. We had to restrict ourselves to playing in the narrow lanes of the neighbourhood. Football suffered the divisive machination of communal politics. The refugees of football were once again accused of being outsiders, people carrying the stigma of being on the wrong side of a territorial dispute. A nation’s rules are so much worse compared to the liberating rules of football. No wonder the not-so-famous goalkeeper, Albert Camus, had said in 1957, among all his experiences, what he knew about ‘morality and obligations’ he owed ‘to football’. Football is Marquezian, Alejo Carpentier’s world of ‘marvellous real’. If there was any flash of magic in post-Enlightenment Europe, it could be found either in surrealism or football. Football runs in the opposite direction to the way Kant defined the Enlightenment. It is a game where chance score over reason, where chance scores, not reason. Football is a game of dissolving maturity, adulthood at play, a space of mischief and genius, where rules allow what they disallow. The dream of a goal signifies a forbidden place to be penetrated without violence and left unconquered. Football defines a strange territory where the magic of becoming can take place.
That is why it is sad when Rana, a young football player who lived close by in the Railway Colony, who chose to play for his club, White Dragon, against the team from his neighbourhood, was slapped and abused by a gang of boys while returning home after the match. The gang tried to mark Rana’s territory and teach him the wrong lessons of loyalty. Loyalty is love, and love is a matter of the heart. The refugees of football, struggling against a politics that tried to ridicule their possibilities, were violating their own necessity to be free.
In the end, I imagine if football existed during Vyasa’s time, the battle of Kurukshetra could have been decided by a match between Kauravas and Pandavas. The trophy would have been the kingdom of Hastinapur. Before the game, Krishna would explain the Gita of Football to Arjuna, that football is maya, scoring a goal is the mind’s delusion and the ball is the metaphor of an evanescent universe.
http://www.fifa.com/live-scores/news/y=2010/m=10/news=what-they-said-about-pele-1321917.html
"I told myself before the game, 'he's made of skin and bones just like everyone else'. But I was wrong.”
Tarcisio Burgnich, the Italy defender who marked Pele in the Mexico 1970 Final
“The difficulty, the extraordinary, is not to score 1,000 goals like Pele – it’s to score one goal like Pele.”
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazilian poet
“The greatest player in history was Di Stefano. I refuse to classify Pele as a player. He was above that.”
Ferenc Puskas
“In some countries they wanted to touch him, in some they wanted to kiss him. In others they even kissed the ground he walked on. I thought it was beautiful, just beautiful.”
Clodoaldo
“After the fifth goal, even I wanted to cheer for him.”
Sigge Parling of Sweden on a 5-2 defeat by Brazil in the 1958 FIFA World Cup Final
“I arrived hoping to stop a great man, but I went away convinced I had been undone by someone who was not born on the same planet as the rest of us.”
Costa Pereira on Benfica’s 5-2 loss to Santos in the 1962 Intercontinental Cup in Lisbon
"Pele was the greatest – he was simply flawless. And off the pitch he is always smiling and upbeat. You never see him bad-tempered. He loves being Pele.”
Tostao
“When I saw Pele play, it made me feel I should hang up my boots.”
Just Fontaine
“Pele was so focused on winning the Trophy. It was like he knew it was his destiny. He was like a child waiting for Santa Claus.”
Mario Americo, Brazil’s masseur, on Mexico 1970
“Pele was one of the few who contradicted my theory: instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”
Andy Warhol
“You may be right. But you know nothing about football and I’ve seen Pele play.”
Vicente Feola to the psychologist who said Pele was too immature to play at Sweden 1958
“Pele was the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic.”
Johan Cruyff
“His great secret was improvisation. Those things he did were in one moment. He had an extraordinary perception of the game.”
Carlos Alberto Torres
“I sometimes feel as though football was invented for this magical player.”
Sir Bobby Charlton
"Pele played football for 22 years, and in that time he did more to promote world friendship and fraternity than any other ambassador anywhere.”
J.B. Pinheiro, the Brazilian ambassador to the United Nations
Malcolm Allison: “How do you spell Pele?”
Pat Crerand: “Easy: G-O-D.”
British television commentators during Mexico 1970
But the two that stand out for me are these:
1. “The greatest goal I ever scored was a one-two with Celeste – we named him Edson Arantes do Nascimento.”
Dondinho, Pele’s father
2. My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the President of the United States of America. But you don’t need to introduce yourself, because everyone knows who Pele is.”
Ronald Reagan
Indian couple reveal their World Cup passion
Pannalal and Chaitali Chatterjee are not a couple who can visit any restaurant in Kolkata and eat without caring to look at the prices on the menu card, and neither can they decide to take off on vacations to coveted destinations like England, France or Mexico.
Yet, this couple is already making their preparations to attend their tenth FIFA World Cup™ in Russia in 2018. A recent guest at the unveiling of the FIFA U-17 World Cup Winner’s Trophy in Kolkata, learning about Chaitali's World Cup experiences was nothing short of taking a virtual trip with her to Spain in 1982, Mexico in 1986, and right up to Brazil in 2014.
Reminiscing about her very first World Cup, Chaitali spoke about how her and her husband’s chance visit to Spain 1982 was a pure stroke of luck without which they might never have found how deeply their love for football ran.
“My husband’s childhood friend lived in Sussex and he was soon to become the Mayor of the province. He wanted all his friends to be there for him to share the special moment, so we decided to go," Chaitali said. "Incidentally, the World Cup was going on in Spain and two old friends couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the happy occasion than going to catch some football. Being there in the stadium, purely on an impulse, I realised how this is something we have to do every single time. I will always consider this a gift of God since if we had not gone to England, Spain would never have happened and our lives would never have taken the turn that it did.”
The decision to visit every World Cup came with a hundred sacrifices, from curtailing on food they liked, to always living on a budget, and making sure that their World Cup fund was not compromised with. It was not such a bad decision, one could tell, from the way her face lit up when she was asked what her most memorable World Cup moment was over the past 35 years.
“Of course, it was watching [Diego] Maradona’s brilliance at the 1986 World Cup," Chaitali said. "I saw him leave defenders helplessly looking at each other, as there was little they could do when the tiny fellow had the ball at his feet. Watching the Hand of God occurring right before my eyes, well, how can you expect anything else to top that memory?” Moreover, in spite of being a quintessential Brazil-supporting Bengali (she and her husband were even photographed with Pele), she had no qualms in admitting that Maradona would always be her favourite footballer.
Her love for Brazil was further apparent when asked about being in the stadium in Belo Horizonte when hosts Brazil were beaten 7-1 by Germany in the semi-finals in 2014. “You have no idea what it is like to watch something that heartbreaking happen before your eyes. If you support someone, you just do," she said. "You don’t need to be a Brazilian to struggle with the waterworks when the team fell like a pack of cards.”
Brazil, though, has to play second fiddle to her true allegiance at home in Mohun Bagan. Having watched 31 Santosh Trophy matches in different parts of the country, her love for Indian football was far from fickle. “You can cut open my wrist. You will see Mohun Bagan running in my veins and nothing will ever change that,” she added with a grin.
In spite of her frail and sweet demeanour, she did a rather poor job of disguising the tinge of football snob in her when she spoke of the differences between watching a match on TV and watching games live. “When you watch a match on TV, the camera is just following the ball. Of course, there are a lot of people who are satisfied with that," she said. "I need more. How can you not pay attention to how the defender takes the position when he sees an attack brewing? So much is going on without the ball. It’s all part of the game.”
And watching the beautiful game live just got a whole lot easier for the couple, with the U-17 World Cup currently taking place in India. They are very grateful that Kolkata hosts 11 games, including the final on Saturday. Nevertheless, one should expect to see the Chatterjees in Russia next year for the latest edition of football's showpiece event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxKmUXoEYuo
In past, various federations have been banned due to interference by Government. This proposed Bill also will cause the same thing- Banning of India to participate in international events.
Are Bengalis racist and discriminatory when it comes to Marwaris in their state? Why?
A new book, ‘The Bengalis’, offers a modern-day portrait of the community, warts and all.
The roots of Bengali racism and discrimination are watered by the stupendous sense of self of the Bengali cultural elite and their applauding, aspirational fan club of the Bengali middle classes, one feeding off the other in a congratulatory loop. Of course this is an ultimately fragile imagining where, by diminishing others the Bengali diminishes himself – herself too, certainly – in obtuse xenophobia our women are frequently out there with the men.
But of all the not-Bengali who live around us and among us, special ill will is reserved for the Marwari, the transplanted trading and compound-interest wizards who have travelled the subcontinent and beyond from a patch of the western Indian state of Rajasthan. This relationship is more complicated, the Bengali arguably less gratuitous with rudeness. Indeed, disdain and a sense of superiority may actually flow the other way – from the Marwari to the Bengali. The flow from the Bengali to the Marwari could even be a feeling of hatred drizzled with envy.
The East Bengali will usually say Maura, the West Bengali Mero, with a hard rolling “r” closer to a “d”, but both mean the Marwari, ubiquitous in Kolkata and other cities of Bengal, the traditional business community that in so many ways controls Bengal’s economics and has played a prominent part in it for several hundred years. Maura or Mero is a self-contained curse.
I would hazard a guess that the hatred of the Marwari probably goes back to the time of the boy-king Siraj-ud-Daulah and his run- in with the legendary bankers, the Jagat Seths, and their collusion with the East India Company representatives to undermine the influence of that nawab of Bengal. As always with “John Company” there was commercial reasoning: the young nawab had, after a series of disputes, withdrawn concessions given to the Company, limited its sphere of activity, attacked its eastern bastion of Fort William in Kolkata and had several Britons locked up in a small, suffocating room – leading to their death, and the dramatic birth of the “Black Hole of Calcutta”. The nawab had to go. The Jagat Seth at the time, Madhab Rai, with a cousin, Swaroop Chand, who held the title of maharaja, evidently threw his lot in with the eventual rulers of Bengal. Jagat Seth – banker to the world, a title given by the fading line of Mughal emperors in Delhi, but here was grandeur backed by acumen, by flourishing practice.
As much as the bitterness that exists in contemporary and subsequent Bengali sources, mostly Hindu, about the petulant nawab and his mistreatment of people, in the Bengali imagination, Shiraj, as we sometimes familiarly refer to him, is seen in popular imagination as the last hold out against depredations of John Company, and its subsequent humiliation and domination of Bengal and the Bengali. This was a gigantic step in the embellishment of the British East India Company and the British Indian empire that would follow a hundred years later, in 1857, after the great mutiny (if you’re a textbook Indian nationalist feel free to call it the First War of Independence), when the Company’s administration was taken over by the British government.
The Company’s general, Robert Clive, conspired with – indeed, partnered – the Jagat Seth, effectively treasurers to several nawabs of Bengal, to sway Siraj-ud-Daulah’s traitorous general Mir Jafar, and had Polashi – Plassey – go against the nawab. Ergo: for the Bengali it marked the end of Bengal, all because of a greedy Mero to whom poysha, coin, will always ring truer than morjada, pride, and honour.
This oral and written history of stigma has passed down to generations of Bengalis since Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757. It was repeatedly reinforced in times of crisis. “The Marwaris were the ones to make the most out of the disruption of normal trading channels during wartime,” the journalist and economic historian Harish Damodaran writes of Marwari acumen during both World War I and World War II. In the Bengali scheme of things this is a gentle estimation. The “speculative profits” Damodaran writes of were made in commodities like jute and cotton. But none probably hurt the Bengali mind, body and soul like the speculation and hoarding of rice during World War II, precipitated by British policies to stave o a possible Japanese invasion. Along with a few stalwarts of the ruling Muslim League in Bengal, the Marwari is implicated, historically and, perhaps more damagingly, in the public imagination, in denying vast swathes of the Bengal countryside of grain. Up to three million dead is a fair number for complicity, and Marwari heroes, visibly and invisibly close to Mohandas Gandhi, providing moral support, underwriting parts of the freedom movement in a delicate balance of Crown and conscience, haven’t quite been able to escape Bengal’s Nuremberg of the mind. The famine of 1943 was our Holocaust till the war for Bangladesh twenty-eight years later. And then we had two.