Criminal, Saint, Politician: The Monk in the Popular Bengali Imagination

A seven-phase election like the 2024 Lok Sabha contest makes it necessary for new tweaks to be made to refresh the basic content of a campaign. In West Bengal, the campaign this time has been a no-holds-barred slugfest between two very articulate and charismatic leaders, Narendra Modi, perpetually haranguing the public for the Bharatiya Janata Party on the one hand, and the mercurial Mamata Banerjee, speaking in the idiom of the masses, on the other.  

In his quest to add something new to a concoction that he had crafted over weeks of intensive campaigning, Modi picked on a targeted attack by Mamata Banerjee. The TMC chief named a monk, one Kartik Maharaj, of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha. She also said that other monks from similar institutions including the Ramakrishna Mission were involved in partisan politics, indicating that they were engaged in canvassing for the BJP.  

The Mamata Banerjee speech offered a perfect opening for Modi to launch a full-throated attack that was a good fit for the narrative of communally divisive and paranoid majoritarianism that he has been tirelessly repeating in every rally in West Bengal and elsewhere.

In the hope that this was an issue that would alienate voters from the TMC in phases six and seven, Modi said “In Bengal, the TMC is responsible for attacking your faith. TMC leaders deem the Ram Mandir unholy and the government halts Ram Navami celebrations…. The chief minister herself threatens Hindu monks.” The BJP’s campaign has focused on how TMC was in favour of – as Amit Shah said, “Mullah, madrassa, mafia”. Thus her tirade appeared as an unexpected gift with which to attack her for being anti-Hindu. 

Also read: Who Is Swami Pradiptananda, the Monk at the Centre of the Political Heat in Bengal?

How voters see this exchange between Modi and Mamata is unclear.

Impulsive as Mamata can be, she is also shrewd enough to know where the line cannot be crossed vis-à-vis voters and their sentiments. Her attack on some meddling monks was carefully crafted; she made it clear that she was not critical of the institutions, like Bharat Sevashram Sangha, Ramakrishna Mission or ISKCON. By singling out Kartik Maharaj, she knew that the BSS would not back him up and its statement distancing itself from the Kartik Maharaj confirms how accurately she gauged the impact of her statement.

She was confident that most voters in the state would not misunderstand her attack on the monk Maharaj and others who dabbled in politics, as anti-Hindu. On the contrary, she was aware that some voters have been squeamish about her public displays of Hindu devotion and her equally public gestures that mimic Muslim ritual practice. 

The monk in Bengali culture

The monk or sanyasi is a motif in Bengali culture, from literature to films. Having been nurtured on a diet that does not axiomatically treat monks as saints, the attack on a specific monk during an intensely confrontational election campaign would not alienate nor even offend Bengalis, not even the most devout and spiritually inclined.

Satyajit Ray, made a film in 1965, Kapurush O Mahapurush, ‘The Coward and The Holy Man’. The second part was based on a short story, Birinchi Baba, by Rajshekhar Bose, an author who continues to shape the idiom in which Bengalis formulate their thoughts. The Holy Man was a fraud who fed on the vulnerabilities of the well-heeled. In one iconic scene, Birinchi Baba is travelling in a first class train compartment which is shared by his target, Gurupada Mitter. The time is dawn; Birinchi Baba looks out of the window and tells the sun to rise, in a tone that a father would use to a lie-abed son; and, Mitter takes the bait. 

No Hindu ever lashed out at Ray or Bose, regardless of how devout or spiritually inclined and so prone to being captivated by holy men. When Ray made Joy Baba Felunath, one of the films in his detective series, a sanyasi with the mandatory beard and long locks, garlanded with rudraksha with his fixed patch on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi turned out to be part of the criminal network masterminded by the sinister yet unctuous Maganlal Meghraj, a role that Utpal Dutt played to perfection.

Ray’s sanyasi as a conman and fence for stolen property were smooth fits for the archetypes of some sanyasis, especially the wandering kind, that populate Bengali folklore. Children, in the 21st century, especially in rural Bengal are warned to beware of saffron-clad wandering sanyasis, who may be child lifters in disguise. 

The Bengali mind is in thrall of the idea of the wandering mendicant, especially the idea of the robes of a sanyasi as a disguise. The best loved of these is the conception of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose wandering back to India disguised as a sanyasi. Through the 1950s and up to the 1970s, sightings of a sanyasi who could be Netaji were regularly reported in newspapers. The idea of Netaji the sanyasi continues to captivate the imagination as the 2019 film Gumnami Baba by Srijit Mukherji confirms. 

Netaji as the mysterious sanyasi who rejects political life fascinates the Bengali imagination as much as the other mysterious sanyasi, popularly known as Bhawal Sanyasi. Professor Partha Chatterjee described him as the ‘Princely Impostor’, in a book about the narrative history of the name. His research and interpretation are aimed at sifting through the evidence to reconstruct what happened in that mysterious episode against “the background of the larger history of Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century.”

The popular Bengali film, Sanyasi Raja, starring the legendary Uttam Kumar was a take on the Bhawal Sanyasi mystery. The Sanyasi was a zamindar and died in Darjeeling in 1909. He, it was believed by some of his family, reappeared in Dhaka in 1921; what followed was a complicated legal battle between those who believed the sanyasi to be Ramendra Narayan Roy, the second kumar of Bhawal, who lived in Jaidebpur, a small town located to the north of Dhaka. 

The renunciator is a romantic figure, too, in the Bengali imagination. Rabindranath Tagore wrote about sanyasis, as the embodiment of compassion in Chandalika, where the central female character is a Dalit woman who encounters a Buddhist Bikshu. His Valmiki Pratibha, in which he performed as the thug who renounced his life and became Valmiki the sage, is about the man who gives up and becomes transformed in the process. 

And then there are sanyasis like Swami Vivekananda, a reformer, a Hindu and a charismatic speaker who grabbed global attention with his Chicago address at the World Parliament of Religions. The Bengali is as admiring of Swami Vivekananda as they are of Sister Nivedita and other great spiritual leaders including Rishi Aurobindo and the subaltern holy man Baba Lokenath with several others in between. 

There are multiple ways in which the sanyasi has captivated the Bengali imagination across oeuvres. The sanyasi is revered and reviled. Mamata Banerjee when she attacked Kartik Maharaj’s credentials, knew exactly how ambivalent her audience was to the idea of the sanyasi meddling in politics. 

Narendra Modi, alas, has inadvertently stepped into a snare that he thought mistakenly as a great opportunity to slam his opponent for attacking a monk.

Shikha Mukherjee is a Kolkata-based commentator.