Shutki 🤮

We have seen hate comments on beef recipes before, but the amount of spite and disgust we received on our shutki recipe surprised me. I have had to delete at least fifty similarly vile comments in the last one week. It was a reality check in some ways — shocking, yet strangely familiar.

The Bangal-ghoti squabble is nowadays looked at somewhat fondly. It is just harmless banter, right?

Bangal, for those unfamiliar with the word, is a term used to refer to refugees from East Bengal who migrated to West Bengal around the time of the partition of India, as violent religious riots broke out on both sides of the border. Ghoti refers to the original inhabitants of West Bengal.

I cannot speak for Bangals elsewhere, but people like me who grew up in refugee colonies at the periphery of Calcutta have heard similar comments — what we now term as micro aggressions, some more overt than others — all our lives.

Jokes about how our food is stinky, or that we eat weird things (this was before nose-to-tail eating became cool), how our people lack manners, are bad-looking/darker-skinned, how the neighbourhoods we live in aren’t really part of the city proper, expressions of shock about how long it takes us to get home from Park Street, how opening the metro route beyond Tollygunge has ruined the metro for the real Calcuttans, how during Pujo, the “village types” turning up in droves from outside the city make the nice idyllic neighbourhoods hard to navigate — “why can’t they just stay in their neighbourhoods? Why do they come here?”

The allegations are true, of course. We eat all sorts of fish the locals would not touch (this was more true 30 years back than now). Dried fish, fish innards, foraged greens, turtle eggs? What won’t we eat?

Our families were loud, and the houses were all crowded together. So, when there was a family quarrel, your neighbours would know all about it, which was not that big of a deal because you knew all about theirs.

It is also true that the refugee colonies are far from every place that matters. Until recently, even the traffic policing used to change from the white-uniform clad, aviator-wearing, tall Kolkata Police, to the khaki clad, underpaid West Bengal police beyond Jadavpur Thana. To get to anywhere in the city it would take me at least 40 minutes on a bus, a little less on an auto. At night, it would be hard to find transport back. Taxis would refuse to go or charge exorbitant markups. This holds true even today.

Even the grouse about people from outside the city crowding their neighbourhoods during pujo is true. When I was young, the handful of times I went to Gariahat was with my grandmother just before pujo to buy new clothes. This was always followed by a dosa, and a kulfi with rose syrup at Sonali — the only restaurant I had been to until I was much older (my father took me to Shabir once when I was in class eight, I think). And I would go to Ballygunge, College Street, Baghbazar, etc. again on the four pujo days with my parents, braving the crowds to look at the pandals and lights. This used to be the highlight of my whole year.

Our para pujo in Baghajatin, funded by colony people and small businesses, but without any big advertisers, was much smaller at the time. There was no theme. The idol maker was from the same neighbourhood. The local decorator would do up the pandal as they fancied. It had its own charm, no doubt, and I did spend the better part of the day at this pandal with friends and cousins, but it was no Santoshmitra Square.

A few years ago a friend had decided to film a short documentary on how we started Bong Eats. An extremely gifted cinematographer, she came over to our house for some shots of our home, kitchen, my parents, our garden, etc. She kept asking to see some old family heirlooms — some quaint crockery, or beautiful old utensils — that has some sentimental value to us. We kept trying to explain that we don’t have any. She was bemused and mildly suspicious. The truth is we don’t inherit nice heirlooms because we don’t have any. My great grandparents were certainly not poor. They were an upper caste, landowning Hindu family in Bikrampur, Dhaka. But when they came over to West Bengal with young children in tow, there were only so many valuable things they could carry with them without getting robbed.

They settled down in what was essentially marshland covered in hogla grass growing six-feet high. Could they have got land in a respectable neighbourhood in Bhowanipur? I doubt it. Even if they had just about enough money to buy land, I don’t think they would have, at that point in life. For many years my great grandparents believed that after this partition thing had blown over, they might be able to return “home”. It was only in the fifties, after my great grandfather passed away, that my great grandmother came around to the reality that they were not going anywhere.

There are so many other families who came and settled down in that colony, who were poor, from lower castes, and had no financial or social capital to begin with. Many of them have not been able to rise up the social ranks as we have. I can only imagine how these aggressions affect them, when I, so much more privileged, so much more confident of my cultural past, struggle daily to contain my anger at these casual insensitivities from not just strangers, but educated, liberal, well-meaning friends.