The Question of North Bengal

It is examination season. I am being seen with suspicion and annoyance – I am a teacher, a group that my nephew temporarily dislikes. He sits in front of a laptop for most of the day – all his teachers live there, his classmates, and his video games. We matter little to him – we could be the mosquitoes that disturb him or the ceiling fan that he needs. The room he is in remains curtained through the day and night. His life, like all other children’s, has lost all outside. 

Occasionally I ask him about his exams. ‘Why is everyone laughing in the Blake poem? Can humans live on Mars? How were the Himalayas formed?’ I don’t ask him about the answers he’s written. It is not only because he is exhausted from this near-farcical exercise of learning and answering examinations online. I shake my head occasionally. He asks me why. When I manage to pull him out of the room to the balcony, both of us mindful of wearing a mask when standing there, I ask him about the name of the street his house is on. He remembers – he’s heard us say it to the courier and Zomato personnel. 

‘Sreema Sarani,’ he says. 

‘Who is Sreema, and why is this street named after them?’ I ask. 

He doesn’t know. 

Not a single book he studies tells him his story – about the town he is in, how it gets its name, why its climate is what it is. He does not know the name of a single historical figure from his town. After much thought, he says ‘Wriddhiman Saha’. Quite clearly, his history textbooks have misled him to equate a ‘famous’ person as a ‘historical figure’. 

And so I began preparing a set of questions – they might help us to think and imagine North Bengal differently. 

1. If we are in West Bengal, why is this place called North Bengal? 
2. Since when has it been called North Bengal?
3. What is the meaning and history behind the name ‘Siliguri’?
4. Why do so many settlements in North Bengal have ‘guri’ in their suffix? For instance, Jalpaiguri. 
5. Why is the river called Balasan? Where does it begin its life? 
6. What is the history behind the name Darjeeling? 
7. How did Kurseong become a school town?
8. How did the culture of tea plantations start in this region?
9. Why is the Hill Cart Road so named? When did its construction begin and end?
10. What are the languages spoken in North Bengal?
11. Have you heard of a place called Rajabhatkhawa? Why does it have this unexpected name?
12. What gives the river Teesta its unique colour?
13. You’ve heard of Kalimpong. What was its older name? And what did it say about its history?
14. What is Gorkhaland, and why are so many people in the hills fighting for a separate state?
15. Have you eaten any fish that is peculiar to the region? Would you know which river it was from?
16. Why is Kamtapuri a language and not a ‘dialect’? 
17. Have you ever seen a statue of a person from North Bengal in North Bengal? Have you wondered why you haven’t?
18. Where exactly is Naxalbari, and why is it important to Indian history?
19. Please name three writers from North Bengal. 
20. Would you know the names of three novels written about this region?
21. Would you know of any poem, story or play written by Rabindranath Tagore that was written in North Bengal?
22. How many districts are there in this region?
23. Has the Vice-Chancellor of the University of North Bengal ever been a person from North Bengal?
24. What is the Chicken’s Neck?
25. Do you know the name of any historical monument in this region?

To begin with, just these random questions, answers to which will not be difficult to find on the internet. These questions are not only for ‘tourists’, who come here to ‘enjoy’ the hills and the forests but find little interest in discovering anything else, but also to all of us who live here. We might not know all the answers, but we can start with them. It might be rewarding to know about the histories outside our window and not only about Mumtaz Mahal. 

And, if you can, perhaps you’ll learn to sing a song from North Bengal some day?

Illustration by Suvamoy Mitra

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