Kolkata’s nostalgia trap: Winning Bengal was hard, transforming it will be harder

Kolkata is a city that seduces you and disappoints almost simultaneously. You arrive, and it feels like a world you have always wanted to inhabit and grow old in. Yellow taxis that wobble past colonial buildings, bookstores that evoke the sense that Rabindranath Tagore has only just stepped out, and street-corner conversations that make it seem as though every second person has been personally trained by Satyajit Ray. And yet, as days go by, one feels stuck, often regressed — in time.

For, Kolkata may live in the present, but it thrives on the past. It may be the only metropolitan city in the country where nostalgia is not merely an emotion but a dominant philosophy. The city exists somewhere between Tagore’s last poem, Ray’s final frame and Sourav Ganguly’s famed cover drive.

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Kolkata is addicted to memory. The present is painful, but the past feels therapeutic. Rabindranath Tagore. Satyajit Ray. Uttam Kumar. Ritwik Ghatak. Vivekananda. The glorious dead are summoned endlessly, perhaps as reminders of the failures of the living.

This nostalgia is not a harmless romance, though. It is an intoxicant. It offers pride without effort, identity without responsibility, and superiority without performance. But when the high fades, only the dreary reality remains: of crumbling infrastructure, fleeing industries, chronic unemployment, political violence, and a generation of young Bengalis whose greatest ambition of life is to flee the state for jobs.

Then comes the withdrawal syndrome, marked by grievance, helplessness and rage. Someone must be blamed. Naturally, the outsider becomes the villain. Delhi did it. Gujarat did it. Capitalism did it. Hindi did it. North Indians did it.

This mindset offered Bengal a safety valve in permanent villain and a permanent excuse. Industry left? Good, industry was exploitative anyway. Wealth creation slowed? Excellent, poverty was morally superior to a vulgar display of wealth. Strikes, shutdowns, hartals… these were not economic sabotage, but moral resistance. Gandhian Satyagraha is often invoked. Though the same person would never fail to remind you how Mahatma Gandhi had been unfair to Subhas Chandra Bose, and later Delhi discriminated against Kolkata post-Independence!

Bengal, thus, became perhaps one of those few places where not working acquired moral legitimacy. Anti-work ethic was elevated into an art form. In this worldview, as Shibram Chakroborty puts it aptly in his 1974 book, Ishwar, Prithibi, Bhalobasha (God, The World, Love), “There is nothing as sad as being great… There is much more happiness being a small guy.” Productivity became a disgraced notion. Business was uncouth. Profit vulgar. And the market exploitative. All this when the same bhadralok class would find no problem in standing in line to buy the latest imported iPhone or sipping expensive wine at Park Street or in old Kolkata clubs!

The communist project in Bengal did something even more disorienting: it made people obsessively attached to the past, but only in the physical sense. The soul that defined the Bengal of the past got lost. Marxism quietly disconnected Bengal from its own civilisational roots. Bengal, which gave the country Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Aurobindo, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, and much of the philosophical-revolutionary fervour of modern Indian nationalism, was persuaded to become suspicious of its own inheritance. Rootlessness was marketed as cosmopolitanism.

Yes, Durga Puja survived, but increasingly as a spectacle rather than a spiritual anchor. Pandals became more important than prayer. Food stalls became holier than philosophy. Tradition was preserved aesthetically, while its civilisational substance was politely edited out. Author Indrajit Hazra writes in Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata, “Pujo in Kolkata, like the shorter and almost-as-dizzying Christmas, is a five-day condition that affects everyone. It is about being Bengali, and not so much about being Hindu.”

This produced an identity crisis so deep that Bengali nationalism got de-hyphenated from the larger Hindu fold. The idea of Bengal became distinct from the idea of Bharat—and the idea of Bengali different from the idea of Hindu. Hindutva, which owed some of its origins to Bengal, soon became its antithesis.

A strange split emerged: Maa Kali was acceptable, but Sri Ram became “North Indian”. Vivekananda was quoted, but his philosophy became distant. Bankim was remembered, but Vande Mataram became politically inconvenient. This produced an identity crisis so deep that Bengali pride and Indic civilisational confidence were made to seem mutually exclusive, as if Bengal was Sanatani by accident.

For decades, communism perfected this dichotomy — socially, economically, spiritually and culturally. By the time people fully grasped the cost of the Marxist project, 34 years had passed. The anger spilled onto the streets, from Singur to Nandigram, and in 2011 the Left Front was finally unseated.

But that revolution was quickly hijacked. The Trinamool Congress inherited power and pushed the state towards a new form of ultra-leftism, mixed with patronage politics and an extreme form of minority appeasement. What followed was not renewal, but further regression.

Fifteen years later, in May 2026, Bengal appears to have finally loosened Trinamool’s grip. Yet the fear remains that change itself may again be hijacked. After five decades of ideological conditioning, the challenge before the BJP is far greater than winning an election.

Because Bengal does not only need factories. It needs to stop believing factories are morally inferior to poetry recitation centres. It needs jobs, but it also needs to escape the mental blockade that treats disciplined work as a capitalist curse.

The irony is painful: the state that once led the country intellectually, pioneered entrepreneurial-industrial culture, unleashed Hindu renaissance during the British era, and shaped modern Indian political thought now finds itself apologetic about everything it historically and civilisationally stood for.

For the BJP, therefore, winning Bengal politically was hard, no doubt. But transforming the state will be harder. It will have to not just rewire the politico-economic narrative in the state, where the ethos of life and work will have to be redefined, but also rediscover Bengal’s civilisational roots. This will determine whether the state remains a museum of lost greatness or re-emerge as a living participant in Bharat’s rise once again.

Be that as it may, the truth is simple: the future success of Bharat, in many ways, still flows through the Ganges in the east.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)