Few issues seize the guts of a Bengali fairly just like the hilsa, a fish that evokes not simply culinary delight however cultural delight. It swims via the ‘lifeblood’ of India and Bangladesh, showing at festivals and ceremonies.
Its silvery sheen and delicate style have impressed fierce arguments over whether or not the Padma or Ganga produces the superior catch. Bengali-American meals historian Chitrita Banerji completely captures the cultural weight of this fish, describing it because the “darling of the waters” and a “prince amongst fish.”
For a lot of Bengali households, Durga Puja is incomplete with out their beloved ilish (hilsa). Some even provide it to the Goddess, believing that with out it, the puja can be incomplete.
However the story of hilsa extends far past the festivals and the eating desk. For hundreds of years, it has captured the creativeness of poets, writers, and artists – whether or not in conventional Kalighat work or as an imposing, mermaid-like goddess in up to date depictions.
A literary affair
The Bengali love affair with hilsa is intricately woven into its literary custom. In Brihaddharma Purana, one of many 18 Upapuranas, fish is praised as a delicacy match for Brahmins, at the same time as orthodoxies debated its consumption. “This textual content stated that Brahmins might eat the rohu (rui in Bengali), the swamp barb (punti), the snakehead murrel (shoul), and different white and scaly fish,” writes Ghulam Murshid in his e-book, Bengali Tradition Over A Thousand Years.
On how the hilsa received favour regardless of spiritual taboos, Murshid writes: “It was not nonetheless straightforward to without end resist, within the title of faith, the scrumptious yield of river fish, or perhaps a extensively accepted meals tradition.”
The Eleventh-century Bengali scriptural scholar, Bhabadeb Bhatta, went on to extol the virtues of fish-eating, whereas the scholar Jeemutbahan praised the hilsa and its oil. Murshid notes that the scholar Sarbananda, too, didn’t overlook the hilsa when he slammed fish-eating in his Teekasarbasya within the twelfth century.
Satyendranath Dutta’s poem Ilshe Gundi romanticises the monsoon rains related to hilsa fishing. Dutta’s verses evoke the rhythmic dance of the hilsa through the monsoons: ‘Ilshe Gundi! Ilshe Gundi/ Hilsa fish eggs/ Ilshe Gundi Ilshe Gundi/ Frost through the day./ The solar laughs on the restrict of the clouds/ Ilshe Gundi dances/ Hilsa fish dancing.’
Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi additional explores themes surrounding the riverine tradition that hilsa embodies, weaving it into the material of Bengal’s social and financial life. In the meantime, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, in his ode to the hilsa, evokes a way of culinary devotion: “…my coronary heart stays prostrated, overwhelmed by devotion, and refuses to go away that web site of pilgrimage.”
A visible and creative image
Within the visible arts, the hilsa’s distinct kind has lengthy been a recurring motif in conventional and up to date artwork in Bengal.
Historical finds, just like the 4th-century slab with a fish picture at Chandraketugarh, reveal that the love for fish runs deep within the tradition. “Fish photos additionally seem in lots of the terracotta slabs that have been made at Paharpur and Mainamati from the eighth century,” writes Murshid.
In newer instances, hilsa seems regularly in Bengali folks artwork, comparable to patachitra and Kalighat work, symbolising abundance and sustenance. One well-known Nineteenth-century Kalighat portray, painted on brown paper with skinny, shiny pigments and a contact of silver, includes a stylised cat holding a fish in its mouth, “representing the hypocritical ascetic or monk who renounces the world however continues to take pleasure in earthly pleasures.”
“The hilsa is all the time on the thoughts of a Bengali, although its season is restricted to the monsoons. Just lately, I’ve observed the picture of motsokonya showing within the work of London-based artist Arinjoy Sen. It was gorgeous how he depicted a Goddess with a physique half fish,” says Ina Puri, a London-based arts impresario, curator, and author. “Up to date artists are additionally partaking with the hilsa via totally different mediums. Take Delhi-based sculptor Prerna Sharma who makes ceramic fish.”
“What I keep in mind of the hilsa is from my childhood as a joda hilsa (pair of hilsa) is what is obtainable to Saraswati. It’s a part of our folklore, music, artwork, and literature, and naturally could be very related to our delicacies. At my very own marriage ceremony, we had a hilsa in our alpana, which is taken into account auspicious; through the child bathe, the fish is obtainable to the mother-to-be. At weddings, together with garments, they’re given a fish with vermillion, which is auspicious,” she says, including that the hilsa can be seen within the works of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak.
An emblem of loss and longing
However hilsa isn’t just a logo of celebration. Its position in Bengali tradition has additionally been intertwined with themes of loss and displacement. Diya Gupta, a lecturer in Public Historical past on the Metropolis, College of London, in her e-book India within the Second World Conflict: An Emotional Historical past, explores the tragic penalties of cultural loss through the Bengal famine via the motif of the hilsa.
Citing Marxist poet Samar Sen’s prose poem ‘ninth August 1945’, she says, “In Sen’s poem, the metaphor of gustatory notion — ‘ilisher swad’ (the style of ilish) — comes solely on the finish, as if held in examine for therefore lengthy.”
And darkish sounds collect tempo within the clouds
The saffron river’s movement doesn’t convey with it the flames of crops,
The violent movement of the water reveals a muddy delirium,
Solely from time to time is there a flash of fish.
However fishermen have forgotten the style of ilish,
And an excellent dying covers the disgrace of the bare girls weavers.
— ‘ninth August 1945,’ Samar Sen
The fishermen, beforehand connoisseurs of regional fish varieties, are represented right here as victims of a horrible sensory forgetting, a cultural amputation, because it have been, says Gupta. They can not now even keep in mind what the normal Bengali culinary delight, the ilish fish, tastes like. Weaving, the well-known craft of Bengali villages, significantly that of East Bengal, is proven to die too together with its girls — the Bengal famine affected those that have been financially precarious probably the most, leading to an infinite decline within the numbers of village artisans. “The famine, then, registers within the poem not solely as a scarcity of meals in Bengal but in addition as an enormous and sweeping destruction of the primordial nubs of Bengali sensibility and cultural life,” she says.
The post-Partition period noticed the fish tackle deeper symbolic that means. Writers comparable to Khademul Islam have used the hilsa to discover the scars left by the Partition of India and the Bangladesh Liberation Conflict.
In his brief story, An Ilish Story, Islam juxtaposes the tenderness of cooking hilsa with reminiscences of violence and loss (Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Reminiscence, Tradition, and Politics, edited by Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul Ok. Gairola).
This transformation of hilsa from a delicacy to one thing that provokes nausea, each literal and emotional, illustrates the fish’s symbolic weight in Bengali life. As Khademul Islam’s narrator says, “the once-prized fish now makes me really feel sick.”
In post-Partition literature, hilsa serves as a metaphor for longing and nostalgia. Murshid writes, “The Padma ilish was not only a fish; it was a logo of the motherland that was left behind.”
In folklore
In folklore, hilsa’s position extends to ghost tales and cautionary tales. The Mechho Bhoot, or fish ghosts, are believed to be the spirits of fishermen who met tragic ends within the water. Moreover, the Shakchunni, a spectral determine residing in timber, symbolises unfulfilled wishes and the eager for companionship, typically craving fish as a metaphor for unmet needs.
Probably the most iconic figures in Bengali folklore is Gopal Bhar, the jester to Raja Krishnachandra of Krishnanagar, recognized for his wit and antics. As Lee Siegel notes in Laughing Issues: Comedian Custom in India, hilsa typically takes centre stage in these comedic narratives.
Through the hilsa season, “fishermen might consider nothing however hilsa-fish. Fishmongers bought nothing however hilsa-fish. Homeowners might speak of nothing however hilsa-fish.” Raja Krishnachandra challenged Gopal Bhar to convey a hilsa to the palace with out anybody asking him about it. Gopal, ever the trickster, shaved half his face, donned outdated rags, and smeared his physique with ashes. As he walked via city with the hilsa, nobody talked about the fish, as a substitute commenting on his absurd look. Siegel factors out that Gopal’s comedian antics, like these of the Sanskrit vidusaka, “flip a risk to society again on itself, as he brings the group, the collective physique of hilsa-fish-possessed people, to its senses with a trick, a joke, with laughter.”
A style of custom
Maybe nowhere is the Bengali love for hilsa extra obvious than in its delicacies. Bengali homemakers have lengthy experimented with methods to organize the fish, with cookbooks comparable to Pak Rajeshwar, touted because the oldest cookbook in Bengali (printed within the Nineteenth century) and Pak-Pranali (1923) preserving elaborate recipes. By the twentieth century, the famend culinary creator Prajnasundari Devi of the Jorasanko Tagore household listed no fewer than 58 alternative ways to organize hilsa in her cookbook, writes Murshid.
Requested why the hilsa stays such a permanent image of Bengali tradition, Dr Abhishek Basu, who has been educating within the division of comparative Indian language and literature, College of Calcutta for 9 years, says, “The hilsa is usually seen as a insurgent, a fish that defies the tide by swimming upstream, towards the present because it strikes from the ocean to the rivers. It embodies resilience and revolution — qualities that resonate deeply with Bengal’s spirit. We establish with the ilish as a result of it’s not only a fish; it’s a revolutionary image. It’s the joler rupoli shosho, the golden fish.”
References
- Banerji, Chitrita. The Hour of The Goddess: Recollections of Girls, Meals and Ritual in Bengal. Penguin Books India, 2008. ISBN: 9780144001422.
- Ghosh, Pika. “Kalighat Work from Nineteenth Century Calcutta in Maxwell Sommerville’s ‘Ethnological East Indian Assortment’.” Expedition, vol. 42, no. 3, 2000, pp. 11-20. See: Fig. 4.
- Gupta, Diya. India within the Second World Conflict: An Emotional Historical past. Oxford College Press, n.d.
- Murshid, Ghulam. Bengali Tradition Over A Thousand Years. Translated by Sarbari Sinha, Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2008.
- Roy, Rituparna. “For the Love of Hilsa.” Roads & Kingdoms, 27 Sept. 2017, https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2017/for-the-love-of-hilsa/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
- Siegel, Lee. Laughing Issues: Comedian Custom in India. College of Chicago Press, First Version 1987, First Indian Version, Motilal Banarsidass, 1989. ISBN: 81-208-0548-8.
- Singh, Amritjit, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul Ok. Gairola, editors. Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Reminiscence, Tradition, and Politics. Lexington Books, 2016. ISBN: 9781498531047.
