When I was growing up, in the 1950s and 1960s, Bengal had a hallowed place in my mind, as perhaps the mind of every one of my generation. Bengal was, I think, the crucible of our culture, of  our sense of patriotism and of national pride.

In a way Bengal must have crystallized sort of bildungsroman of every imaginative teenager and youth of the period anywhere in the country. Bengal taught us many things to grow with and to hold fast. All its spiritual leaders, writers and intellectuals who shaped Bengali, and thereafter Indian, culture had a saintly halo round their heads.

In the forefront was of course Swami Vivekananda. Then there were Bankim Chandra Chatterjee who gave us one of the earliest fulsome Indian novels, Anandmath, and through it the everlasting national song Vande Mataram, Raja Rammohun Roy, the great social reformer, Rabindranath Tagore whose rapturous offering Gitanjali won for India its first Nobel Prize, Easwar Chandra Vidyasagar, pioneer educationist, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, writer of Pather Panchali that paved the way for a new cinematic experience in the country through Satyajit Ray……. the list goes on and on.
 
That was the golden age of Bengal embedded in our mind, the real Sonar Bangla. Nationalism was nurtured in us during schooldays through Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana and Bankim Chandra’s Vande Mataram, which incidentally was set to melodious music by Tagore himself. It was such a heady mix which went to our heart and head that whenever we saw nature’s plenty, lines from the anthems echoed in our mind’s chamber, like Bankim Chandra’s immortal praise for the motherland, ‘sujalaṃ suphalaṃ, malayajasitalam, sasyasyamalaṃ, mataram…..’
 
In refurbishing that mind’s image of Sonar Bangla and keeping it alive, there was a good and long line of filmmakers who descended on the national cultural milieu like Satyajit Ray with his maiden Pather Panchali and many other classics, Rtitwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha and the like, all favorites of discriminating cinema buffs everywhere.
 
Though Bengal was far distant from Kerala geographically, for many it was thus close by emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically.
 
But I never thought Bengal would come so close to us as to overwhelm us as at present. Just open the window and one can see a Bengali out there doing some odd job or other, mostly a job that the local workforce would invariably do without. 
 
What a fall, from the dizzying heights of intellectual efflorescence and academic brilliance of the sum total of Bengal of the last few centuries to these mundane levels of immigrant manual labor as a visible mark of Sonar Bangla!! 
 
What went wrong or who went wrong? Is the virtual invasion of Kerala by Bengali workforce a corollary to the exodus of Kerala’s workforce to the Gulf countries? Whatever be the reason, the situation has come to such a pass that without the ubiquitous Bengali, the glorious state of Kerala would come to a grinding halt. It has no adequate local workforce to do the jobs, like manual labor in farms and fields, skilled labor in construction works, street-food making, tailoring, tinkering, hair-cutting and what not.
 

It is difficult to say if this is a reflection of the state of affairs in Bengal or state of affairs in Kerala. Perhaps the Bengali is lured to Kerala by the tall tales of high wages paid to the workers. 

True, the Kerala worker gets one of the highest rates of wages in the country. But the other side of that rosy picture is the fact that the exorbitantly high wages coupled with Kerala’s special brand of  labor militancy had wrought havoc on farms and factories in the past. 

Kerala has another dubious claim to fame. It is perhaps the only place in the whole world where a mere look at a job being done by others can get one his wages. The obnoxious system is called Nokku kooli, literally meaning Wages for Looking, practiced by the militant work force of a trade union. They will simply watch loading or unloading of goods by skilled workers, but insist on being paid.

On the labor front, all workers may be equal, but the Bengali is never treated equally with the local work force. The government has condescendingly given them the honorific ‘Adhithi thozhilalikal’ or Guest Workers. Like Guest Artistes or Guest Lecturers they are not treated equally or paid equally with the main body of the work force. They get lower wages as one part of the wages paid goes to the contractor. 

Still, they come in their hundreds and thousands to the El Dorado of Kerala, slogging it out day in and day out, hoping to make the riches they dream of, like the old-time expatriate Malayalees who went in dhows to the Gulf countries with just some bags full of old clothes and minds full of dreams.

That is the Bengali out there. But am I sure he is a Bengali? Bengali has become such a generic term nowadays like ‘Madrasi’ was once used to describe anyone from South India. The Bengali out there could be a Jharkhandi, an Odishi, a Bihari or anyone from any North or Northeastern states. Or even a Bangladeshi from across the country’s borders.

While I am relieved that there is a man to do the work, have I a sense of foreboding at the great influx?

I do not know. Only time can tell.