The upcoming birth anniversary of the quintessentially Bengali comedian Bhanu Bandyopadhyay is a good reason to commiserate with Bengal as a global province of tears but also to celebrate it as a republic of laughter.

Born as Samyamoy Bandyopadhyay in Dhaka on August 26,1920, Bhanu Bandyopadhyay belonged to a Kulin Brahmin family whose ancestral home lay in the village of Panchgaon in Bikrampur. He studied at St. Gregory's High School in Dhaka, followed by Jagannath College for his B.A. He moved to Calcutta in the 1950s, working for the Iron and Steel Control Board before finding fame as an actor in more than 300 films, numerous plays and radio performances.

What set Bhanu apart from other comedians in West Bengal was his trademark use of the bangal dialect in his ghoti surroundings. Indeed, it was his dialectal excellence (amplified by a unique voice) that found him a permanent niche in the pan-Bengali hearts of Bengalis living in India. In 2020, Cine Central, Kolkata, ran a centennial tribute to him in which the author remarked that he was similar to Charlie Chaplin, outwardly a comedian but a man who was deeply anguished within himself by human suffering.

The film commentator Joseph McBride writes that "I had a damn good teacher, Chaplin. Probably our greatest comic. And everything he did was tragedy. He made things funny out of tragedy." Chaplin's tragedy belongs in the realm of the redeemed absurd. In his autobiography, he bases his concept of humour on "the subtle discrepancy we discern in what appears to be normal behaviour. In other words, through humour we see in what seems rational, the irrational: in what seems important, the unimportant. Because of humour we are less overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life. It articulates our sense of proportion and reveals to us that in an over-statement of seriousness lurks the absurd".

Chaplin's tragic realm lay in the 20th-century Anglosphere in which Britain, Germany and the United States contended uneasily and ultimately violently for supremacy. Bhanu's tragic sphere lay in a partitioned Bengal where the bangal dialect would be found funny enough to make ghoti Bengalis deliriously happy.

Many transposed bangal refugees in West Bengal, proud of their origins in East Bengal, did not find him funny. He did not make them happy at all. I remember an occasion at which I played the rendering of a marvellous skit by him, one in which he takes on a Hindi speaker in his inimical bangal dialect. An aunt of my wife, whose family is descended from Barishal but which moved to India before Partition, was not impressed. "That man mocks our bangal heritage," the aunt said. "It makes us linguistic outliers in ghoti Bengal: Forget the Hindi-speakers."

As a repentant ghoti descended from a village in Hooghly, I switched off the computer. I realised that comedy hurts.

Comedy and freedom

Comedy can hurt more than tragedy. That is because comedy is an inherently democratic protest against the absurd workings of the universe, whereas tragedy, at least in the elitist Aristotelian conception of it, is an aristocratic settling of scores with unruly time. Would Oedipus and Antigone have merited the attention of Sophocles, would Hamlet and Lear have become Shakespearean icons, had they not been royals transformed into mortals by the hurt power of the Greek and Elizabethan tragic imagination?

By contrast, comedy privileges the ordinary and the unnoticed and raises it to the level of art by revealing how it is the everyday that ultimately situates eternity. Tragedy redeems the exceptional by revealing its triumph over time: Comedy privileges the unremarkable by turning time itself into the unexceptional. Tragedy works on the capacity for pity and awe in the audience: Comedy restores an essentially playful identity to battered humanity. In that sense, comedy brings us closer to freedom than tragedy. It makes freedom immediate and tangible: We can all laugh ourselves out of the workings of a lost universe.

In a 1964 essay, Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement, recalled the words of Roberto Rossellini after the director associated with Italian cinematic neorealism had watched A King in New York. Rossellini said: "It is the work of a free man."

That is true of Bhanu Bandyopadhyay as well. He remained free to his bangal last, a lifespan unbroken by temporality or contingency: the Partition of Bengal in 1947 that carried within itself the apparently irreconcilable differences between the Hindu and Muslim dimensions of a single Bengali identity.

He is gone today, but his laughter resonates in the most tragic political corners of the Bengali mind.

Comedy zindabad!

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He may be contacted at epaaropaar@gmail.com