But even as the MEA mulls over the possibility of adversarial anglers fishing in troubled waters, Bengal might face an existential crisis concerning its own fish to fry, or in this case, no fish to fry.
What makes Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal) sonar is that consummation devoutly to be dished called ilish maach (hilsa fish), the best variety of which comes from Bangladesh. If relations between the two countries become so strained as to result in an embargo of Bangladeshi hilsa to Bengal where it is deemed to be not just the staff of life —the hired help of humdrum existence, so to speak—but the paradisial adjunct to heaven, the veritable CEO so to say of blissful being.
By unanimous acknowledgment the best ilish comes from Bangladesh’s Padma river and is to Bengal what karimeen is to Kerala, or bombay duck to Mumbai, the duck in this instance belonging not to the gallinaceous species but the piscine, and deriving its name from a corruption of the Bombay Daak (Mail) train in which the highly odoriferous product was transported.
Fish, or the absence of it, can ignite passions, and as a boy growing up in the 1950s in the city which was Calcutta I bore witness—from a prudent distance—to volcanic eruptions of public-spirited ire when the price of the prized hilsa went up to levels deemed to be extortionate and led to the ceremonial immolation of tramcars in a bonfire of the verities, the chief of which was that ilish was Bengal’s birthright and it would have it, by fishing hook or inflammatory crook.
A parallel may be drawn with the so-called “cod wars” Britain engaged in with Iceland in the 1950s and 1970s involving verbal, not violent, exchanges, which philologists adduce as proof that to interpret the term “codswallop” to connote that “If you take my cod I’ll wallop you” is, well, pure codswallop.THE BONE PEOPLE
The Bengali devotion to ilish is based on reasons both linguistic and anatomically lingual. Hilsa is a particularly bony fish, an evolutionary deterrent to possible predators, including humans. Indeed, non-Bengalis find the ingestion of hilsa a daunting challenge that is best avoided, dietary discretion being the better part of culinary valour. However, the Bengali tongue, in the sense of both language and the oral organ, has through a process of Darwinian selection managed to overcome the ossific obstacle posed by the hilsa.
The tongue of the true-blue Bengali has trained itself delicately to separate the edible part of the ilish from the tiny bones embedded in it, which are tucked into the inner cheek and discreetly disposed of after the morsel is consumed. This remarkable lingual nimbleness might be attributed to linguistics, and the Bengali pronunciation of the word “fish”. The abrupt fricative “f” of the word becomes a diphthong in the form of an elongated “phee” and the concluding “sh” is expressed with sibilant emphasis.
So, even as New Delhi ponders as to what to do about the suspected “foreign hand”, or hands, behind the coup in Bangladesh, Bengal suffering the anticipated angst of ilish deprivation could sound its own caveat to such interlopers and tell them to “Pheesh off!
