The god of sweet things?

Rasogolla's GI tag is no cultural achievement

As long as Bengal had Rabindranath Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose and Satyajit Ray to remind the world of the innate greatness of Bengali civilisation, the rasogolla was little more than a much-loved, everyday sweetmeat. Like mishti doi, and ilish maach, it merely reinforced the superiority of Bengali cuisine.

But the Bard of Bengal and the state’s first Nobel laureate has been dead 76 years. Despite being in denial for decades, Bengalis have been forced to accept that Netaji has indeed departed this world — though precisely when will forever remain a point of fierce contention. The state’s sole Oscar winner — an honorary one — breathed his last a quarter century ago. Okay, Amartya Sen, the state’s second Nobel laureate, is still around, though his ideological wrangles with Jagdish Bhagwati have dimmed his star power a bit, plus he's betrayed the Cause by patronising a university in Bihar of all places. And Sourav Ganguly has exchanged his successful cricketing career for Dadagiri, a TV show. So it is fair to say that Bengalis are woefully short of contemporary icons to nurture their unshakeable convictions of civilisational supremacy these days. Pipping Odisha to the GI label for the zero-shaped rasogolla, thus, can be considered a symbolic victory in more ways than one.

Recall that Bengalis never fail to remind their western neighbours that Odisha was part of the mighty Bengal Presidency under the British — the great Netaji’s family once lived there. There is some bitterness in this victory, however, because the all-India Geographical Indications Registry has been curmudgeonly enough to restrict the tag to “Banglar Rasogolla”— that is, the white or cream cottage cheese ball dipped in sugar syrup. Odisha, which claims a yellow-tinged cottage cheese ball steeped in a slightly different syrup, can yet taste success for its application for Odishara Rasagolla — note how an ‘o’ became an ‘a’ to distance the Odisha variant from any hint of Bengali-ness.

This is not the first GI tag that Bengal has acquired. Reports say there are some 13 special Bengali products on the list — including Sitabhog and Bardhaman Mihidana. Much more significantly, it was Darjeeling tea, Bengal's major export, that acquired the GI tag over a decade ago. Why wasn’t that celebrated as enthusiastically as “Banglar Rasogolla”?  As we know, Bengalis have decidedly mixed feelings about Darjeeling. It's a popular holiday destination to be sure, but the Gurkhas, the original inhabitants of that famous region, have steadfastly declined to partake of the benefits of Bengali culture for decades, despite Mamata Banerjee’s best efforts earlier this year. Yet, ironically, the Darjeeling tea label confers on the beverage an exclusive marketing right in global markets, where it commands a premium.

The rasogolla does not figure as a significant item in India’s export basket. Nor is it exclusive within the country. India, as those ads for the goods and services tax never fail to remind us, is one country, and the rasogolla or rasagulla or variations thereof is available in some form or the other throughout the country. Like the humble kichdi, our newly designated national food. Or the samosa or singara or shingara. Or the gulab-jamun, a variation of which Bengalis call the ledikeni, supposedly named for Lady Canning, wife of the Governor General. She got the better memorial; he has a grotty Kolkata street and an insalubrious port town named after him.

In effect, the acquisition of the “Banglar Rasogolla” label confirms zero benefits on those who make it. Foreign investors, whom the chief minister has been forcefully lobbying these past years, will not pour in millions of dollars into “Banglar Rasogolla” plants.  A GI label for “Banglar Rasogolla” may reinforce the feel-good factor for Bengalis, whose legendary gastronomic indulgence has made the state a major market for antacid tablets. But as a “cultural” achievement, this must surely be a lost cause.