Column | Didi and the Romans: How Bengal’s ‘Asterix’ lost her biggest fight

A decade ago, I was trying to write about the then forthcoming Bengal election. And I found inspiration in dog-eared comic books from my childhood.

The year is 2016 CE. Bharat is almost entirely occupied by the Lotus Party. Well, not entirely… One small corner of indomitable Bengalis still holds out against them… And life is not easy for the Delhi legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Vidyasagar Setu toll plaza and Murshidabad toll plaza.

Five years later, it was still the same story: Mamata Banerjee as the Asterix of modern Indian politics starring in yet another edition of Didi and The Big Fight.

Mamata Banerjee, the hero of these adventures. A shrewd cunning little warrior; all perilous missions are immediately entrusted to her.

A fishy affair

Each election, the cast of other characters kept changing around her. Obelix, Asterix’s inseparable friend, always ready to drop everything and go off on a new adventure. Once it was her trusted lieutenant Mukul Roy but then he started carrying menhirs for the BJP before returning to his village. At another time, it was Suvendu Adhikari, who not only switched camps but eventually led the charge that caused the sky to finally fall on Didi’s head.  

Getafix, the village druid, whose speciality is the potion which gives the drinker superhuman strength. In 2021, that seemed to be political strategist Prashant Kishor. This time around, the political consultancy IPAC took up the mantle.

But, like the Romans in the Asterix comics, I could never quite figure out what exactly was in the magic potion.

At one time I thought, perhaps, Didi got her superhuman strength from muri or puffed rice. She was superwoman by being Everywoman. This year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi added his magic masala to the muri by ordering jhal muri on the campaign trail, an image that went viral.

Others said the magic potion was the many dole schemes the Trinamool government had come up with. Kanyashree, Lakshmir Bhandar, Rupashree, Swasthya Saathi and so on, schemes that had her voters covered from birth to death.

As the 2026 campaign gathered pace, I realised, for Mamata Banerjee, the magic potion was always Bengali culture. She tried to paint the BJP as bohiragoto, the ones from the outside, who would not understand a culture that revered both Rabindranath Tagore and fish. BJP candidates responded by campaigning with entire fish while the Prime Minister sang paeans to Gurudev Tagore.

But still, no one could match Mamata’s prodigious artistic output. She could burst into Rabindrasangeet at the drop of a hat. Or paint pictures while sitting on a dharna. And churn out mind-bending rhymes like this.

Your name? Hello hi.

Father’s name? See you, bye.

Mother’s name? Hi-fi.

Sister’s name? Sweety pie.

Supporters of Trinamool Congress at a Kolkata protest rally against the BJP government and the shortage of LPG supply in the country, in March.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images

Culture vulture

Her artistic endeavours made her the butt of many memes and reels. But she carried on unfazed, convinced culture would win her the big fight.

Talented or not, children in Bengal must always exhibit a “knack”. I had a “knack” for painting and was shipped off to innumerable sit-and-draw competitions where I laboriously drew a Day at the Zoo for years. Children still sit staring at a piece of paper and crayons at these cut-throat cultural competitions while agitated mothers hiss instructions from across the fence. At the house across the street, half-a-dozen sisters practised their sa re ga ma scales every evening like clockwork. They always sounded tuneless but they never gave up, resolute in their pursuit of a knack. And if all other knacks failed, the Bengali child was sent off to learn abritti or elocution so he could impress the aunties with a dramatic rendition of a Tagore poem.

Culture was Didi’s magic potion. But this time the magic potion finally ran out. By Toutatis, the wily modern-day Romans even came up with their own battle cry — Jai Shri Ram. And they cooked up their own magic potion. It had a bit of jhal muri, whole rui fish, central forces and SIR electoral roll revisions that struck crores off the list (a veritable Caesar’s gift). They promised the electorate that with the fabled double-engine sarkar in Kolkata and Delhi, they would build the mansions of the gods in Bengal. In the end, while anti-incumbency had never been a problem in that comic-book corner of Gaul, it proved deadly in Ben-Gaul.

Thus, Mamata Banerjee, once the Asterix of these adventures, suddenly finds herself playing a very different role at the traditional end-of-adventure village feast under the starry sky. In a plot twist, Asterix creators Goscinny and Uderzo could have never imagined she has become the bard Cacofonix, sidelined and speechless at the great jhal muri feast.

And all this poor Cacofonix can do now is mumble under her breath — hamba hamba ramba ramba kamba kamba. 

But for now, her state is singing a different tune.

The writer is author of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal.

Published – May 14, 2026 07:00 am IST