The left bank

 

My grandfather had a sister, a saga behen (own sister) as we say in India. Nothing unusual in that except that there has been no trace of her existence within the family in decades. That she had even existed in what is now called Bangladesh was just a chance discovery.

You’re like the Koreas, a friend quipped, alluding to the fact that North/South Korean divide has pulled entire families asunder. Still, in the Indian joint family structure where collectivism is key, it is bemusing that the only female sibling of three brothers remained unknown to their families for the longest time. 

In the Indian sub-continent, historically, Bengal has been the hotbed of socio-cultural activism. During the colonial era, Bengali Babus were the anglophiles that, at first, the British colonizers relied heavily on to consolidate their position in the region. But then, with Western ‘education’ and their subsequent political awakening, the Bengalis transformed to thorns in their flesh. 

 

To contain Bengal, the then representative of the Crown, Lord Conwalis I think it was, mooted its first partitioning circa 1911. The banks of the River Ganges that flows through the state became the East and West Bengals. Locally they were called apaar Bangla (Bengal on this bank of the river) and opaar Bangla (Bengal on that bank of the river). In the vivisection of India in 1947, East Bengal was made a province of the newly carved out nation, was renamed East Pakistan. Then, in 1971, with help from across the river to stop the genocide, it became an independent nation, Bangladesh. But the local reference continues to be apaar Bangla and opaar Bangla. 

My family originates from that side, although they retained no connections with it since they left its soil around the time of the partition of the country. But the parents never forgot their birthplaces, and in their childhood memories, opaar Bangla was like no other on earth. For years we have only heard stories of abundance in the fertile land they grew up in and the freedom to be they had as children in their respective joint families: the tasty hilsa fish, the numerous ponds they swam in and orchards overladen with fruit, the prajas (subjects) that cultivated their fields, the space they enjoyed, the football, the intellectual pursuits.

They spoke less about the horrors inflicted on its people, though the effects of that experience runs deep in remembrances of the oppressiveness of the colonial rule, the famine the foreign powers engineered, the freedom struggle that the young men joined into and were killed for, the sudden rise of communalism that put friends into opposing camps, the riots following the forcible partitioning of the nation that caused the river to run red… My father never got over the trauma or ever wanted to go back. Now, seventy years after she left her village as a bewildered teen, my mother has finally desired to revisit the paradise of stunning natural beauty.

Thinking of it as a pilgrimage, my objective became to find somebody in Bangladesh who might recall those times and the location of the villages my parents came from. At first, it appeared that possibly nobody in the know had survived time. Well, I thought, we have the village names, and perhaps they haven’t been changed too many times by successive governments! But, truth is, I wasn’t too hopeful myself.

Then, the very extended family network came through with a name and a contact number.  He was somebody’s relative, on a visit to Kolkata, and still lived in opaar Bangla. It seemed a godsend, and I made contact immediately. When we met face-to-face, the eager questions we asked one another were, and how are you related to so-and-so or to such-and-such family?

We compared notes on our respective family trees. We stared in surprise at our findings. We are blood relatives, the newfound cousin I shall call Umesh declared at last. The sister of my grandfather, apparently lost in the sands of time for two generations, turned out to be his grandmother!

I was eager to hear her story. Her grandson, however, couldn’t quite recall her name. Something-sundari was the best he could come up with. In the traditional naming of the girl-child in those times, appends like Sundari, meaning beautiful, or Bala meaning ornament, was regular. I suppose they were meant to enhance their chances in the marriage market, where child-marriage was prevalent then.

Anyway, the story of this Sundari is the story of three families of my father’s village inter-linked by marriage. Let’s call them X, Y and Z. My paternal grandfather belonged to family Z. At the turn of the twentieth century, the patriarch of family X was a renowned practitioner of ayurvedic medicine. A young man of family Y had become his apprentice and proved himself ably to his mentor. He was welcomed into the fold of practitioners of traditional medicine and thereafter married a young woman of the family, obviously with the patriarch’s blessing. His wife produced two children, but she did not survive too long after. He couldn’t be expected to rear the children on his own, and hence another marriage was on the cards.

Family Z had three boys and one girl of the same generation. The youngest of the three sons, my grandfather, had also married a daughter of family X. Meanwhile, the young man of family Y set his sights this time on the girl of family Z. This was Sundari! It seems they married, although family Z kept no record of it.

Why has there been no mention of her within her family of origin? Was it sexism - did her three brothers consider her gender a burden to be rid of and forgotten at the earliest? Did she marry for love? Was the match against family wishes, and so she was spoken of no more? Or did the fact of Partition lead to the unraveling of ties? 

Sundari stayed back with her husband and children when two of her brothers left for the other bank of the river with the rest of the family members. Her eldest brother also remained to dispose of the family property, but then was found dead under suspicious circumstances. The second brother also died soon after, and it was left to the youngest brother, my grandfather, to anchor the relocation of this large extended family. It all seems pretty curious, and so many questions arise, especially about the constraints imposed on little girls in that age!

I hear that she bore three sons and two daughters, survived childbirth and lived to a ripe old age.  So there was nothing wrong with her physiologically. Was she indeed as beautiful as her name suggests or was loyalty her strength? Was she happy with her lot as wife, mother and grandmother, or was it an imprisonment of sorts? Did she accept her family’s indifference to her plight stoically or was she heartbroken at being so completely forgotten? She died some time ago, and hence unfortunately, there is no way of knowing her side of the story, except as her descendants retell. 

The separation of family members is probably the natural fallout of the partitioning of any nation, but still why forget a person altogether, an only daughter of the family at that? There is no one to provide the answers, and today, I can only speculate whether Sundari’s life has been the stuff of fairytales or as tragic as those times.

Young college awareness

Young man Rohan has just turned nineteen. He tells me he sometimes forgets that he’s still a teen, he feels so grown up. Stepping into college portals clearly signals the outgrowing of the cocooned shelter of home.

It seems adult characters are being chiseled out of the undifferentiated child block. Within months of entry, the college student is actively shedding puppy fat. His fond mother tells me a little wanly that he’s stopped eating.  He is going through the lean-and-mean phase in the search for individual identity, which needs must include the physical. Besides, there are girls to impress at the college.

Quite recently, I visit their home, and see the college newbie looking exhausted, but elated all the same. What’s up? I ask. He has been walking miles, he says, and is just back from a student rally. We hear that thousands of students of different colleges cut classes to march from their institutions to another to express solidarity with the student body there. This rally is against police action against their protest against official inaction against student demands against the molestation of a girl-student earlier. It all seems a little complicated to me, but essentially, the student body is riled up.

I ask the question that probably keeps his parents awake at night, have you become a political activist? No, no, he says, we joined in only because it (the protest rally) was apolitical. For children born into the traditional family system in India, breaking bounds in such a way is an awesome feeling. What is important is the realization that in a democracy protest is a right, and they begin to understand the value of the adult franchise they gain at age eighteen. 

In the college world, political awareness is imbibed from the environment. In our time, decades ago, the campus was the hotbed of political activities. Political parties would run their recruitment drives through the student unions dependent on their patronage. Thousands of young people fell victims to their machinations, during the Naxalbari movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Some political people had wanted to ‘lead’ the rally, Rohan informs us, but were asked to leave. These students want no such overtones, or to have their opinions hijacked by party organizers.  

We tune into the news channel on television and find coverage of rally. We see the students marching along, and Rohan is a little disappointed that he is indistinguishable in the crowd. The elders around him though, are secretly relieved that he is not identifiable; nobody wants to be the unwitting recipient of political ire. 

Many of the young marchers clearly perceive the rally as some sort of college excursion or picnic. The musically inclined have taken along their guitars. They gather en masse to sing songs and join into street plays. It was peaceful, entirely peaceful, the young man insists, and it quite seems that way.   

Then the state minister comes on view, and he is like an aggrieved, martyred parent bemoaning bad behaviour of unruly children. He says that he was saddened by the videos shown to him of the incidents - aggressive students on a rampage, destroying property, beating up unarmed police personnel, abusing elders and so on. Lies, all lies, says our young man excitedly, nothing like that happened. I tell him to calm down and that ‘democracy’ means the other side too must be heard.  

It gets too much for him. We were there; we saw it all, he insists, everything was peaceful. I remind him that the incidents in question happened before their rally. Yes, yes, he says, but we saw the unedited videos. The police put 35 students in hospital, how come that is not being mentioned or shown on tv? The students involved in the fracas had recorded the police actions, and displayed them at the rally. Well, I counter, these could have been edited as well to show the authorities in a bad light, no? 

 

Or it just might be that outside influences did come in, in the guise of the students, to make mischief. Do you know, says Rohan, some ruling party goons locked students in at a college, so they could not participate in the rally! In volatile situations, anything is possible, and the young people are yet too naive to understand their implications. Small wonder then that parents that have suffered in the past are at pains to ensure that their children focus on studies and stay away from anything that might be deemed political. 

Memories of past times resurface in the elders, and they are fearful for the children. Remember those times, one tells me, how thousands were made to just disappear? Indeed, student unrest had been quelled with an iron hand in the past. We had heard little about that on news waves then officially censored. We had felt their effects however, with academic sessions completely disrupted in the ‘70s, and students unable to graduate because examinations were cancelled.

That government was voted out, and the Left Front came to power as the people’s party, and ruled for over three decades. Ironically, the present state administration in Bengal won the elections against all odds, sweeping them aside. The incumbent chief minister had been much admired for her grit and tenacity in standing up to their political stranglehold. It reflected in her party’s success in the elections, which had been once deemed unthinkable.

However, winning elections is one thing and governance is quite another. Despite election promises and good intentions, political mistakes seem to pile up. Anybody that doesn’t agree with them is now branded ‘maoist’ Rohan tells me, so we started to shout that we were Maoists! The point is the present administrative incumbent is fast losing the support of youth. In India, they are the new voting public, and now a sizeable demographic group. 

Most recently, the social activism against corruption carried by students in Delhi contributed to bringing down the entrenched state government. I suppose the political elders had forgotten that the young people are far more adept with technology and social networks. State machineries cannot even hope to control their communications through the informal grapevine. Political heavyweights need to learn from the past to respect the future.