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Essay

Reminiscences from a Gallery: MF Husain

By Dolly Narang

MF Husain at the opening of the exhibition “A Tree In My LIfe” in 1995.
With him are Dolly Narang (who conceptualised the show) and others.  Fifty one artists from all over the country were invited to participate. The exhibition included M.F. Husain, Raza, Ganesh Pyne, Paritosh Sen, Arpana Caur, Vivan Sundaram along with promising and emerging artists. Photo provided by Dolly Narang

It was 1989 when I  turned my passion for art into reality by opening The Village Gallery. My experience from conceptualising till the launch of my new initiative, as I negotiated unchartered waters, brought me in contact with artists and the art world.  And I had some interesting experiences as I began to fathom the nuances of this unique field.

Growing up, I was a dreamer living in my own world of happy make believe.  Enveloped by the warmth and attention of my joint family I was the cherished firstborn of my parents and my grandfather, Bauji[1]. Their adoration wrapped me in a cocoon sheltering me from the outside world.  I grew up safe, protected and loved in our home in East Patel Nagar in West Delhi.

My mother laid claim to my creative spark. She revealed one day that while she was in the serene hills of Shimla with her parents as she carried me, she was learning how to paint. My mother proudly attributed my artistic side was all because of the genes passed on from her. Her creativity much later matured into fashion design and she became a successful fashion designer in the 1960s opening a high fashion boutique catering to New Delhi’s expat and diplomatic community. Her design skills were honed. She was much ahead of her time.

My Naniji[2] embroidered sequins and beads (maternal grandmother) on small evening clutch bags as gifts. That was her passion as it helped to overcome the grief of the loss of my grandfather who passed away suddenly in his mid 40s following the Partition and the trauma of 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was split into two. My Uncle, my father’s youngest sibling, unleashed his photographic skills to capture my childhood. He won a prize for one of these photographs.

I remember as a child being fascinated by Bauji making decorative paper lanterns. He used fragile kite paper of vibrant green, pink and yellow, slowly and meticulously applying glue on the paper to paste them onto thin bamboo sticks. I must have been four or five years old.  The memory is so clearly embedded in my consciousness. He was a banker with a hectic work schedule involving travel. Our family had been uprooted during the Partition from Lyallpur in 1947 and we were in the throes of resettling ourselves. Yet, he found time to follow his creative calling.

As a child, I was fascinated by art and spent hours by myself doodling and drawing. Growing up, I have fond memories of my art class when I was in 7th or 8th grade in school. This was my happy space. My art teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Rahman, I remember was helped me to nurture my creativity with kindness and patience. She gave me special permission to work in art class during lunch hour. I loved working with my hands. Feeling the clay between my hands was exhilarating so clay was my chosen medium. Mrs. Rahman gave me a piece of soapstone a soft material and chiselling tools to chisel. This new medium opened up thrilling moments of more exploration.

My class had some students who were naturally gifted.  Their effortless creativity left me feeling somewhat inadequate. At the same time, this pushed me to work harder to hone my skills. The confluence of my family’s creative influences and the circumstances unfolding before me led me to dream of starting an art gallery and I did do exactly that.

I nurtured a desire to start my gallery with the art of the famed MF Husain. Though it seemed an impossible dream, it happened. I went ahead and I shared my idea with Arpana Caur, my childhood playmate and college mate who had made a niche for herself in the art world and received recognition as a painter of great talent and promise. Caur encouraged me to chase my dreams. The first one person show at my newborn gallery was of Husain serigraphs and lithographs.  It was a coup of sorts if I may say so myself for a new and unknown gallery and it stirred some excitement. 

When I tried to contact him, Husain Sahib finally answered the phone.  The conversation was polite and formal. He gave me appointment at his Canning Lane residence in Delhi, a charming colonial style government accommodation.

I had been warned of his proclivity for not arriving on time or not showing up at all.  I reached his house expecting in all probability not to find him there.

His single storey home lay in a verdant environment. I was seated in a simple and well-appointed living room surrounded by vibrant colors of his paintings adorning the walls.  Without keeping me waiting, a towering, calm and dignified figure emerged from the adjoining room. I introduced myself somewhat timorously trying to read his expression as I spoke.  I remember saying, “Husain Sahib, I am planning to open a gallery in a new location, Hauz Khas Village. I would like to have a show of your limited-edition prints.  I won’t be able to buy your works though.  I was wondering if it would be feasible to pay for the prints once they are sold at the exhibition.”

This was the general tone of my brief monologue as he listened politely and patiently.  I waited anxiously for his response. There was none. 

 Our meeting must have lasted fifteen minutes with mostly me muttering something to prove my credentials and at the same time trying to gauge his reaction as I continued with my monologue.

 Once I finished talking, he stood up and walked into a room attached to the living room where we were sitting. I waited, confused by his disappearance. Soon he emerged with a thick roll of black sheets and handed it to me saying you can have a show of these prints. I accepted it in complete disbelief. Thanked him and left. I thought later that I did not give my contact details and neither did he ask for them.  This was my first meeting with MF Husain.

Once the gallery interiors were ready I requested Husain Sahib if he could come to see the new space and give his suggestions before the inauguration. He arrived on the appointed day accompanied by his son Mustafa, a tall and dignified young man who came with a camera slung around his neck.

Both father and son walked around the gallery silently. It had a raw rustic interior with a cement floor and lime washed walls. I waited for their reaction, not quite sure how they would respond to the raw rusticity of the environment both internal and external. To make matters worse, a buffalo belonging to a villager put its head through the entrance door and snorted loudly.  ‘This is all I need,’ I thought, ‘especially when I am trying to make an impression.’ Just as I was going to apologize, to my surprise Husain Sahib smiled and softly said, “That’s nice.” 

Mustafa added: “My father loves the rustic environment”. Both lingered for a while enjoying the peaceful and unpretentious village setting as Mustafa took photographs.

While planning the execution for the show of his graphics, I had the opportunity to interact more frequently with Husain Sahib.  He wanted the show to have the title ‘Husain Graphis 89’. “The word graphics to be spelt without a ‘c’, as it is spelled in French,” he said.  Cards were printed announcing the exhibition of “Husain Graphis 89”.   As the exhibition cards were delivered to their addressees, I was inundated with calls advising me that the word “graphics” had been misspelled in the card.  I had a lot of explaining to do in call after call.

Photo provided by Dolly Narang

 The prints were up on the gallery walls. A few days before the opening of Husain Graphis ‘89, the artist himself visited the gallery. As he made himself comfortable in the midst of his serigraphs and lithographs, he said something that has stayed with me as a source of guidance ever since.  He waved his hands gently across the wall and said: “Make the walls of your gallery something that every artist will be proud to hang their works on.”  These words illuminated my path forward as I was inspired to conceptualise a series of shows which went onto make history.

The inauguration of Graphis’ 89 was done by SK Misra, the Secretary of Tourism at the time and a close friend of Husain Sahib’s. He had wanted him to inaugurate the show. Husain Sahib flew off to Bombay the same evening so was not present at the inauguration. Of course, we were all disappointed. The inauguration was on schedule with Misra painting a lamp on a canvas. This unique idea was suggested by the eminent scenographer, Rajeev Sethi. Misra was caught off guard when asked to paint a lamp instead of lighting it. However, he painted with the flourish of a seasoned artist.

There was a self portrait of Husain on display in Graphis’89 exhibition which had a thick red line running down the face. It generated much curiosity and many queries from viewers who wanted to know the deeper meaning behind the red line, expecting a profound philosophical response about the artist’s thoughts or his life experience behind this. During a visit to the gallery, I mentioned to Husain Sahib that I was being asked repeatedly by visitors what was the meaning behind this thick and bright red line. He simply said: “I liked it and I painted it.”  

 The next exhibition that I curated in 1989 was ‘Self Portraits’.   Twenty-four artists, from masters to beginners, were invited to showcase self-portraits in this exhibition held in October 1989. Husain Sahib loaned his self-portrait, an oil on canvas.  Fortunately, Husain Sahib was in Delhi for the opening. He arrived walking barefeet down the kuccha[3] path leading to the gallery.  Just a few feet ahead of the gallery he saw the Choudhry[4] of the village reclined on his charpai[5] smoking his hookah.   Husain Sahib was so excited by this sight that he requested for the charpai to be shifted outside the gallery. I conveyed his request to Choudhry Sahib who immediately agreed and pulled his charpai over.  Both Husain Sahib and Choudhry Sahib sat together on the charpai savoring the experience.  

The guests at the opening, several of them old friends of Husain Sahib were surprised to catch him here.  There was rambunctious camaraderie and backslapping in full public view on this village street. It occurred to him that he wanted to have his good friend and gallerist DV Chawla there.  He requested that I send the car to pick him up from the Oberoi Hotel where his gallery was located. Delhi being free from the dense traffic that the city is afflicted with today, he arrived soon enough.

As Mr Chawla arrived, there was more lively celebration of old friendships.  they all enjoyed the exhibition. The self-portraits were replete with humor or marked by self-mockery. Some were self-effacing while others, thought provoking  

 Husain Sahib joked that the real Husain was in the painting hung on the wall of the gallery and the flesh and blood sitting outside was fake.

The exhibition of self-portraits was followed by ‘The Other Ray’ in 1990, an exhibition of the graphic design, children’s drawings, and film sketches, set design drawings, film posters by Satyajit Ray. Together, we selected the works for the exhibition.  In the process Ray was surprised to see all the work that he had created compelling him to remark: “I had forgotten I had done all this work.”  

Husain at the Village Gallery. MF Husain liked walking bare-feet. Photographs provided by Dolly Narang

The opening was in October 1990. I met Husain Sahib to invite him for the preview. When he heard of ‘The Other Ray’ exhibition he asked me where the works were lying as he wanted to see them. I told him that they were lying at home and suggested it would be better to view them once they are properly hung in the gallery. But he was insistent on seeing them right away and didn’t want to wait for the opening. So, we drove to my house from AIFACs. He was overwhelmed to see the works and started to reminisce of his association with Ray. Unfortunately, I did not have a tape recorder at the time to record his thoughts but fortunately The Illustrated Weekly carried these reminiscences as an article in an issue. It’s a truly poignant piece filled with precious memories.

We got into the car to drive him home and had driven away for just a few minutes. All this while it was churning in my mind. Should I, should I not. But finally plucked up courage to tell him that it was my birthday a few days later and could I request him for a drawing.

He asked the driver to turn back to the house. He asked for sketch paper.  And resting the paper on the bonnet of the car made a drawing. 

These are some of the memories I am penning down here.  There are many more…

The sketch made by Maqbool Fida Husain for Dolly Narang on her birthday: Husian signed himself McBull, a humorous take on his first name, Maqbool. He was known to sign his name in various ways. Photo provided by Dolly Narang

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[1] respectful address for an elder patriarch of the family

[2] (maternal grandmother)

[3] Untarred and uncemented path

[4] Village chief

[5] A cot made of a wooden frame and rope

Dolly Narang , a gallerist, has conceptualised  innovative  pathbreaking exhibitions. A recent student of sculpture, she has the satisfaction of experiencing both personal and spiritual evolution as a Pranic healer and as a grandmother.

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Essay

When a New Year Dawns…

Ratnottama Sengupta writes she does not junk all the old Calendars and Diaries…

The dawn of every New Year brings with it the need for a new calendar and a couple of new diaries. So, wholesale markets in every major city on the map flourishes with these items in every shape and size. In the years of my growing up, a government organisation calendar, with only the dates and simply no illustration, was routine. Forget 12 images for as many months, even half that number was a rarity. This, even though in the previous decades Raja Ravi Varma’s [1] evocation of Saraswati, Shakuntala, Nala Damayanti or Lady with a Lemon, were coveted adornment for the walls. In certain instances, these images were individually dressed up with sequins and pearls too! Oleographs and mechanical reproductions had, by this time, won past hand paintings that once covered the mud-plastered walls with stories of Ram-Sita Vivaha[2], among others.

Calendars by Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906). Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

Since the turn of this century, which saw dealings in art skyrocket, galleries have made it a custom to bring out calendars on either a theme that’s tackled by a number of artists, or on works by one chosen artist. Simultaneously artists themselves became proactive in bringing out calendars sporting images of their own work. These are not driven so much with the need to publicise their creativity as to lend a personal touch to the annual give and take of ‘Season’s Greetings’.

I particularly cherish the textile scrolls published annually as calendar by my friend Subrata Bhowmik, one of India’s leading graphic designers. This ‘Design Guru’ has eighteen awards from the President for accomplishments in textiles, publications, advertisement, photography and craft communication. He was motivated to do these calendars in order to share what he learnt in Switzerland as also from his experience in the Calico Museum of Ahmedabad. And they spread a deep understanding of the contextual framework of design in the real world. I still cherish one such tapestry designed with Ajanta style beauties, though the year rang out seven years ago.

My friend Jayasree Burman’s desk calendar with detailed images of Laxmi Saraswati or Durga have, likewise, remained in my collection years past their expiry dates. Sohini Dhar used to regularly commemorate the memory of husband Ramlal Dhar with images of his landscape that shared pages with her own Bara Maasa, miniature style narration of the seasons. Ajay De’s limited-edition calendar published by Art and Soul gallery this January is in line with this custom.

Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

The passion in Ajay’s charcoal paintings of bulls and the stamina of his stallions bring to mind the energy of Assam’s wild boars that Shyam Kanu Borthakur familiarised; the vitality of the horses Sunil Das studied in Kolkata’s stables; the vigour of Husain’s much auctioned equines; even the animation of Paris-based Shahabuddin’s abstractions. However, the amazing vibrancy of Ajay’s treatment of a black and white palette acquires a touch of magic, with a red dot here or a wash of yellow there. And when he places the charging bull against a wall dripping the salsa red of blood, I recall the vivacity of a ‘Bull Fight’ that I had a chance to witness in Southern France a quarter century ago – before its forceful evocation in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her (2002).

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Prabal Chand Boral, as his name suggests, boasts kinship with Raichand Boral, a pioneer of Indian film music in 1940s. Not surprising that Prabal oftentimes breaks into songs on the terrace of his Kolkata home. Every Durga Puja finds him dancing with earthen dhunuchi[3]. And his diurnal routine finds him painting. Sketching. Outlining. Portraits. Flowers. Supernatural creatures. Illusive figures. Capricious forms. He creates videos to involve attentive viewers. And every year, out of his own pocket he brings out a wall calendar for private collection. “An artist craves to express himself in so many ways,” he told me last year when his calendar had sported six portraits in his signature style.

 Thakurmar Jhuli (1907). From Public Domain
Dakshina Ranjan Mitra Majumdar’s illustration. Provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

This year Prabal pays an ode to Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandma’s Satchel). Written in 1907 – year 1314 of Bengali calendar — by Dakshina Ranjan Mitra Majumdar this landmark in Bengal’s pre-Independence literature compiles stories that have been orally handed down from one generation to another in the villages and backwaters of undivided Bengal. This was in the manner of the Brothers Grimm who wrote and modified Germanic and Scandinavian tales that have been translated, like Hans Christian Andersen, into every language spoken in the world. In the process they embedded in the collective consciousness of the West lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity.

 Much like them Dakshina Ranjan had gone around mechanically recording the tales of Lalkamal Neelkamal, Buddhu Bhutum, Dalim Kumar and Byangoma Byangomi. When first published, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath had written the foreword because he felt that publication of these legends was a need of the hour in order to counter the sense that only the European rulers had fairies, elves and ogres, imaginary beings with magical powers, to entertain and educate their young. Educate? Yes, because the dark and scary beings, even when they did not metamorphose like the Frog Prince, were metaphors for a state where the victim, though less powerful, always overcame the tormentor. Not only children and young adults but grown-ups too liked the stories that broke down the boundaries of time and culture. They encouraged and even emboldened the readers to look for wonder in their own lives.

Prabal had long cherished the desire to reinterpret the illustrations by Dakshina Ranjan himself. He has brought this to fruition with a touch of his own imagination. The result might not be a fairy tale – read, decorative – but none can deny the originality of this calendar.

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I have personally felt happy to write for a diary – rather, a notebook – that has been published by Nostalgia Colours, a Kolkata based gallery that holds an annual exhibition in other metros of India. A number of the 17 exhibited artists are no longer with us in existential terms. K G Subrmanian, Paritosh Sen, Suhas Roy, Sunil Das, Robin Mondal, Prakash Karmakar — they do not eat-drink-chat with us across the dining table as they once did. Or as Anjolie Ela Menon, Jogen Chowdhury, Ganesh Haloi, Subrata Gangopadhyay and Prabhakar Kolte still do. But their watercolours and gouaches, contes and temperas continue to bring us as much pleasure as when these majors of art signed off their canvases. Only our viewing now is tinged with a certain sadness at the thought that they will no longer add new dimensions to Indian contemporary art scene with their thoughts, their arguments and their palette.

This precisely is what heightens the joy of an undated notebook richly decorated with aesthetic reproductions of not six or twelve but 52 works of art.

A thing of beauty, be it a calendar, a diary or a notebook, is joy forever. Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) can vouch for that.

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[1] Raja Ravi Varma, an artist from the nineteenth century who mingled Indian and European styles

[2] Marriage

[3] Bengali incense burner

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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of  The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. 

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Essay

What Is Your Name?

By Fakrul Alam

From Public Domain

The very last words my mother had said to me constituted the question, “What is your name?” We were in the VIP lounge of Dhaka airport and she had just been wheeled in from an aircraft with one of my sisters. Another sister and I had gathered there to receive her, perhaps knowing as well as her, that she was close to dying. And yet she had managed a smile as she said to me, “What is your name?”

The words, indeed, amounted to a kind of game she would play with me whenever I would meet her at my sister’s house in Dhaka. It was what we call a rhetorical question since she most certainly did not have to be told what my name was. It was her way of reminding me that while I might be professor of English at the University of Dhaka, I — Dr. Alam, as she would also sometimes teasingly call me — should never forget that I had learned English from her, sometimes literally at her feet as she did housework, and on other occasions, when she had done the day’s work, at the table where all of us siblings would gather to study once we were old enough to do so.

On International Women’s Day, I would like to pay a tribute to my mother, her fierce belief in the importance of education, especially women’s education, and the rights of women to study and work and have parity in every sphere with men.

My mother was an outstanding student. Recorded as well as oral family narratives enable me to reconstruct her brilliant performance as a student as well as her aborted student life and its consequences. From one of my aunts’ contributions to the 100th anniversary commemorative volume of Feni Government Girls School, I am reminded that both in Class Four and Six she had made it to the All Bengal Merit List and had been awarded scholarships for her achievement.

From an uncle’s autobiographical narrative, I have an explanation of why she had to stop studying when she was in Class Eight. The only Muslim girl studying in a very conservative town, she had become an obvious target of their religious concern. “Why must a Muslim girl study after a point?” they would say. My mother would go to school properly veiled, but these men reminded my grandfather, who had once been a progressive Swadeshi[1]but was then embracing a very conservative Islamic position, that there were Hindu male teachers teaching in the school. And, they noted, educated women tended to be immoral. For good measure they added, “Is your daughter going to become a judge/barrister after studying?” What was the point of female education, after all?

Persuaded, my grandfather withdrew my mother from school. The clinching point for him, I learnt from my uncle’s narrative, was his own father telling him with finality, “Your daughter has to stop studying. It’s enough that she can write letters and read them!” My grandfather tried to placate her by saying that she could sit for the matriculation examination as a “private” student.

Both my aunt’s account and my uncle’s narrative l record my mother’s intense grief afterwards. For a while, she tried to concentrate on studying for “private” matriculation. But then the First World War broke out; everything was disrupted in Feni, and she was married off after a couple of years. Not only was she grief-stricken at that time, as my aunt notes in her piece, but she would carry her grief at being cheated out of an education almost to her grave.

However, my mother was nothing if not a fighter. My uncles would tease her and call her a “communist”, and if the word had been fashionable in the late ’50s and ’60s when they would always be visiting us in our Dhaka house, surely they would have also called her a “feminist”, although I am sure she would have detested the sanctimonious and self-serving ways in which the word is at times bandied.

What my mother missed in formal schooling, she made up by reading voraciously, whenever she could spare the time. A lasting memory I have of my mother, both after lunch and dinner, and after all the housework was done and our studies supervised, was of her going to bed, day after day and night after night, with the Bangla newspaper, the current issue of the weekly Begum, and some Bangla novel, usually by Sarat Chandra or some other best-selling Bengali author.

Always feisty, and despite being immensely religious and completely devoted to God and the Prophet, she would never miss the opportunity to berate ‘holier than thou’ Muslim priests and men for the way they treated women. Because she knew the religion well, she would always cite examples of how the place of women was not what it was made to be by patriarchal Muslim men of her generation and how veiling beyond a point was totally unnecessary and the ghomta and orna [2]were good enough, if one knew what was prescribed in the holiest of books.

But the most eloquent way that my mother protested against the deprivation she and her generation of Muslim women suffered because of their fathers and their friends and mullahs at large, was in her single-minded dedication to the cause of women’s education. Not only did she teach us and my four sisters the English and Bangla alphabet, but she also ensured that her four daughters as well as her one son had equal access to education. She insisted that her daughters earned the highest degree possible in the field of their choice and was proud when they became working women. She was saddened when a couple of them did not go beyond an MA degree and when one of them gave up her job. And she did everything for them as long as she could to ensure that they could combine not only higher studies but career goals that would help them realise their dreams. When I told my wife I would be writing a tribute to my mother for International Women’s Day, she reminded me that my mother had told her when we were leaving for Canada, where I would be doing higher studies, that she should not come back without earning a higher degree in some field or the other.

Moreover, my mother’s preoccupation with women’s education went beyond her family. She would help any woman wanting to advance herself, through education and through jobs. Whether it was her sisters or her relatives, or even their friends, she offered our house as a home to them and would become their “local guardian” or counsellor, if not a surrogate mother. She also went way out of her way to help any woman she felt was remotely in distress, or lonely, or deprived in any way, with whatever little she could do to help or comfort them. And she would teach anyone, male or female, she could get hold of, believing that education was above all!

There is a lot more that I could say about my mother but I must end here by saying that I took this occasion not really to give you the feeling that my mother largely made me what I am, but mostly to convey to you how she had pledged herself to parity and worked for the emancipation of women in her own way all her life. In that respect, and in so many ways, she was an exemplary woman and truly ahead of her time and thus worth remembering on this day.

[1] Freedom fighter – active in the struggle for independence of the subcontinent from British rule

[2] Covering the head with the loose end of a saree or an orna (shawl or large scarf)

(First published in Daily Star, Bangladesh, on March 9, 2016)

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibanananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Essay

In the Hidden Kingdom of Bhutan


Narrative and photographs by Mohul Bhowmick


Young lamas, or monks, appearing for their annual examinations in the monsatry of Simtokha Dzong, Thimphu.

Bhutan, 2024

The sun sets far too quickly for my liking in Phuentsoling. There is little to no entertainment to speak of that is worth its name. The town, by and large, presents itself in its entirety and goes to bed by the time my friend, S, and I crisscross our way to our hotel uphill. It does not help that we enter Bhutanese soil on its National Day, celebrated to mark the coronation of their first king Ugyen Wangchuk in 1907, and find most places of public convenience closed.

The stark contrast that the Indian border town of Jaigaon offers to its Bhutanese counterpart Phuentsoling is remarkable. The lack of men — and their wherewithal — on crossing the north-eastern frontier is welcome, as is the steep upkeep that the Himalayan kingdom pushes upon its citizens.

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The Phuentsoling-Thimphu highway has improved by leaps and bounds since Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck made her initial foray into the hills of Kalimpong from the village of Nobgang in the 70s. I try my best to spot a mule — or its track — but am left disappointed by the presence of a modern-day state-of-the-art business college in Gedu[1] instead.

The lower reaches of the Himalayas that surround us to the east act as forbidding barriers into the hidden crevices of the hidden kingdom we are attempting to climb in a motor vehicle, the likes of which were first seen in this country in the 1980s. The light — of which I had been so painfully deprived in Phuentsoling — seeps in with zeal I have seldom seen in the plains of the Deccan, and the lifeblood that flows inside me is roused enough to taste the incandescent flavours of kewa datsi[2]with red rice. And before I know it, a lifelong love affair has begun with this enticing dish.

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We are welcomed into Bhutan proper only after arriving in Thimphu the next day, or so it seems. The capital city of this virgin kingdom has evolved significantly from Pico Iyer’s assumptions in 1989 that all of it could be explored over the course of an afternoon. That the Druk Hotel in which the legendary essayist stayed remains steadfast beyond the clocktower that shows no change of hands is a testament to the art of stillness that the Bhutanese so pride themselves upon; at 11 AM on a weekday at a laundromat not far from the main street hangs a signboard proclaiming, ‘closed for lunch.’ Iyer is not too far off the mark even thirty-five years later.

That the people smile easily takes me by surprise; I have seldom known a populace so unburdened by the weight of living that they have overtaken all their consternations and settled finally upon the art of being. Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk, Bhutan’s present king, finds himself immortalised in pictures across every restaurant, hotel and store across the country.

The fervour seems, to me, all the more in Thimphu, where the local masses try to outdo their neighbours in anticipation of the gentle 44-year-old stepping out of the Tashicho Dzong grounds (his palace) to inspect these pictures and possibly reward their owners for their loyalty. I suspect this ardour stems as much from devotion to their ‘living God’ as to the fear of missing out or merely keeping up with the Joneses — or Wangchucks. Some modern predicaments seem to have crept into Druk after all.

It is not without these frailties that one’s mornings in Thimphu are strewed. Gather and scatter, as the bard Vikram Seth[3] was wont to have mentioned, applies less to the hounding of the dogs mid-street all night than to the karaoke bars that pride themselves on staying open when the rest of the world sleeps.

Had Nehru not arrived in Paro from Nathu La in 1958 on the back of a yak, this journey would have seemed almost romantic to that of the least fatalistic of Indian prime ministers. It is not known whether the venerable freedom fighter from Allahabad shared any of his midnight oil burning advice with the Bhutanese during his state visit; it appears for certain that the karaoke bars sprung up like mushrooms much later and took his guiding directions to heart.

*

If it is not the baying of the foolhardy dogs, it is the crowing of the late-night suppliers at the fifty shops selling similar products on the Thimphu main street that keeps me — and my journalistic tendencies — awake. Onitsuka Tiger [4]rubs shoulders with Adidas Samba[5] with a glee that one forsakes in favour of the warmth that a bowl of tofu thukpa [6]offers; before long, a handsome policeman in his impeccable uniform including a heartening jacket and betel-stained teeth joins me for a cup of tea. He has just finished his duty of acting as the traffic signal in a city that has no traffic signals.

With the precision best described as that of mimicking an archer — of whose credulity there is a lot in Bhutan — my newfound friend diverts the few cars that choose to make the hike into Thimphu’s central business district on this cold night. He tells me about how gently the tea goes with the thukpa I have with me, all while seated on the plank of a wooden crate left behind by the Adidas doppelgangers.

A plate of momos — beef for him, and cabbage for me — soon arrives from Kinley Tsering, a lady who sells home-cooked food at night after tending to her household all day to augment the family income. In a horror mixed with incomprehension of protocol, my friend in livery whips out his wallet to pay; I am stunned by an act I have never seen uniform-clad men do in the past. The temperature plunges to minus six degrees Celsius as I walk back with the numbing, tear-inducing breeze on my face. I feel exhilarated.

*


The Paro airport is considered to be one of the most dangerous places in the world to land in.

Paro[7], imperious, meek and all-abiding, comes too soon and whisks away any perceptible delight that one feels at having escaped the wrath that Thimphu denotes upon those who cannot see. The dzong, located several miles outside of town, is the only real attraction besides the museum on the way down; modern tourists — and locals besides — tend to find enjoyment in climbing up the steep hillocks to gain a view of a Druk Airplane taking flight from what is considered to be among the most dangerous airports in the world. Back on the main strip that connects this valley to Chuyul in the north, dinner consists of dried ema (Bhutanese chilli), vegetables and rice, with accompaniments of dumplings.

The Taktsang Lakhang[8] stands upright on the shoulder of a cliff the next day; I am perplexed as to how I could be so close as to see the finer details of its inner sanctum in my mind yet far enough to appreciate the impossible angle at which it is perched. The monastery, which had dominated so many of my dreams about Bhutan in the past, is often referred to as the ‘Tiger’s Nest’ by the West. It takes its name from a spot allegedly visited by the Indian guru, Padmasambhava[9], on the back of a mythical flying tiger in the eighth century to flay a demoness who was tormenting the locals of the area.

The Taktsang Lakhang
Sunset at Taktsang Lakhang

The climb is demanding, but the panoramic views of the valley to the east make it seem less so. The ardour of the fellow pilgrim is contagious enough for me to push past the mental barriers I have erected for myself without even trying, and before I know it, we are at the halfway point where the government has been kind enough to let an eatery ply its trade. The Local Train’s Vaaqif[10] accompanies us as Taktsang appears all the more closer, and all the more dangerous.

The ascent, dusty and translucent though it is due to the lack of rain for several months, troubles me with its penchant for nonchalance. I loathe to fall into the reverie that takes me over every minute while glimpsing at a branch of the hundred-year-old rhododendron that has stood firm while men have grappled past their anxieties. I awaken soon enough with the realisation that my worries and physical ailments may seem impotent to the staunch Buddhist who makes the six-kilometre hike to the monastery by prostrating himself full-length, getting up and repeating the feat till he gets to the top a week after he has begun.

The top is still way off from where one reaches the monastery proper. Perched dangerously on the edge of this cliff, the monastery virtually hangs into oblivion attracting gusts of wind, who somehow choose not to play to the gallery. Yet, it has survived for centuries, and if faith were one’s sole determinator, it shall survive for several more. The inside has temples dedicated to Padmasambhava in his various forms: astounded, wrathful and compassionate.

Propitiating the gods — and as an extension, their other halves, the demons — is commonplace in Bhutan, and the same holds for ParoTaktsang. While the inordinate thangkas[11] and artefacts collected over the years provide the inner sanctum sanctorum of the monastery with its sheen, it is the historical hostility that the local deities have displayed towards demons that make it eerily attractive. Indeed, folk tales observe that several local, protective deities were demons won over by the Buddhist dharma when Padmasambhava arrived on the back of his mythical tiger.

And so it is that I find myself in the dark, indistinct crevices of the cliff on which the monastery proper is located but beneath which is the original Tiger’s Nest which the Bhutanese claim to have a pug mark of Padmasambhava’s beast. The descent into the darkness, almost as if plunging into the unknown, requires one to be on his back and flatten himself along the rocks to reach the acute angle where the pug mark is located.

A lonely candle blows in this unventilated corner of the cliff, and only a sliver of light to the east remains to remind me of the vast world outside, that which I have forsaken to witness this tiny fraction of hope at Taktsang. This hope flutters unabated, almost as if without any beginning or end, and for a moment, I am suspended in the brilliant sunshine overlooking a valley fit for the heroic landscapes I so fervently pursue. Might this be the only time when I forsake my attachment to life in search of a glorious future, real or imagined?

There is no end to the ruminations that I have while being assailed by the light that peeps in almost as if it is too shy to ask for permission. The way out may be more difficult than the way in — as in life — but how do I respond to the call I have heard inside, the one that compels me to sing the songs of my fathers in the temples of my gods?

The thought strikes with a speed I had not known I possessed until I see the boulder above me swerve in its position in a quarter of a millisecond; with an equal lack of precision and comfort, I come out of the cave, for all the world a dishevelled a youth with an abrasive attitude towards the world, but in my own estimation, a changed man. I did not need new eyes, but merely a new way of seeing.

*


The magnificent Punakha dzong is surrounded by the river Mo Chhu.

The dzong[12] of Punakha is a magnificent object of interest to lovers of history and architecture alike; straddled on an oasis that one must reach after crossing the timid-looking Mo Chhu River, it looms large into the thoughtful sunshine all the while immersed in a meditative calm that only its altitude has any makings of. Like all dzongs in Bhutan, the one in Punakha too is much more impressive from the outside. Tall, gaunt and imperial in its outlook, it acts more as a presence of the godly authority that the king and abbot enjoy in Bhutanese society, the former only matched in his regal bearing by the latter.

Even more impressive, if the word is right, is the suspension bridge that takes one across the river Po Chhu (the male consort of Mo Chhu) behind the dzong. There is little to look at but the other end as one sways with the wind — and the breeze is far too strong for my liking even at three in the afternoon here — while praying to the Gods, both Indian and Bhutanese, that the bridge does not give way and deposit me into the freezing waters of the river about three vertical kilometres below. The 160-metres bridge span seems more than a mile to me; awake finally at the reality of life slipping away from my grasp in the blink of an eye, I experience the innards of a fear that I thought I had buried deep inside myself.

For the entire time that I cross the bridge — and return — for there is nothing to see on the other side but an eatery that sells delightful ice cream, this fear flares in a bid to reignite my passions for a world I had once deeply cared for and strongly felt like changing. For all the lack of consideration that I display, either in terms of material or intangible riches, there is little that stays on par with this kind of fear, the one that reminds me at every step that I am virtually playing with my fate, and that everything I have with me, most perceptibly my heartbeat, could drown in a second if the heavens so choose. A strong gust of wind and I can finally sense what Matthiessen[13] meant when he wrote:

‘This is a fine chance to let go, to win my life by losing it…’

I am driven back to life when a local teenager rides across the heavily swaying bridge and into the sun — with the mildly flowering dandelions emitting a heady scent ideal for such gallant terrains, on his bicycle — too young to care about life’s intricacies, yet old enough to realise that everything one wants is on the other side of fear.

It is in such heroic landscapes that I change my stance towards the heavens; where I drink the water from the stream gurgling past the Po Chhu and gulp in the air that promises a revival of a dream seen long ago. Such dreams deserve their rightful places in a world shorn of temerity in a way that human emotions can seldom fathom. And yet the dandelions, by now competing with the rhododendrons that shall have to wait till spring, promise a tomorrow that may not get swayed by this incredible afternoon breeze.

*

When I wake up a month later in the arid plains of the Deccan, unsure if such dreams are still worth chasing — or life still worth living — I remember that the dandelions would soon be in bloom in the hidden kingdom I so arduously seek within myself.


The gently flowing Paro Chhu river makes one lie down beside it and do nothing.

[1] In Bhutan

[2] A dish made of potatoes and cheese

[3]  From Summer Requiem, a book of poems by Vikram Seth

[4] A Japanese fashion brand

[5] A shoe brand

[6] A Tibetan noodle soup

[7] Historic town in Bhutan

[8] Monastery in Paro

[9] Buddhist mystic of the 8th century CE

[10] Song by pop group, Local Train

[11] Buddhist art on cotton

[12] Fort

[13] Peter Mattheissen (1927-2014) novelist, naturalist and CIA Agent

Mohul Bhowmick is a national-level cricketer, poet, sports journalist, essayist and travel writer from Hyderabad, India. He has published four collections of poems and one travelogue so far. More of his work can be discovered on his website: www.mohulbhowmick.com.

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Essay

Morning Walks by Fakrul Alam

Jarul trees: From Public Domain

Morning walks, or rather ambles, tiptoeing towards the rest of the day. One’s day gathers pace seemingly hour by hour after one wakes up, like a typical Bhairavi[1] performance in Indian classical music, starting slow and accelerating in tempo till the end. The world seems so tranquil in the morning; the Dhaka air smells so relatively fresh (how fresh depends of course on where you are!) at that time. I think indolently most days now (even before the alarm rings!), why not walk at an easy pace and even lazily at first, at least for a while, before picking up speed afterward?

It was not always thus with me; time was when I used to greet the morning impetuously. Like Donne in ‘The Sun Rising’[2], albeit sans a lover next to me, I would, once upon a time, feel like chiding the sun— “busy old fool, why disturb my sleep so? Why not light up some other world and break someone’s sleep in continents far, far away?” My mother, stirred by the call to prayer she always heard in her conscience (for those were days without alarms), would try to wake us up. Or she would scold and cajole us till my siblings and I would eventually arise, rubbing our eyes and getting up from bed for another schoolwork-filled day in practiced disbelief and simulated foot-dragging.

Mother would tell us of fabled early risers. “Take Rabi Thakur[3],” she would say, “never missed a sunrise!” Or formulaically, “Morning shows the day!” My father would do his bit: “Early to bed,” he would recite ritually, “and early to rise/ would make a man healthy, wealthy and wise!” But the man who made me take up morning walks seriously and regularly was my physician. Gravely, he said, while writing blood pressure pills for me when I was well past 50, “You must walk regularly too—half an hour every morning at least!” Setting out for my “prescribed” morning walks initially, I would think, “How boring! How slowly does the body warm up this way!” For someone who had played contact sports requiring a lot of running around/movement (basketball, football, cricket and tennis) for decades, walking was decidedly dull when I began to do the needful in my 50s. One missed the excitement and emotions generated when like-minded boys of all ages competed with each other intensely in games. But like everything else in life pursued regularly, walking soon became a habit for me. In no time it became an activity I began to like and even looked forward to. After all, morning walks, I soon found out, have their unique attractions.

Fuller Road Morning Walks

I was lucky that I first began to do my constitutionals on Fuller Road and the Mall part of the Dhaka University campus. The walks my doctor had prescribed soon began to feel pleasurable in the still lovely parts of the DU campus. How could I not like the early morning sights and sounds in that green and quiet world then? In spring and early summer flowering krishnachura, radhachura or jarul trees presented a visual feast even as mango blossoms and other flowers scented the air; the solitary cuckoo bird, at its most insistent in the early hours, too, was unforgettable. In the rainy season, everything looked lush green while the fragrance of kodom or kamini flowers suffused the air; in autumn, delicate sheuli blooms embellished mornings imperceptibly for us walkers.

Krishnachura tree
Radhachura tree
From Public Domain

February morning walks were made colourful by “early bird” couples all dressed up for the occasion of Bashanta Utshob[4] or Valentine’s Day dates. Ekushey February[5] and December 14[6]— Martyred Intellectuals Day—mornings, in contrast, were mournful occasions when walkers appeared touched by the solemnity of events they were heading towards. Eid days saw only scanty early morning traffic, but soon after seven in the morning, kurta-clad people could be seen rushing to the central mosque of the campus. But most days, Fuller Road mornings seemed to us walkers in sync with a relaxed, unhurried mode of existence.

Other scenes caught my attention during morning walks for often unusual reasons. The wild dogs of night would disappear in full light, but one would occasionally come across pack members intimidating one another or chasing solitary, skinny squirrels or stray cats who would fight back in their own fierce or wily ways. A not uncommon and sobering scene was that of a rickshawallah parked on the street, precariously perched on his seat, attempting to steal some sleep anyhow before heading for his next back-breaking assignment. Certain times of the year, the neighbourhood madman would attract one’s attention with his manic display. And not infrequently and sickeningly, one would encounter a bedraggled drug addict every now and then. Looking doped and possessed, his eyes turned away from prying gazes, he was inclined to slink away.

I, for my part, got addicted quickly to my early morning campus walks. There was the heady feeling of the fresh air charging up my veins; it was pleasurable too to walk with people with whom I could share the twists and turns of university politics and vent my indignation at the way campus politicking was vitiating the atmosphere day by day. And after 45 minutes of brisk walking and a quick shower, I had a healthy appetite and a mind relaxed for the day’s work.

Dhanmondi Morning Walks

In 2017, I moved to Dhanmondi to begin life in the city outside the DU campus after 20 or so years in it. One reason this seemed a fit place for retired life was the walkways edging the lakes, built thoughtfully for walkers, traversing Dhanmondi and winding their way through parks and open spaces. I felt in my mind in choosing a new flat, that this would be an ideal place for morning walks for people like me so dependent on constitutionals. I was not really disappointed by what I experienced in my Dhanmondi morning walks initially. We were surrounded by greenery. The water in most parts of the lake was reasonably clean and quite greenish blue; scattered bits of reflected sunlight here and there made the water even more attractive during the morning hours. If I was able to get up really early, I could watch the glowing sun ascend above Kalabagan from the road 32 bridge. One lucky day, I was even able to capture the crimson-daubed rising sun reflected in the placid lake water.

Unlike the Fuller Road-Mall areas of DU, the Dhanmondi lake walkways and the park areas fill up in no time at all with morning walkers. It was good to see people doing calisthenics in groups daily, or playing badminton (in winter and early spring). Occasionally, I came across a man or a woman on the mobile, rapt in intimate conversation, no doubt with a significant other with whom talking is essential even that early. All alone in my walks now, I, on the other hand, found early morning walks a good time to think about things or think through things—solitude is sometimes the best company! Ideas for papers I was writing or projects I hoped to undertake seemed to become clearer by the bend in my walks. And soon I discovered Dhaka FM radios that performed from 6 to 7 am with little or no commercial or smart-talking DJs intervening for long stretches and with music that synced with my Bhairavi mood.

But there are aspects of Dhanmondi life that make morning walks here much less relaxing than the Fuller Road ones—despite the lakeside ambiance and the abundance of greenery. The park becomes so crowded within half an hour or so of sunrise that a common experience is people jostle one another on the walkways after a while. The lake water is quite polluted in places; a common sight is the garbage littered in the lakeside or plastic bags floating on tucked away parts of the lake or even near bridges. Almost immediately after seven, never-ending honking and noxious fumes emitted by cars swarming to the main and neighbourhood roads to drop children to the innumerable schools of Dhanmondi can mar morning moods easily. Irritating, too, can be professional beggars placed strategically on walkways and on intersections. For instance, shortly after I start my walk every day from road 27, I encounter the conscience-clouding gaze of a beggar woman clad in a black burqa, peering at the passer-by purposefully, reminding one of the figures playing death in western medieval morality plays. And then there are the vendors lined up to sell food or this or that inside as well as outside the park. Truly, Dhanmondi is now an area where the line between the residential and commercial is close to disappearing. In many ways, Dhanmondi morning walks are nowhere near the ones I would set out for on almost always serene Fuller Road.

And yet I find much to like in my morning walks even now. Dhaka still appears a nice place to live at that time of the day. The morning breeze, if and when flowing, revives me. One morning recently, when I was walking by the lakeside where the palash flowers blazed against the greenery and the greenish blue lake water, I heard on my mobile FM radio lyrics of a song that said it all for me then: “Emon manob jibon ki hobe/Eto shundor prithibe te ki ar asha hobe?” (Will there be another life like this one/ Will I come back to another world as beautiful as this one?”)

[1] Morning raga in Hindustani Classical

[2] A poem by John Donne (1572-1631)

[3] Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

[4] Bengali Spring Festival

[5] Mother tongue day. On 21/2/1952, the Bangladeshi movement started against the imposition of Urdu

[6] December 14 was observed as a Martyrs’ Day to commemorate the large number of Bangladeshi intellectuals killed during the Bangladesh Liberation War.

(First Published in Daily Star in March 2019)

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Essay

Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein: How Significant Is She Today?

By Niaz Zaman

Statue of  Begum Roquiah in the premises of Rokeya Hall, University of Dhaka. From Public Domain.

Recently, near Shamsun Nahar Hall, the second women’s hall of the University of Dhaka, a resident student defaced graffiti depicting Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein – popularly called Begum Rokeya. Black paint was used to smear her eyes and her mouth. Later, the student apologised for her action and promised to restore the image.

I do not know what upset the young woman. The picture is not offensive. The woman has her hair modestly covered. However, the manner of the defacing is troubling. The eyes have been painted over so that the woman cannot see; the mouth has been painted over so that the woman cannot speak. Why was the young woman denying the  rights that Roquiah fought for, that the women of my generation demanded as their fundamental rights, and that the young women of today take for granted?  Why was the young woman who defaced the picture denying the rights that the students against discrimination were claiming?

But, then to my surprise, I learned that this was not the only picture of Roquiah’s that had been defaced after August 5. In this other picture she had been given a beard and the derogatory word “magi[1]” written across it. What had Roquiah done to be dishonoured? What had made her controversial?  Why was a young generation denying the changes that Roquiah had brought in young women’s lives by sheer perseverance and strength of will? On October 1, 1909, only four months after her husband’s death, Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein started a school in his name at Bhagalpur where she had been residing at the time. It was with great difficulty that she was able to persuade two families to send their daughters to her school. Of the five students, four were sisters.

Forced to leave Bhagalpur for personal reasons, she moved to Calcutta. However, she did not give up her dream and, two years later, on March 16, 1911, she re-started Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School with eight students. At the time of her death on December 9, 1932, there were more than 100 girls studying at the school. Apart from teaching, the school encouraged girls to take part in sports and cultural activities. In recognition of her contribution to women’s education, the first women’s hall of the University of Dhaka was renamed “Ruqayyah Hall” in 1964.

From Public Domain

More than a century has passed since Roquiah’s Sultana’s Dream was published in the Indian Ladies Magazine in 1905. In Bangladesh, in recent years, more than half of SSC graduates have been girls – who have also outperformed the boys. Though the female to male ratio goes down at the university level, women are working in different professions. Nevertheless, the danger to women that led to the institutionalisation of purdah and its extremes – which Roquiah questioned and decried for its often fatal results and which in Sultana’s Dream she reverses to put men in the “murdana” – still persists.

According to the UN, “Violence against women and girls remains one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world.” It is estimated that almost one in three women has been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both, at least once in her life. Numbers of women’s deaths in 2023 reveal that a woman was killed every 10 minutes.

Sadly, many of the killings are within the family, by husbands,  brothers, fathers, mothers-in-law, and mothers – who have internalised the concept of honour and allow their daughters to be killed by those who should protect them. In early November, the murder of five-year-old Muntaha shocked the nation. We learned to our horror that her female tutor has been charged with the murder.

Neither education nor empowerment is proof against violence. What is the answer?  Was Roqiuah wrong?

Had Roquiah been here today she would have been surprised to see so many young women wearing jeans but also hijabs – very different from the all-enveloping burqas of her times. Perhaps she would have been happy to see that the young women in the crowded streets were not afraid of the young men, and that, in August, when the traffic police were absent, they were confidently directing traffic. She would have been happy to see that the burqa had changed – as she had once suggested in an essay on the subject that it should.

However, she would have been shocked to see in recent months  young men beating each other up with sticks – some even fatally. She had believed in education, believed that education was the answer to improving lives. She had striven to educate girls because she believed that it was education that would change their lives for the better. She would have been horrified to know that most of the young men beating each other up were students. She would perhaps have asked, Was I wrong? If education is not the answer, what is?   

It is not enough then to educate women and to empower them. The tutor was educated and empowered. Perhaps what is important then is to realize as Roquiah did that one must have proper values. In “Educational Ideals for the Modern Indian Girl,” she stressed that India[2] must retain what is best about its traditions. Acquiring education did not mean that Indian women should discard their familial roles or forget their cultural values.

Though in this essay Roquiah emphasised traditional roles for women, she also believed that women had roles outside the family. Thus, in a letter to the Mussulman, dated December 6, 1921, she noted that four of the Muslim girls’ schools in Calcutta had headmistresses who had studied at Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School.

Roquiah has been an icon for the generation of early feminists in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, many of whom like Shamsun Nahar Mahmud and Sufia Kamal were inspired by her and others like Nurunnahar Fyzenessa and Sultana Sarwat Ara who had studied at her school. She was one of the heroines for the generation of women activists of the mid-1970’s who made her call for emancipation their rallying cry. Women for Women, a research and study group, has a poster which quotes lines from Roquiah’s essay, “Subeh Sadek”: Buk thukiya bolo ma! Amra poshu noi. Bolo bhogini! Amra Asbab noi…Shokole shomobeshe bolo, amra manush. Proclaim confidently, daughter, we are not animals. Proclaim, sister, we are not inanimate objects… Proclaim it together, we are human beings.

Many people are frightened of the word feminism and believe it means a radicalism that would destroy society. But in reality, feminism is a call for equality and justice. Yes, Roquiah was a feminist, who saw the positive side of Islam and decried the absurdity and injustices of society. Roquiah would not have radically changed gender relationships but in both Sultana’s Dream and her novel Padmarag (1924), she suggests that women can have identities that are not dependent on their relationships to men. Yes, she was bound by her times, but the courage with which she lived her life – refusing to be shattered by personal tragedies and trying to make the world better for others – is still relevant today. As is the rationality that she stressed at all times.

[1] Insulting Bengali slang for woman

[2] India had not been partitioned to multiple entities when Roquiah lived.

Niaz Zaman is a retired academic, writer and translator.

(A version of this essay was published in the Daily Star, Bangladesh on December 9, 2024 under the title “How Significant Is Begum Rokeya Today?”)

.

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Essay

A Short, Winding, and Legendary Dhaka Road

By Fakrul Alam

From Public Domain

Fuller Road, the short and winding road in the middle of the University of Dhaka campus, is quite legendary, not only as far as the history of that institution is concerned, but also in the annals of Bangladesh. It must also be one of the most beautiful of Dhaka city’s roads, having till now mostly escaped the degradations other old roads of the city have been subjected to due to rampant urbanisation. It is steeped in history, but still looks as if it was built not that long ago. Undoubtedly, it has real character and a distinctive place in the city’s life.

Bampfylde Fuller[1] was the first Lieutenant Governor of the province of East Bengal and Assam but he held that position for less than a year. Fuller Road must have been named to acknowledge his indirect role in the creation of Dhaka’s university. A controversial administrator and a very opinionated man, he had quit his position in a huff after less than a year at his job. The Partition of Bengal had been revoked in 1912, and all Fuller left behind then in his brief stint seemingly was the beautiful Old High Court Building of the city (whose construction he had initiated) and the splendid, sprawling rain trees of the university he had apparently imported from Madagascar. Nevertheless, the naming of the road indicates that he was part of the historical current that would lead not only to the building of the University of Dhaka in 1921, but also to the Partition of India in 1947, and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Fuller Road is thus replete with history.

Enter it from Azimpur Road and you will see it flanked on one side by Salimullah Muslim (or SM) Hall, and on the other by Jagannath Hall. The former, of course, is named to honour Nawab Salimullah, one of the university’s founders, and someone who had donated a lot of land to the university. Built in 1930-1931, SM Hall is a splendid building, incorporating features not merely of Mughal architecture and gardens, but also of design elements of the colleges and halls that echo another venerable university, Oxford (one reason why the University of Dhaka was once called the “Oxford of the East”). Jagannath Hall comes with an overload of history as well. It, too, was originally modelled after the halls of the University of Oxford and was named after a zamindar of Savar who had contributed to the founding of Jagannath College, which had an organic connection with the university for a long time.

Fuller Road, in fact, is also steeped in the history of Bangladesh. If you enter it from its Azimpur Road entrance, you will see the Swadhinata Sangram, a group of sculptural busts by Shamim Sikder that commemorates the legendary names associated with the university and the birth of Bangladesh. If you care to enter the university staff quarters from either the left or right of the road, and if you then ask the guards to show you around, you will find the graves of intellectuals (or plaques honouring them). These were men martyred in 1971 due to the single-minded determination of the Pakistani army and its Bengali collaborators to eliminate dissident intellectuals who had worked for the birth of Bangladesh, thereby crippling the country at the moment of its birth.

If you exit the road on Nilkhet road, you will find a solemnly built commemorative area in another island, containing plaques listing university teachers, staff members, and students martyred in 1971. The sculptures and the plaques are testaments not only to the sheer bloody-mindedness of the Pakistani forces of yore but also to the major contribution made by the university’s people to Bangladesh’s independence. I grew up listening to snatches of the history of the University of Dhaka and Fuller Road that are relevant here.

One of my uncles, for instance, is still fond of retelling an incident when he escaped from the Pakistani police’s bloody assault on demonstrators protesting on February 21, 1952, against the imposition of Urdu as the sole national language of the nascent state by (West) Pakistani administrators and their cohorts. He had taken refuge at that time in the Fuller Road flat of an European Jewish academic, who was then a faculty member. A few of my teachers have either talked about or written about the movements that continued from that memorable incident till December 16, 1971, describing their involvement with the various other movements that led to the emergence of Bangladesh. They highlight, in the process, noteworthy moments in the road’s history and the roles its denizens played in our country’s pre-liberation stages, as well as the memorable transitional historical moments they had either witnessed or were part of.

As I move in from the Swadhinata Sangram island on the Azimpur Road entry point of Fuller Road nowadays, I can see only a few remnants of the natural beauty the road once boasted. Gone is the basketball court placed in a picturesque setting that SM Hall once possessed, or the lush green grass tennis court of the Hall that my uncle reminisced about. He played there before my time. For a long time, there were many statuesque and lovely trees on the SM Hall side of the road. However, the distinctive architectural features of the SM hall building still strikes me as very impressive.

On the other side, however, the first clear signs of the uglification of Fuller Road are visible in the drab features of the newly built extension of the Jagannath Hall complex. In addition to these two halls, Fuller Road is flanked on one side by the British Council and university staff quarters, and on the other by Udayan Bidyalaya (aka Udayan School/College), some faculty and staff quarters, the residences of one of the pro-vice chancellors and the treasurer, and the vice chancellor’s house. The two buildings of the pro-vice chancellor and the treasurer are pretty nondescript, as are the Udayan buildings, but the British Council setup is quite notable. I have written about the British Council’s transformation from an open access center for intellectual and cultural pursuits and my own memories of stimulating as well as adda[2]-filled days in anguished as well as indignant remembrance elsewhere, but let me just reiterate what I say in that piece briefly here: This new British Council is, indeed, sleekly designed and has state-of-the art security, but it is no longer the vibrant centre of intellectual exchange it once was, and is now mostly a place visited by those who can afford its wares of British education.

The Vice-chancellor’s residence, however, is undoubtedly still striking. If you have had the privilege of going inside, you must have been impressed by the building as well as the grounds, containing krishnachuras and jarul trees, which when flowering, make Fuller Road look vibrant and colourful—almost a garden in Dhaka city. Indeed, the rain trees, the krishnachuras and jaruls in bloom, one or two shirish and a solitary sonalu trees and (still) numerous mango trees play their part in making Fuller Road a distinctive floral phenomenon of the cityscape. Fuller Road is indeed as beautiful as you could expect any road to be in a bustling, bursting-at-its seam, and unsparingly chaotic city like Dhaka.

It is a road that also has many moods and that you can see in many lights—literally. I lived in Fuller Road for over two decades and frequented it for two more, and thus have had the privilege of viewing the road at different times of the day and on diverse occasions for at least four decades. When I now reflect on what I saw, I am struck by the immense variety of the experiences the road affords to those who live in it and even to passersby.

It was during my prolonged stay in Fuller Road that I got frequent glimpses of the wondrous place it once must have been. Even now, a nature-lover can take delight in its birds, for although the cacophonic crows still reign supreme amongst the bird population of the locality, throughout the day, and especially in the evening, you will see swiftly flying flocks of pigeons, tribes of parrots, and incomparably beautiful yellow-breasted holud pakhi[3]couples, in addition to the sad-looking, ubiquitous shaliks[4] and evening’s surrealistic bats.

When I first started living in Fuller Road, I would occasionally see snakes slithering by on monsoonal days; mongooses darting away at the sight of walkers is a not uncommon experience even now. Wild dogs roam in parts of Fuller Road at nights and early mornings. The foxes have disappeared, and I have seen a stray monkey only once or twice, but there is still enough flora and fauna around to make you feel an intimate connection with nature in this neighbourhood of the city. But of course, in addition to its nonhuman residents as well as its human ones, Fuller Road is now frequented mostly by people who find its free and open spaces appealing for different reasons at different times of the day.

Early in the morning or late in the evening, for instance, you will find men and women chatting away as they do their constitutionals; during the day students saunter across the road while vehicles fill the free and plentiful parking spaces; come evening lovers sit down discreetly in its dark spots, trying to be as close as possible and as far away as they can from prying eyes; with nightfall nouveau riche youths park faux sports and/or sleekly painted cars, trying to impress the girls who stroll across the road. Nowadays you will see with irritating frequency in evenings the parked motorcycles of busy-seeming student leaders. At night, Fuller Road can have a surrealistic feel to it—lit up but deserted, desolate as in some dreamscape, and as in a dreamscape, hauntingly familiar. 

What surely makes Fuller Road truly distinctive, though, are the festival days that it hosts throughout the year, and the processions and parades that cross it throughout the year for one reason or the other. If you list them by the English calendar, you can begin with the new year when celebrations continue from the final hours of the dying year and end till the first nightfall of the new one. February is a truly distinctive month in the road—first Bashanta Utshob[5]and then Valentine’s Day see it fill up with young men and women in bright, warm colours and obviously romantic, flirtatious moods. Even solemn Ekushey[6]February, when night-long Fuller Road residents hear the doleful notes of the Ekushey song commemorating our language martyrs, and when from dawn to afternoon the road is closed to all vehicular traffic, switches to a festive mood by late afternoon, as those crisscrossing it seem bent on leaving the sad notes behind to celebrate all things Bengali. But the most exuberant display you can see in and around Fuller Road is during Pohela Boishakh[7], when the road turns into a conduit for festival-loving people flowing from fun-filled event to event. Eid days and Durga Pujas, and Saraswati pujas too witness suitably dressed young people walking across the road in obviously celebratory moods, lighting up themselves and the people around them, as they either stroll by or stand in pairs or groups here and there in the curving road’s embrace.

And the processions and parades? Suffice it to say that they are motivated not only by politics but this or that reason or cause. In the three Fuller Road flats I lived in for twenty or so years, I felt the kind of contentment and ease that I did not experience in the many neighbourhoods of Dhaka I had lived in before, or the Dhanmondi flat I live in now. Mango-filled trees exuding mango blossom scents, kamini flowers with overpowering fragrances, wide open spaces where children and boys play to their hearts’ content and neighbours greet each other familiarly throughout the day made my life on Fuller Road incomparably pleasing.

Towards the end of my Dhaka University career, I moved to a flat on the ninth floor of the newly constructed faculty apartment complex. There I saw what I had never seen before—monsoonal cloud formations, magnificent sunsets (I would not get up in time for sunrises!), the moon in its full glory, and star-studded nights. Heaven seemed to come closer and closer to me then. I truly seemed to have ascended to celestial heights! But paradise has to be lost sooner or later and can only be regained in this world by willing the mind to vision it from exilic places every now and then. But to have had some close to it moments in this life through Fuller Road is truly something to be thankful for!

From Public Domain

[1] Fuller (1854-1935) held the position from 16 October 1905 until he resigned on 20 August 1906 after which he relinquished the position to Lord Minto (1845-1914).

[2] Tete-a tete

[3] Orioles

[4] Mynas

[5] Spring Festival

[6] Twenty-first February has been declared the mother tongue day by UNESCO. One of the reasons Bangladesh was formed was its insistence on Bengali being its mother tongue while Pakistan tried to impose Urdu as the national language.

[7] Pohela Boishakh (first day of the Bengali month of Boishakh) falls on 14th April in Bangladesh and  is celebrated as the start of the Bengali New Year with a holiday and fanfare.

(First Published in Daily Star on July 7, 2018)

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Essay

Still to Moving Images

As a curator, Ratnottama Sengupta writes about the long trajectory of films by artists, beginning with Husain’s Berlinale winner, down to the intrepid band she screened at the just concluded 30th Kolkata International Film Festival

Gaja Gamini: Painting by MF Hussain
Gaja Gamini (An elephant’s walk) Movie by MF Hussain

When Maqbool Fida Husain won the Golden Bear in the 17th edition of the Berlin Film Festival, the year was 1967. I, in my pre-teen years, knew little about painting. But growing up in a family of filmmakers I was already conversant with the art of looking through the camera. So I was disoriented that the film critics of the time were baffled by what had impressed the international jury.

Royalty, tigers, ruins, hawks, school children, anklets, on the river bank – all these images moving only to music, not a word uttered. The jury at Berlinale were astounded by the richness of the artist’s idiom that had breathed life into a Rajasthan that is rich in architecture as it is in painting, in costume as in music. 

This dawned on me years later, when I curated the exhibition, 3 Dimensions, forthe All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society in New Delhi. It featured paintings, sculpture and graphic art or drawings by artists from Husain, Satish Gujral, Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh, Jatin Das to Sanjay Bhattacharya, Paresh Maity, Mimi Radhakrishnan, Shadab Hussain, among others. 

A unique feature of this exhibition was that all the participating artists had interest in another expression of art. So every evening of that week had seen a Ram Kumar and Mimi read their short stories; a Narendra Pal Singh and Jatin Das read their poems; a Sanjay Bhattacharya render Tagore songs of and a Shruti Gupta Chandra perform Kathak. Ratnabali Kant had staged a Performance Art in the presence of Prime Minister V P Singh who had inaugurated the week-long exhibition by reading his poems. And, on the closing day, I had screened Through a Painter’s Eyes. That’s when it dawned on me: it was the originality of vision captured by the 7-minute short film had won over Berlin as also Melbourne and our very own National Awards too. 

Subsequently Husain, who had started out from the tenements of Bombay by painting oversized hoardings of Hindi films on the sleeping tramlines at the dead of night, had at the ripe age of 84 made Gaja Gamini (2000) with stars such as Madhuri Dixit, and Minaxi — A Tale of Three Cities (2004) with Tabu and Naseeruddin Shah. Ironically these films baffled the critics just as much as the earlier short film had. However the dazzling visuals of vibrant figures and colourful structuring of the (non)-narrative had found acceptance in the Marche du Film section of Cannes 2004.

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I have since then tried to fathom what drives artists who are skilled at painting with oil or watercolour, or sculpting wood or stone, metal or clay, or creating graphic images on paper or linoleum, to wield the megaphone. Now, instead of holding the camera or editing the celluloid strips with their hands, they use their mind, their mind’s eyes, their creative imagination.

Some other contemporaries of Husain too had, after attaining glory in the plastic arts, turned to experimenting with the new, ever evolving, ever contemporary art form — cinema. In 1970, Tyeb Mehta, who had briefly worked as an editor, made Koodal, meaning  ‘Meeting Ground’ on the Bandra station of Mumbai’s Western Railway. The synthesis of images of humans and animals had won him the Filmfare Critics Award.

Cartoonist Abu — born Attupurathu Mathew Abraham — was a journalist and author who had worked for Punch, Tribune and The Observer in London before returning to work with The Indian Express. He was given a special award by the British Film Institute for the short animation No Ark, clearly a cryptic message deriving from the Biblical tale of Noah’s Ark.

Equally engrossing is the story of Syzygy, also produced by Films Division, and directed by Akbar Padamsee.  This  16-minute short, premiered at a UNESCO screening in Paris 1969, had no narrative, no sound, or even colour. It only had lines evoking shapes typically used to refer to the alignment of celestial bodies. Only one man had stayed back till the end of the screening — and he had said to Padamsee, “Most people could not understand your film — it’s a masterpiece.” 

Reportedly that man had gone on to become the programming director at Cinematheque Francaise – world’s largest film archive. That’s where Indian filmmaker found Ashim Ahluwalia found a copy of Events in a Cloud Chamber, Padamsee’s second film that was sent for screening at the Delhi Art Expo — never to be returned to the artist. The lost-in-transit film has now been professionally reinterpreted by Ahluwalia.

NB: All these films were supported by filmmaking bodies, and though often baffled, cineastes realised theirs was a new way of seeing the visual expression that goes under the arching umbrella of cinema.

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This desire to understand, adapt, and get under the skin of a modern medium had driven Tagore, a century ago from today, to paint expressionistic forms and also to film Natir Pujo (1931). And today we find a band of artists from Delhi, Mumbai, Kerala and Baroda making films that bridge disciplines from landscape and abstraction to mimetic movement and drama.

What are the notable features of these films that are mostly made on video? They too have little need for dialogue. Instead, their sight is supported by music of natural sound. If the objects they capture through the lens are arresting forms, vacant spaces can be just as inviting. When they have humans as their protagonists, they are keen to capture body language rather than drama. Colourful palette is not a foregone conclusion – monochromes and black and white can be more poignant. Because? Their visuals are but vehicles for commenting on social reality and for communicating philosophic content. 

Legends or veterans, seasoned or sprouting, this intrepid band of adventurers includes Vivan Sundaram, Ranbir Kaleka, Gopi Gajwani, Rameshwar Broota, Bharti Kapadia, Babu Eshwar Prasad, Gigi Scaria, Protul Dash, and Sanjay Roy. They are a continuum of the spirit of experimentation that had driven Husain and Tyeb, Abu Abraham and Akbar Padamsee.

Films by Artists at KIFF*

1 *Disclaimer* 2016/ 9:40 min
By *Gigi Scaria* focuses on the sleight of hands by a magician 
2 *On the Road* 2021/ 5:7 min
By *Babu Eshwar Prasad* is a nostalgic look at road movies that are part documentary, part adventure.
3 *Sabash Beta* 3 min
By *Rameshwar Broota* with Vasundhara Tewari applauds the galloping of a fleighty horse.
4 *Leaves Like Hands of Flame* 2010/ 5:34 min
By *Veer Munshi* likens the fallen chinar leaves to the autumn in the lives of uprooted Kashmiris.
5 *L for…* 2019/ 13:14 min
By *Bharti Kapadia* plays with the sight and - surprisingly - the sound of the alphabet.
6 *Fruits Ripen and Rot* 2022/ 4:21 min
By *Sanjay Roy* is a surrealistic look at the divergent responses to food that is central to everyman's existence.
7 *How Far…?* 2023/ 12:37 min
By *Ranveer Kaleka* is an elegy, a dirge, mourning the losses wrought to Planet Earth by human destruction such as war.
8 *Burning Angel* 2024/ 4:37 min 
By *Pratul Dash*  is an abstract story of the same destruction.
9 *Turning 2008/ 11 min
By Vivan Sundaram is a silent, colourful comment on the waste created by consumerist civilization.
10 *Time* 1974/13 min
By *Gopi Gajwani* is a riveting tale of how relative a minute is to one in mourning, one waiting, and for one in love.


*Kolkata International Film Festival

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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of  The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. 

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Essay

How Dynamic was Ancient India?

Farouk Gulsara discussed William Dalrymple’s latest book

Growing up in the later part of the 1970s, kids of my generation were drilled with stories that India was a subcontinent of poverty, filth, and pickpockets. Even our history books taught us that it was a land of darkness, living in its myths, superstitions, and cults, waiting to be civilised by the mighty European race and their scientific discoveries. 

That was what was impressed upon us as we sauntered into adulthood. The media did not help either. With eye-catching news like a particular Indian Prime Minister having his daily dose of gau mutra[1] for breakfast and another ousted after thirteen days of taking oath as the Prime Minister, India was made out to be just another third-world country. Then came the 21st century and the turn of tides. Locally bred academicians started teasing deeper into India’s forgotten history. They started doubting the self-deprecating history that was taught to them by leftist historians in the textbooks.

Like many historians before him, historian William Dalrymple, in his latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World outlines the importance of India as a cradle of knowledge that peddled wisdom to regions near and far. Its scientific knowledge was far ahead of its time. This know-how was put into practice and spread via trade routes. Their port of entry received not just their goods but also their culture and way of life.

Enduring attack after attack from foreign invaders, Indians had already forgotten their glorious past by the time of the British Raj. A tiger hunting expedition inadvertently brought British hunters to various beautiful cave carvings and Buddhist sculptures. That kind of rekindled India’s history, which had disappeared from the Indian imagination.

India had been a crucial economic fulcrum and a civilisational engine in early world history. As early as 31BCE, Indians had learnt to manipulate the monsoonal winds to steer their ship to the West to the prosperous kingdom of Ethiopia, Egypt and subsequent access to the Mediterranean. With their mammoth merchant ships, they transported pearls, spices, diamonds, incense, slaves and even exotic animals like elephants and tigers in exchange for gold. Trade favoured India so much that a Roman Naval Commander, Pliny the Elder, lamented the unnecessary spicing of the food and the almost transparent Indian fabric that left nothing to the imagination. It is said Buddhism reached the shores of Egypt through these ships. The Christian monastic way of life is said to have been influenced by these monks.

With seasonal monsoon winds, Indian ships brought not just trade but philosophy, politics, and architectural ideas to Southeast Asia, China, and even Japan. All this cultural allure and sophistication did not happen through conquest. Sanskrit was the language of knowledge and a conduit for spreading knowledge. 

Buddhism emerged in the 5th century BCE as an alternative to caste-centred and animal sacrifice-filled rituals. Unlike Jainism’s strict austerities, it offered a middle path. Due to King Ashoka’s untiring efforts, Buddhism spread beyond its borders. Contrary to the belief that Buddhism promotes an impoverished way of living, early Buddhists drew interests (and resources) from the merchant group, as evidenced by the Ajanta Caves’ findings. Buddhism drew many Chinese scholars to India’s centres of higher learning in Nalanda and Kanchipuram in the South to get first-hand experience reading Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit. India’s universities later became the template for other varsities the world over. 

Ajanta Caves
Ajanta Painting inside the cave
From Public Domain

India’s cultural influence on South Sea Asia is phenomenal. Stories from Indian epics, Ramayana and Bhagvad Gita, are told and retold in children’s stories, plays and cultural art forms. Their ruling elites were Hindus. The biggest Hindu and Buddhist temples are not in India but in Cambodia and Java, respectively, as Angkor Wat and Borobudur. Marvellous stony statues and temple are similar to those in India. At a time when the Byzantines were presiding over Europe, the Suryavarman clan was ruling a Hindu Empire so huge it would dwarf their European counterpart.  

The 5th to 7th century of the common era was the golden age of Indian mathematics. Between Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, their knowledge of the nine-number system (and zero) brought them the know-how of negative numbers, algebra, trigonometry, algorithms and astronomy far ahead of their time. They understood that Earth was a sphere spinning on its axis, about the eclipse, gravity and planetary rotations. The Indians even built a space observatory tower in Ujjain to study constellations and devise a solar calendar. The idea of a prime meridian arose from here. 

In the 8th century, the Abbasids exerted control over the Afghanistan region through treaties with local viziers. At that time, the Bamiyan region in Afghanistan had over 460 monasteries and 10,000 monks. A member of an influential Buddhist family, the Barmakid, converted to Islam to establish his family in the Abbasid fold. They brought Indian medicines, texts, and scholars with them and encouraged and promoted Islamic engagement with the East. Sanskrit texts were translated into Arabic. It is said that the Barmakids were instrumental in the building of Baghdad. 

The Islamic hegemony spread, as did the scholarship it had built. 

The Bamakid-Abbasid liaison met a tragic end due to palace power dynamics. The Abbasids started looking at the Romans for inspiration. Many Europeans were drawn to the Golden Age of Islam. Many texts were translated into Latin. Toledo of Andalusia introduced the science of timekeeping from Ujjain to Oxford. A particular young Italian named Leonardo of Pisa picked up the beauty of Mathematics during his stay in Algeria. He returned to publish ‘Liber Abaci‘ (The Book of Calculation) in 1202, which introduced Europe to the sequence of Fibonacci numbers and the mystic power of mathematics. This sudden gush of knowledge spurred the European Renaissance.  

First published in 1202, Liber abaci was one of the most important books on mathematics in the Middle Ages, introducing Arabic numerals and methods throughout Europe. Its author, Leonardo Pisano of Pisa is known today as Fibonacci .
Stature of Fibonacci (1170-1240/50) in Pisa
From Public Domain

The whole cycle completed its full arc when European powers rose to great heights. Benefitting from the knowledge from India that layered its way through, passing from hand to hand, the colonial masters returned to chop off [2]the hands that had nourished it. 

Emerging rejuvenated from their occupation-induced slumber, with their Anglophilic familiarity, Indians have risen from the ashes to claim their status in the Indosphere[3], a world where Indian influences permeated every layer of society.

This well-researched, unputdownable book is for all history buffs. Infused with little nuggets from cover to cover that would excite nerds, it is a joy to read about the history of India in a way that is not often told in the mainstream.

[1] Gau mutra, cow urine, has a sacred role in some forms of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism and is used for medicinal purposes and in some Hindu ceremonies.

[2] https://www.thedailystar.net/lifestyle/special-feature/the-muslin-story-187216#

[3] Indosphere is a collective linguistic term for areas under Indian linguistic influence. It includes countries in the Southern, Southeast, and East Asian regions. 22 languages, including Indo-European and Dravidian languages, are recognised under this category and are considered to have originated in India. 

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

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Essay

The Year of Living Dangerously by Fakrul Alam

Painting by Zainul Abedin. From Public Domain

1971 began and ended on a note of hope but in the course of the year we went through the whole gamut of human emotions: love for our motherland and hate for its enemies; desire for freedom and abhorrence at those who had curtailed our right to be ourselves; feelings such as anxiety, fear, even terror caused by the knowledge that at any moment we might be abducted and murdered; and excitement and elation at the thought that relief could not be far away. 1971 was the year when for months we lived from day to day, totally insecure in a Dhaka which had become like a city of the dead; it was also the year when we discovered what it meant to hope against hope. 1971, in short, was a cataclysmal year; for every Bengali it was the year of living dangerously.

The year must have begun innocuously enough; at this point in time, I have simply no recollection what I did or how I felt in January and February of that year. But certainly, hope must have been in the air; after Sheikh Sahib’s massive election victory all of us must have been feeling confident and secure in the knowledge that we were finally about to master our destiny. For me—temperamentally apolitical and not yet out of my teens at the beginning of that year—the first sign that something was seriously wrong came one day while we were watching a test match in Dhaka Stadium on the first of March. Suddenly, the game was interrupted and then abandoned as news came about Yahya Khan’s decision to not call a meeting of the Pakistani National Assembly. Pandemonium ruled for a while in the field, but soon everyone left, muttering that this cannot be, indignant that the army chief could not go against the resounding mandate given to the Awami League to change the course of Pakistani history.

And then for a while: hartals[1], demonstrations, slogans, meetings, public displays of discontent, and the will to oppose and resist on one side and display of the carrot as well as the stick on the other. In fact, the month of March showed a whole nation in a state of ferment, ready to go to any length against a brutal but posturing force.

A first climax was Sheikh Saheb’s[2] speech of March 7. Hearing it now, I cannot but think: is it as stirring for people of this generation as it was for ours? Contemplated in retrospective, the speech seems to be the quintessence of the Bengali spirit in 1971: inspired, defiant, pulsating, and resolute. It considers the dangers ahead but is emphatic about the need to put up resistance and counter whatever measures were taken to contain us.

The real climax, of course, came on the night of March 25. That night I was in Sylhet, visiting my sister and her husband, along with my father and two other sisters. In Sylhet that night we could have no idea that Dhaka had become the scene of carnage or that our family, friends, and acquaintances were in the greatest of danger. It was only next morning, waking up to discover that Sylhet town was under curfew, and listening to Indian radio and the BBC, that we began to have an inkling of how devastated Dhaka had become in a night and in how much jeopardy our loved ones were.

Throughout the next week we alternated between a feeling of joy at the knowledge that Bengalis were fighting back and a foreboding that a grievous wound had been inflicted on us. We were elated by Major Zia’s declaration on the radio about independence and the reports of resistance everywhere; we were depressed by the news items transmitted in the air waves about Dhaka as a city that had been flattened by heavy weapons and was still burning. Since, our house was close to Farmgate, we were full of anxiety: had my mother and the sister we had left behind survived the mass slaughter of Dhakaites that was being narrated everywhere except on Radio Pakistan?

After a few days my father decided that he had had enough of waiting and uncertainty; he and I would head for Dhaka and determine for ourselves the fate of my mother and sister. My brother-in-law and three other sisters would remain in what seemed the relative safety of Sylhet. Little did we realise as we left them on a day in early April the hardship and suffering they would go through in the next few months, fleeing from tea garden to tea garden and even to the safety of Tripura[3] to escape the pillaging Pakistani army. Only after we were reunited with them in Dhaka in July did we get to know of their travails as they attempted to evade the marauding forces.

The trip to Dhaka was a tense and an unforgettable one. A few images are etched in my memory vividly: driving through the tea gardens, we saw tea garden workers with bows and arrows, determination wrought on their faces. In Brahmanbaria, we heard gripping stories of the confrontations that had taken place in Comilla and saw the intense preparations being taken in the town itself to resist the Pakistani onslaught. But the most vivid memory of the journey are the scenes of mass exodus we witnessed as we neared Dhaka: men, women, and children on foot or on rickshaws, looking harrowed, wearily fleeing to village homes from the city to escape genocide. Not a few of the people we met told us not to be so foolhardy as to return to Dhaka.

Thankfully, we managed to reach our Indira Road home without facing any unpleasant situations and found that my mother and sister were safe. But there were troop movements all the time and stories of mass arrests of young men during curfew. The elders of my family decided that I would be safer in my uncle’s house in Dhanmondi than in a house in the Farmgate area.

In the few weeks that I stayed in Dhanmondi I managed to get in touch with some of my friends. The news they told me was horrifying: Dr. Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, my tutorial teacher, and the man who first made me feel that I had the sensitivity to be a student of Shakespeare, and who went beyond his role as a tutor to talk to me about his passion for radical humanism, as well as Mr. Rashidul Hasan, who taught us Blake and was as humble and meek as some of the denizens of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, had been brutally murdered. More horror stories: one of my school friends, Arun Chowdhury, and his father, could no longer be traced after they had been abducted from Ranada Prasad Saha’s Narayanganj home along with the millionaire philanthropist; one of my uncle’s in-laws, a Rajshahi University professor, had also disappeared after being picked up by the army; other people that we knew had been shot at or humiliated or hurt. A friend who had joined her family in Bogra had witnessed their house being burned and the family had barely managed to escape with their lives. The whole Bengali nation appeared to be bleeding and bruised.

Nevertheless, no one felt defeated and hope still flickered as a candle newly lit and solidly fixed will even in the darkest night. For one thing, there were the daily broadcasts from Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra[4]containing news about Mujibnagar and organised resistance all over the country. Then there was the knowledge that some friends had crossed the border and were receiving training so that they could be inducted into the Mukti Bahini[5]. Everywhere one could view the resentment against the Pakistani army being concentrated to the point when it would rebound upon them.

Eventually, my parents decided that we would take a house in a part of the city which was relatively free from regular army patrolling and I rejoined them in a Central Road flat. But, really, no part of the city was completely safe. One night, to take just one example, the boys of the neighbouring family climbed the wall separating our two houses because the army had raided the house next door and stayed with us till next morning. I still remember how tense we were that night and nervous and indignant.

Gradually, we learned to sleep better and not hear the stray shots that were fired into the night by who knows whom. Inevitably, we adapted to a life lived mostly indoors, listening to the radio or the tape recorder all day, or reading, or playing cards. But we had to be very careful about everything that we did: the radio had to be toned down, books with insidious sounding titles not read, and visit to and from friends of our age restricted. Fear of army raids constricted us and forced us to make life a diminished thing. Only my father would go out regularly to spend the day in office or shopping; his greying hair gave him a kind of limited freedom that we could not hope to have.

However, consolations for lives lived under such strained circumstances were not impossible to seek even in those days when we would rarely venture into natural light. By June, bombs which were beginning to explode at regular intervals all over the city announced loudly to us that the Bengali capacity to resist, far from being diminished, had transformed itself in spectacular fashion. My father told us one day that he was one of many people who had been donating money for freedom fighters who were now infiltrating into the city in large numbers. In July and August, the Mukti Bahini activity in Dhaka intensified and I even met a few of them. Also, every once in a while, a close friend suddenly disappeared from Dhaka and those of us who still remained in the city still unsure of what we should do talked about his decision to join the freedom struggle and his daring with a mixture of admiration and envy.

Of course, we knew that the life of a freedom fighter was far from a glamorous one, and full of risks. Exactly how hazardous their life could be was driven home to us when in late August a number of them were caught and murdered. Because we knew a few of these valiant fighters personally or by name, for some time, indeed for perhaps the only time that year, we felt depressed and shaken. But another few weeks and many amongst us roused ourselves and felt hopeful again. True, there had been a setback and some of the muktis[6]who had become legendary in a short time because of their exploits had been killed or imprisoned, but September showed that the spirit of resistance was very much alive.

Explosions could once again be heard in and around Dhaka and were signs to us of the vigour and irrepressible nature of our freedom fighters. By October, Swadhin Bangla[7]Radio broadcasts regularly reassured us that there were advances being made on the diplomatic front by our government-in-exile and that on the battlefield our reconstituted Bangladesh army were beginning to engage the Pakistani forces and defeat and demoralise them.

By early November, Nasim Mohsin, my best friend at that time, decided that it was time for him to join the freedom fighters and that the moment for a decisive assault on the Pakistani army was near. I was with him when he contacted some local muktis about crossing over to training camps in Tripura. They told him that the borders were already the site of daily skirmishes and that he should postpone the journey for a while till they could confirm a safe crossing. Desperate to become part of the freedom struggle, Nasim ignored their advice and our pleas to be patient and left us, never to be seen again. Much later, we were to discover that he had been captured by collaborators of the Pakistani army in a village in the Comilla border. They then handed him over to the local Pakistani troops who summarily shot him.

Late November and our excitement grew: the Bangladesh army was no longer content with skirmishes and raids and was now attacking the Pakistanis frontally. By late November war looked inevitable as desperate Pakistani tactics drew India into the campaign. Finally, on the night of December 3, the Dhaka night sky was spectacularly lit by tracer bullets and then invaded by Indian bombers targeting military installations. The next day all of us were on roof-tops watching dog-fights and cheering Indian jets attacking the airport and the cantonment, oblivious to the danger from shrapnel and debris from shattered planes.

Over the next two weeks, our joy grew by the hour, for every Swadhin Bangla Radio broadcast or Indian radio bulletin informed us of Pakistani reverses and detailed advances made by the liberation forces. In our enthusiasm we did not realise that we were going through dangerous times in the capital city as the Pakistani army and its collaborators, their backs against the wall, were becoming more and more vicious. It was only later that we discovered that the brother of a friend who had joined the freedom fighters had been picked up by the Pakistani army during this time and would disappear from our sights forever. And as the liberation forces closed in on Dhaka, rumours spread of youths and prominent people being abducted. Undoubtedly, the scariest memory I have from this period is of a Pakistani plane droning one night, which we knew had dropped bombs on an orphanage the previous night in a bid to discredit the Indian Air Force. It was a moment when we felt totally vulnerable and at the mercy of forces whose reason had become warped to the extent that they could indulge in mass destruction of innocents merely to smear India in the eyes of the world.

Nothing the vicious Pakistani military/propaganda machine could do, however, could thwart the logic of history and prevent liberation, and by December 15 we were hearing the booming of artillery in and around Dhaka. On December 16, we headed for the Ramna Race Course area because we heard that a surrender ceremony was scheduled there in the afternoon.

But we could only go as far as the Hotel InterContinental, where we got caught in a cross-fire. A friend who was with me got slightly hurt as a splinter from a bullet pierced his leg. We took him to his house and then scattered, telling ourselves that we had not survived nine months of occupation only to get killed at the moment of liberation. But by evening we were out in the streets celebrating with muktis, among whom I could see at least one close friend, firing his Sten gun into the air. The year of living dangerously was ending, and the time for unmitigated hope had finally come to stay with us, at least for a while!

(Published on March 31, 2019, The Daily Observer)

[1] Strikes

[2] Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975)

[3] A northeastern state of India

[4] Independent Bengali Wireless Centre

[5] The freedom vehicle: The army that fought to free Bangladesh as an independent entity

[6] Freedom fighters

[7] Free Bengal

Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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