Lord Lytton – Borderless

By Ranu Bhattacharyya

I hear the scents whisper. Familiar fragrances of clove and cinnamon, imbued with spicy notes of pepper and eucalyptus beckon and tease. Elusive murmurs of mysterious oils and herbs tinge the air as I walk along a narrow-paved lane in Old Dhaka, overshadowed by looming walls on either side. I ignore the press of prying eyes and inquisitive bodies that accompany my passage. The call of the scents is irresistible, and I feel strangely unafraid of what lies before the next turn in the path ahead. These were the scents of my childhood — of summer afternoons spent secretly exploring the forbidden depths of my grandmother’s closet, the kaancher almarih[1] where her medicines were stored in shiny glass bottles with peeling labels.

The narrow lane spills into a small courtyard hemmed by buildings on three sides. Everything is closed because it is Friday, the day of prayer in Bangladesh. Peering through grimy windows, I see gigantic iron cauldrons, cavernous kansa kadhais[2], their gold gleaming in glimpses amidst sooty splatters, huge ladles and enormous tongs. Some vessels perch on hand-crafted mud stoves, their sides smoothened and baked by fires. Wooden logs are stacked in the corner along with bulging sacks of coal. Nearby, some large pieces of cloth, perhaps used for straining, are hung out to dry. In the shadowy recesses, shelves stacked with glass bottles glisten with reflected light. It seems almost staged, like a theatrical representation of a medieval kitchen and yet the evidence of daily use is undeniable.

The fourth side of the courtyard has an open doorway. A sudden urge, an inexplicable pull, lures me towards it. I feel I know what lies beyond its brink. Yet how could that be? In this alien city, situated in a land scarred by a brutal Partition, from where does this knowing come? Concentrating on lifting the edge of my saree as I step across the threshold, it takes me a moment to lift my eyes to see what lies ahead. A painting of a pot-bellied man seated cross legged on an asana[3], a sacred thread adorning the vast expanse of his chest, looks solemnly back at me. Before me was the same face I’d seen on countless bottles in that medicine cupboard of my childhood — the same glossy hair, oiled and parted with precision, the same curled moustache, the same narrow bordered white dhoti[4].

The author with her great grandfather’s portrait in Dhaka. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya

I find myself before a life-size portrait of my great grandfather, Mathura Mohan Chakraborty, founder of Shakti Aushadhalaya, the Ayurvedic pharmacy famed in the streets of Dhaka, Calcutta, Patna, Benaras and Rangoon at the turn of the 19th century. The kitchen behind me was the pharmacy’s karkhana[5] to prepare medicines of his formulations. His portrait hung before the inner sanctum of the temple he had dedicated to the revered Bengali saint, Lokenath Baba. Legend claimed that the mystic had whispered the recipe of the first medicinal formulation to his most faithful disciple — my great grandfather.

Ever since I arrived in Dhaka as an expat, I had been searching for the Shakti Aushadhalaya premises. Everyone knew of the company; yet nobody seemed to know where it was located. I was introduced everywhere as a young scion of the family. And though whispers followed me at gatherings and smiles broadened on hearing I was the great granddaughter of Mathurababu, my questions regarding the whereabouts of the company drew blank stares and confused responses. In horticulture, the word scion, refers to the detached living part of a plant that is cut to be grafted onto another plant. The sundering of this particular scion had been so complete, over so many generations, through such a series of violent events that it seemed my search for the original plant would remain elusive.

It was only through persistent enquiry that I found myself in Swamibagh Road in Old Dhaka where the manufacturing unit of Shakti Aushadhalaya was located. Mathurababu had founded the company in Patuatuli, Dhaka, in 1901. Family lore suggests Lokenath Baba inspired him to venture far from his origins as a schoolteacher in Bikrampur. The ascetic recognised his potential, unusual in those times, as a graduate versed in three languages — Bengali, Sanskrit and English. Starting from humble beginnings in the family kitchen, peddling hair oil and tooth powder in his neighbourhood, Mathurababu’s prescient business acumen saw his enterprise flourish. The company produced and supplied quality Ayurvedic medicines at low prices. Mathurababu also established an Ayurvedic institute, attached to his manufacturing unit to popularise Ayurvedic knowledge. The institute taught Ayurveda and philosophy in Sanskrit. Students were offered free tuition, boarding, and lodging.

Ayurveda, considered the oldest existing health science in the world, is believed to have originated in India 5000 years ago. The journey of Ayurveda from ancient times to its present incarnation is a fascinating story that follows several simultaneous trajectories, embracing geopolitics and history, trade and commerce, science and industry, technology and travel.

It is with a sense of wonder that I encounter my great grandfather’s name in journals and books that describe the history of Ayurveda in India. He was among the earliest entrepreneurs to transition towards production of Ayurvedic drugs for the market. Directly involved in all aspects of his company, Mathurbabu immersed himself in the study of Ayurveda and had an extensive library of rare treatises on ancient Indian medical traditions, including a prized copy of Susruta Sanhita[6].

He noticed that Western medicines advertised their products in newspapers and journals. Following this model, he embraced a similar practice for his own company. An advertisement published in Muhammadi in February 1940 included endorsements from freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das, Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, and Lord Ronaldshay, the Governor General of Bengal. In the vintage advertisement, Lord Lytton wrote: “I was very interested to see this remarkable factory which owes its success to the energy and enthusiasm of its proprietor Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty B.A. The preparation of indigenous drugs on so large a scale is a very great achievement. The factory appeared to me to be exceedingly well managed and well equipped &c. &c.” In the same advertisement, in Bengali, Chittaranjan Das endorsed that nothing could surpass the production processes for medicines at Shakti Aushadhalaya.

Since the mid-19th century, several eminent leaders of the Indian freedom struggle visited Mathurbabu’s factory in Dhaka. On June 6, 1939, in the company’s visitor’s book, Subhash Chandra Bose wrote, “I visited the Sakti Oushadhalaya[7], Dacca, today and was very kindly shown around the premises. Indigenous medicines are prepared here on a large scale and in accordance with Ayurvedic principles. The institution reflects great credit on Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty, whose enterprise has brought Ayurvedic medicines within the reach of the poor. I wish him all success to the institution which he has built up after so much enterprise and hard labour for a long period. The success of Sakti Oushadhalaya, Dacca, means the popularity of Ayurveda throughout the country and this in its turn means the relief of suffering humanity.”

When my parents visited us in Dhaka a year after our arrival, we went back to Swamibagh Road. Our visit included a trip to the shop where the medicines of Shakti Aushadhalaya were sold.

Despite being taken over by the Pakistan government in 1971 and subsequently acquired by a private entrepreneur, the company remains operational in Bangladesh to this day with 37 branches nationwide. Though Mathurababu’s portrait is no longer on the medicine bottles in the shop, the names of the formulations inscribed, are still recognised by my mother. As we browse through the offerings, a crowd begins to form around her, hailed and welcomed as Mathurababu’s direct descendant. Much to my mother’s delight, the crowd guided her to his house, a now derelict mansion hidden in the by-lanes of Old Dhaka.

We entered the property through an ornamented gatehouse that opened to a large courtyard. On one side was the Baithakghar, the public receiving room with the Nat Mandir, the family temple in front of us. On the other side was the majestic mansion with tall columns, topped with ornate capitals. Next to the Nat Mandir was a small doorway that led to a shaded courtyard with a well, meant for the family’s private use. Beyond was yet another courtyard, enclosed with buildings on three sides.

Parts of the ancestral home. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya

As I climbed the stairs leading to the second floor, I had a feeling of déjà vu. I felt I had been here before through my grandmother’s stories. Her small feet must have climbed these stairs. There was the arched windows she had said she gazed out of, and the vast veranda with colonnades, where she played with her eight siblings. Wandering through the rooms, I hear her voice narrating tales of her childhood — kite races on the terrace, indolent boat rides on the Padma, and the indulgence of choosing sarees from the weavers who came all the way from Benaras.

The house is now home to several families who regard our arrival with wary welcome. “Where are the Italian painted tiles?” I ask eagerly. The story of the tiles imported by her father from Italy were amongst the kaleidoscope of stories that my grandmother had shared with me. Whisperings and murmurings ensue amidst the crowd and then a hefty cupboard was pushed aside to reveal the tiles in all their faded glory.

Slowly it dawns upon me that the silent bottle in my grandmother’s cupboard had encoded stories that belied its seemingly mundane materiality. To uncover these lost stories, I embark on a renewed search for those old medicine bottles of my childhood. Their fragrance lingers at the edges of my memory, offering tantalising glimpses to fragments of knowledge. The sense of smell is our oldest sense. My memories of stories narrated by my grandmother were inextricably connected to the scents locked in that bottle. Would holding the bottle in my hand peel back the layers of my memory, answer some unanswered questions about my grandmother’s roots, help me map the route of our family’s journey? But alas! Those bottles are lost to time. My grandmother’s generation is gone and I search among Mathurababu’s scattered grandchildren and great grandchildren to no avail.

My grandmother left Dhaka in 1936, never to return. Mathurbabu’s house on Calcutta’s Central Street was completed that year, and it is there he moved with his wife and three youngest unwed daughters, including my grandmother. His older son remained in Dhaka to oversee the factory and drug production, while Mathurbabu focused on controlling the distribution from a central office in Calcutta. Till his death in 1942, despite his ailing health and flagging energy, he visited the company’s distribution centres spread across Calcutta everyday, accompanied by his faithful retainer Nathu. Probing for reasons for this abrupt migration, my uncle gave me a solitary clue. He recalled that my great grandfather had felt his family was unsafe in Dhaka. With this obscure clue in hand, I delved into history books for elaboration. I read about the rise of communal tensions in Bengal from the mid-1920’s. The Dhaka riots of 1930 targeted several well-established businessmen and involved loot and arson of their business and personal properties.

In 1947, there was yet another wave of migrations far more existential and grimmer. After the borders were drawn between the newly formed nations of India and Pakistan, the remaining family fled Dhaka overnight, leaving behind the factory, the mansion, in fact, all their material possessions in a land suddenly hostile to their continued habitation. Unable to exercise control over their properties in East Pakistan, there was an initial attempt by Mathurbabu’s heirs to establish a factory in Chandernagore. Without my great grandfather at the helm, this nascent enterprise floundered and ultimately sank. Cut from its moorings in Dhaka, Mathurbabu’s inheritors could not keep the business afloat in India. Slowly his legacy dissipated. The Shakti Aushadhalaya head office in Calcutta’s Beadon Street closed and the shops in Calcutta, Karachi, Kabul, and Colombo lowered their shutters.

Through generations of migration and resettlement, we are left with only scattered memories and fragmented stories. These intangible remains are my inheritance today. These intangibles are bound neither by form, nor by time. Instead, they offer limitless possibilities for exploration, crafting and archiving. Memory, nourished by the repeated telling of stories, provides continuity. These intangible wisps of legacy — a remembered glimpse of a peeling label, the stories heard from my grandmother, the whispered whiff of a familiar fragrance, open a door to the past and invite me to connect it to the present. “Listen to us,” the scents call. “Let us tell you our story.”

[1] Glass cupboard

[2] Bronze woks

[3] A rug for prayers

[4] A cloth wrap for the lower half of the body

[5] Workshop

[6] Ancient Sanskrit text on medicine, dated to 12^th-13^th century

[7] Pharmacy

Ranu Bhattacharyya, author of The Castle in the Classroom: Story as a Springboard for Early Literacy, Stenhouse, 2010, is an educator and writer who has lived and worked across the world, exploring and archiving narratives that connect people and cultures.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Professor Fakrul Alam takes us through the Partitions of Bengal which ultimately led to the creation of Bangladesh, with focus on the role of Dhaka University.

In Dhaka University: the Convocation Speeches, a volume compiled with an introduction by Serajul Islam Choudhury in 1988, we read that the university was established by the British as a “splendid imperial compensation” for the Muslims of East Bengal (Choudhury, 26). They had wanted the current rulers of India to make up through it for the loss, they felt, they had suffered because of the reunion of Bengal in 1911. Delivering his inaugural speech as the Chancellor of Dhaka University (DU) in 1923, Lord Lytton had not only made this point but had also expressed the hope that it would soon become “the chief center of Muhammadan learning” in India and would “devote special attention to higher Islamic studies” (26). However, Lytton had ended his speech by urging graduands to conceive of the institution “as an Alma Mater in whose service the Muhammadan and the Hindu can find a common bond of unity” (Choudhury, 29). The subsequent history of the university reveals that while some of its future students would viewed it as a site for cultivating Islamic values and consolidating the Islamic heritage of the part of Bengal in which it was located, others would claimed it as a space where a democratic and secular notion of being Bengalis could be disseminated.

DU started playing a decisive role in Bangladeshi national identity formation almost as soon as the Islamic state of Pakistan was born. It became the center of the movement that would lead to the creation of the country born out of the ashes of East Pakistan in 1971. The key issue here was language and the catalyst was the insistence by the central government of Pakistan that Urdu should be the lingua franca of the country, regardless of the fact that only three percent of Pakistanis actually used it in their everyday lives. For two successive days on 5 and 6 December 1947, teachers and students of the university demonstrated on campus and the streets of Dhaka against the government decision and in favour of Bengali.

The Pakistani government, however, paid no heed to the protests and went ahead with its decision to impose Urdu as the sole official language of the country. In response to this ruling DU students mobilised on 26 February, 1948 to form an “All Party Language Committee of Action.” Not daunted, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Governor General of Pakistan, and identified as the “Father of the Country” by the official media, reiterated publicly while on a visit to Dhaka on the 21st of March that “the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language” (Islam, 224). When he made the same point in addressing the DU Special Convocation on the 22nd of March, Bengali students present at the convocation protested. On March 11, 1950 the Dhaka University Language Action Committee was formed. In essence, the movement that was being spearheaded by university students and that soon spread across East Pakistan, ultimately led to the break-up of Pakistan, a state built entirely on Islamist nationalism.

A direct outcome of the language movement was that the government that had been held responsible for bruising the Bengali consciousness was voted out of power in East Pakistan in 1954. Instead, a short-lived but popular coalition government that was viewed to be pro-Bengali took over up the administration of the province. Students had played a major part in the election and the tradition of student activism in the cause of Bangladeshi nationalism became very noteworthy in national politics from this point onwards.

In retrospect, we can see the Pakistani period was one which had witnessed a continuous tussle between successive Pakistani regimes wielding state power to curb Bengali rights and impose an Islamist state at the expense of Bengali language and culture and Bengali nationalism. DU teachers and students played a crucial part in the confrontation. It was mostly because of them that the Pakistani state apparatus failed to suppress Bengalis and prevent them from expressing themselves. The campus was at the heart of activity that promoted an awareness of secularism and brandished democracy as a goal to be achieved in national life.

It was to be expected, then, that when the Pakistani state made one last desperate attempt to suppress Bengalis clamouring for full autonomy and democracy on March 26, 1971 they would do so by targeting DU and attempting to mow down Dhaka university faculty members and students ruthlessly. When the Pakistani government decided to postpone the National Assembly meet, where the Awami League had got an absolute majority and where they were in a position to claim self-rule for East Pakistan and dominate Pakistani politics for the first time in that nation’s history, the campus broke out once again in loud protest. On the 7th of March, when the Awami League’s chief, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, gave his historic speech claiming full autonomy and threatening to launch an armed movement that would drive away the Pakistanis from East Pakistan forever, DU student leaders were at his side as he spoke in Ramna Park, which borders the university.

What happened on 26 March was nothing less than a calculated bid to blast DU to smithereens, murder student leaders and selected faculty members, and drive out all students from the campus for playing leading roles in the movement against the Pakistani state. The Pakistani Army was nothing short of murderous in attempting to neutralize dissent. Inevitably, DU bore the brunt of their initial fury. Anybody found in the university that night was mowed down and dorms, faculty residences and the DU Teacher’s Club were shot at indiscriminately. The Shaheed Minar was razed to the ground and Bangla Academy was subject to artillery fire. Even university non-teaching staff and cafeteria officials were not spared. Madhu’s canteen – the favorite haunt of student politicians throughout the sixties – was attacked and Madhu – the benign owner of the cafeteria – was murdered. The huge bot tree (banyan) which provided shade under which student leaders delivered speeches and from which they had given the declaration of independence on one of the turbulent March days – was blasted out of existence.

It was clear that the Army had decided that DU was the ultimate symbol of the unacceptable form Bangladeshi national identity formation was assuming. As Professor Serajul Islam Chowdhury observes in “Ekattor O Dhaka Visva-Bidyalaya (1971 & DU),” the university ambience encouraged people to not merely dream about freedom and equality but to create an environment where the dream seemed to come close to reality. Also, the University had been consistently a site of resistance in its efforts to impose a theocratic or monolingual state on Bengalis, as on-campus happenings from the time of Jinnah’s 1948 declaration about making Urdu the only state language and the protest movements of the fifties and sixties that culminated in the month-long protests of March 1971 demonstrated. The six-point program proposed by the Awami League for financial and political autonomy had been drafted by DU professors.

In the nine-month liberation war that followed the Pakistani army crackdown on DU and the rest of Bangladesh, the university once again became a microcosm of the country in that almost all of its entire faculty and students fled it. Academic activities came to a standstill and it became a campus bereft of students who had deserted it along with most of their teachers since they were unwilling to kowtow to the Pakistani design to create a quiescent institution run by quislings and were not inclined to impart or acquire education in line with proto-Islamist and/or totalitarian concepts of nationalism. Many students died in the course of the next nine months fighting for liberation or suspected of doing so. When the birth of Bangladesh seemed imminent at the end of the year, the Pakistani Amy and its local collaborators carried out a systematic search of faculty members on, and outside, the campus to murder the ones still around, holding them largely responsible for the breakup of the country they had not been able to prevent from cracking up.

When independence finally came to Bangladesh on December 16, it was fitting that the Pakistani Army would surrender in the open space adjacent to the university known as Ramna Park. The many teachers and students who had been murdered since March 26 as well as the resistance put up by them were later commemorated with structures erected all over the campus, the most prominent of them being the “Aporajeyo Bangla” or “Invincible Bengal” sculpture in front of Kala Bhabhan or the Arts faculty building, the martyrs plaque put up opposite the central mall, and the sculpted figures of the freedom fighters erected in front of the Teachers-Students Centre. December 14 became from then on the day when the DU Liberation War martyrs were to be ceremonially remembered and December 16 the day when DU faculty and staff joined the rest of the country in celebrating Victory Day.

“*Aporajeyo Bangla*” or “Invincible Bengal” sculpture. Courtesy: Creative Commons

(First published in Daily Star, Bangladesh)

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).