I am a fourth generation Bengali from the City of God, also known as Prayag, a.k.a. Illah-abas, a.k.a Illahabad, i.e., modern-day Allahabad. Till I came to settle in the City of Joy, a.k.a. Kolkata, our closest link with Bengal had remained a noisy, bustling, mofussil town, rich in greenery, on the frontier with Bangladesh.
Barasat, is where my great great grandfather ruled as the last raja of an important Bengal principality.
Des, in his times, was the village, and not the nation state that we are familiar with, and brag about today in display of unrestrained passion.
Life in the village had been stagnant, way back to the dawn of memory, since the time of Dasaratha, the father of Ram. The raja was the lord of the village he surveyed.
Nobody quite knows exactly when our family came to lord over Barasat, but history traces the first zamindari to around 1600 CE when, following Akbar’s conquest of the province, an ally of the local rebel chieftain, Pratapaditya Rai of Jessore, occupied Barasat and became its first raja.
Our family folklore has it that well over a century later, around 1720 CE, possibly when Alivardi Khan became the governor of Bengal and set up his new capital in Murshidabad, a wandering Sufi mendicant named Ek-dil Shah visited Barasat. He was initially treated kindly and offered a meal by the Brahmin raja, who was true to his faith and cherished his freedom.
But soon, an argument cropped up between the two ...
Humiliated, the mendicant dived into a vast lake and, in a demonstration of his magical prowess, swam across it in a single breath. Since then, the lake came to be called santra pukur or the lake that someone finally swam across. A shrunken pond, close to where the raja’s mansion stood once, still sports that name today.
It wasn’t long before word reached the nawab of Murshidabad, who was enraged at the raja’s gall to challenge a sufi. The nawab rushed his troops to teach the raja a lesson. And so, the zamindar was trampled under the feet of an elephant.
The zamindar’s destitute wife fled with her children to the house of their family priest ...
There, she lived in obscurity and prayers.
And so, life went on …
… and the years rolled by, sheltered from the nawab’s wrath till the boys grew up and became men.
And then, one day, the brothers defied the nawab and wrestled back their father’s realm.
Yet half-a-century later, Barasat became the weekend retreat of the first British administrators of India. Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal from 1772 to 1785, built his villa in the heart of town.
Still fifty years hence, Barasat went down in history as the place of the first Wahabi uprising in India, sometime around the 1830s or so. The rebellion was crushed with help from the East India Company.
That episode finds mention in WW Hunter’s civilisation-defining book Indian Musalmans.
The last zamindar, my great great grandfather, lorded over his estate till the turn of the 19th century, when the celebrated Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay became the town’s first Indian deputy magistrate. Bankim, incidentally, was an alumni of the Hooghly Mohsin College in Chuchura.
It was probably during this stint at Barasat that he published Ananda Math and the evocative nationalist song Vande Mataram in 1882. The song went on the inspire India’s independence movement, though few have read the book.
Independence finally came in 1947.
And with it came the partition of Bengal … into West Bengal and East Pakistan.
That’s when much of the absentee raja’s land was confiscated by the government of independent India to be redistributed among the destitute Hindus flooding across the border as victims of the East Pakistan genocide.
In an ironic twist to that history, Barasat, today, boasts a high street named after Titu Mir. It also has a celebrated mazar of Ek-dil Shah, besides a government high school named after him.
Nothing survives of the remnants of the feudal backstory, other than a pair of antique idols of Radha-Govinda at the local high priest’s abode and a retainer’s decrepit mansion.
The zamindar and his descendants who first stood up to Akbar, and later, the nawab of Murshidabad, and subsequently the wahabi rebel, over two-and-a-half centuries, have long been forgotten.
Such are the quirks of time.
And so, this is where we stand today.
But that’s not the end of our story.
Late in the 19th century, scions of the last raja migrated to distant lands —Allahabad, Agra, Shimla, Varanasi and Delhi, each a political and administrative outpost of the Raj, leaving the estate under management of relatives and retainers; their descendants moved on even further, to distant Nepal and Nagaland and Gurgaon and to Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States – some gloried themselves as eminent lawyers at the High Court in Allahabad in the exalted company of the Nehrus, some as notable bureaucrats in Her Majesty’s Service, some distinguished themselves as academicians, and still others as officers in the Indian Army, fighting the Burma campaign, charting the first topographical maps of what are now Nagaland and Arunachal, brokering peace with rebellious Naga tribesmen, and one, even decorated with the Mahavir Chakra for outgunning Paki tanks in the 1965 war. My father became a spy.
Now here’s an interesting twist to the story.
As a spy, my father was assigned to the Indian high commission in Dhaka (then East Pakistan) to work on breaking up that country.
Bangladesh, which as part of one Bengal, and later, one Pakistan, was home to many famous Bengali intellectuals, including Tagore, Nazrul Islam and the famous Bengali scientist JC Bose, among others, before Independence.
I joined my family in Dhaka, when my mom became pregnant for the third time, at the very tender age of 23. We lived as tenants of a rich Pathan family. My father travelled frequently … often anonymous. My young mother mostly stayed home alone.
My mother would say that one of the landlord’s sons would stand guard outside her door all night whenever my father was away, lest trouble come visiting our family in a hostile land.
And so, I was born into privilege: The Pathan’s son, I am told, drove me home from hospital in a stretched Impala. Perhaps, the family’s benign influence rubbed off one me. Small wonder, I grew up to experience some of the best luxuries of life.
And then, I was privileged twice over: A well-known Bengali intellectual Neelima Ibrahim became godmother to me. It’s what you would probably call the gode lena ceremony. Neelima was slaughtered by the Pakistani Army in the famous massacre of Bengali intellectuals at Dhaka University just before the Bangladesh War of Independence. I remember, as a kid, we heard of her assassination in a radio broadcast while at Allahabad. I was 8 years old then.
We Hindus believe in blessings or ashirwad. So, some of my godmother’s sharp intellect must have rubbed off on my brain when my head was rested on her lap.
We also place new-born children on the arms of holy men. The most revered peer sahib of East Pakistan lapped me. I can no longer recount his name. It should suffice that he was the most famous of the lot.
Perhaps, that one act of submission eventually drove me on a spiritual quest that now takes me from here to there … to nowhere ... forever at the crossroads of time.
And that makes me blessed thrice over.
There is also a flip side to my engagement with Muslims, and my discomfort with the religious tag that Muslims sport.
When we shifted to Calcutta, we spent the first four eventful years from 1979 to 1982, living in the heart of a Muslim neighbourhood. Yet, despite us living in one of the city’s poshest mansions, vicious anti-India diatribe from the nearby Muslim ghetto reverberated in our neighbourhood.
Park Street and its surroundings were full of people wearing upturned lungis spewing hatred against Hindus and India. The Pakistani flag went up with every cricket match in town. And even the communist government in power would do nothing about it, on the pretext of preserving communal amity. I remember the first time Imran Khan’s big boys came to town and stayed at The Grand next to where we lived, and wave after wave of pro-Pakistani slogans rent the air for days together.
As an even smaller child, I also remember the innumerable pro-Pakistan juloos that marched down Allahabad’s main street during the Bangladesh war. The government stayed quiet. That’s what I call appeasement. I could never understand the politics behind it. Nor who really instigated whom, because I was still a kid.
But my Calcutta experiences made me jot down my feelings about how to set things right, in a small pocket notebook that I maintained way back in 1979. I accidentally recovered that notebook after my father’s death 25 years later. I read those jottings once or twice, and I can never imagine that I could have written such things as an impressionable Class X student.
Details of my place of birth are not documented anywhere because my father was a spy. But my adventurous birth always made me feel special … that I belonged to all three countries -- Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. Which is also why I always delude myself with this dream that … may be … one day … I will bring all these countries back together as one.
And if I can’t do it in my lifetime, may be, my shadow in my writings will make it happen … once I am gone.
Excerpt from: Hey!Ze, (to be published)
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