Some Friends And Other Visitors
While remembering the Sunday-morning get-together at our house in MacRobert Gunj, we had a quick look at some of Baba’s friends: the very slim and elegant Pankaj Kakababu, the tall and smoky P.K. Mittir Moshai, the delicate Professor of English literature Prabhat Kumar Ray in fine white panjabi and dhuti, the firebrand and headstrong Saurin Ghosh or our Ghosh saheb, and a very harmless and unassuming gentleman – our Master Moshai (he may have been a school-teacher sometime) Khitilal Ganguly, with whom I’ll start sketching a few portraits by way of coming back to our story.
I well remember Khitilal Master Moshai, his suntanned face with a broad and somewhat “embarrassed” smile. He smiled easily and had a look in his eyes, which made me think that he was on the point of telling something. But what? Nothing came. He wasn’t talkative in company, for example, he was a rather silent partner when they were playing bridge. However, with Baba he was different; he’d go and find him busy repairing something in a corner, and there were quick exchanges of smiles, of brief remarks followed by a jovial comment from Baba. 
They may have been talking about an English boss or an incident with some officer – their mutual understanding was a solid one. Master Moshai was assistant to our father in the department of chemicals in the Lal Imli Mill.
Sometimes his wife came to see Ma. We called her Kakima, a cheerful little lady with smiling eyes. Candid and unsophisticated she made no secret of her friendship for our family. In her speech you could hear accents of some eastern region of Bengal. There was an expression of such gratitude in her manners, which sometimes left me wondering.
Much later I came to know that Khitilal had been involved in the Armoury raid in Chattagram, had succeeded in escaping arrest, and had fled from East Bengal. How and through which contact he had come to Kanpur and to our Baba, is unknown to me. His adventure ended when Baba helped him get a job in his own service in the Mill as his assistant. Introduced by the chemical engineer himself and recommended by him, Khitilal’s political past remained unknown to the British superiors in the Lal Imli Mill.
I couldn’t have discovered all that while I was young as the subject was doubtlessly too sensitive to be part of common conversations. Master Moshai, working under Baba’s indulgent wing led a most harmless life until his retirement.
To be continued.
Visualization and Illustration: Surya Ranjan Shandil
The Struggle For Independence
We’ll leave to scholars of history the task of writing the long and complex story of the struggle for independence of India with its ups and downs – complex, because of its interconnections with the industrial and political developments in Europe, where two devastating wars were fought. The world saw the colonies escaping the claws of the British and other “empires”, and, the emergence of two super powers trying to conquer zones of influence and markets on the planet – through the same violence but with far superior technologies.
Our interest here is to recall some events that were happening in India in the 1930s by way of flashing on the atmosphere in which people were living in a city like Calcutta in Bengal. Our Baba was among them as a young man in his 20s, with his curiosity and his receptivity, and feelings for his country and its people.
The massacre of Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar was in 1919 : on order of a British general police had opened fire on a peaceful crowd of some thousand citizens gathered on the occasion of new year in April. However its memory had not faded. Horrified by that criminal act, Rabindranath Tagore got rid of the title of Knighthood in protest. Similar atrocities were being committed by the British in Ireland in those years, and the Irish resistance inspired our revolutionary freedom-fighters to take to arms.
In the 30s Mahatma Gandhi had launched active civil disobedience ; hundreds of Indians were demonstrating against the govt. in the country, being arrested, beaten and shot at by police and military forces. In April 1931 Gandhiji marched to the coast by Dandi in Gujarat and made salt to defy the law. The group was brutally beaten up and the survivors thrown in the jails.
The printed media were not silent. Daily papers like Amrita Bazar Patrika in English, Ananda Bazar Patrika and Jugantar in Bengali voiced the call for total independence to bring the British to quit India. Aurobindo Ghosh was writing in Bande Mataram (founded by Bipin Chandra Pal), at the same time he was secretly organizing a group of young patriots, training them for armed actions against the British.
Revolutionaries in Calcutta made bomb attacks targeting police commissioner Tegart and other officers in Dhaka. One of the officers being a Muslim, communal riots broke out in Dhaka, where the Hindu population was duly massacred while police forces stood looking on.
On 18 April a group led by Surja Sen, a radical revolutionary, raided the govt,’s armoury in Chittagong. Needless to say, the govt. retaliated fiercely by massive arrests and executions. Many were deported to the Andaman Islands, deprived of all rights and tortured. Few could escape and went into hiding.
In September 1931 as young prisoners in the Hijli jail in Medinipur were killed by the guards, Rabindranath Tagore addressed a huge meeting in the Maidan in Calcutta condemning the administration.
I take it for probable, that our Baba was also amidst that audience of about 100,000 people attending the meeting.
In Peshawar demonstrators were bombed upon by the military. In Bombay and Sholapur textile-workers’ strikes were repressed with extreme violence.
Gandhiji’s negotiations with viceroy Irwin, in which he had agreed to suspend the disobedience movement to obtain concessions like the liberation of prisoners had miserably failed, as the country received the shock of the execution of brave patriots, Bhagat Singh, Shukdeo, and Rajguru in Lahore jail in March 1931.
Hindu and Muslim fanatics rioted and killed in the cities of U.P. – in Kanpur and Benares among others.
In the same years Rabindranath Tagore realized his project of rural development in Sriniketan besides a new concept of education opening the minds of the youth to the values of truth and beauty. His songs were with young and old, they were sung in the courtroom in Alipur by the revolutionaries receiving the death-sentence. The period saw other song composers like Nazrul Islam, Rajanikanta Sen, Atulprasad and others.
Eminent theatre directors and actors like Shishirkumar Bhaduri, Girishchandra Ghosh were producing their plays and stars like Sadhana Bose, Kanan devi, Devika Rani were rising.
I imagine that many Bengali families like ours migrating to different provinces of the country were carrying with them something of those ideas, melodies, and images as food for life and legacy for future generations.
Filed under: Aurobindo Ghosh, Bal Gangadhar Lokmanya Tilak, Bengal, Bipin Chandra Pal, Gitarahasya, Independence, Indian National Congress, Lala Lajpat Rai, Partition, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Krishna, sub-continent, Swaraj, Swedeshi, Viceroy Curzon, Vivekananda
All over India groups and movements for the independence were taking shape. The Indian National Congress was already an organized body elaborating its strategy to achieve independence by parliamentary or democratic means. On the other hand there were many patriots in different provinces who were organizing an armed resistance against the British.
The partition of Bengal in 1905 sent a wave of indignation throughout the country. Swedeshi groups demonstrated in protest and started the boycott of textiles and other products made in England, burning the goods at public places. The government reacted with violence – firing on demonstrators and arresting hundreds of them everywhere. 
Why did Viceroy Curzon partition Bengal?
Of course, the province was becoming very dangerous for the government. In fact, in the rich diversity of the peoples of India, the British had well identified the points of weakness: the Hindu society divided in castes and sub-castes, communities divided in Hindu and Muslim, property owners and landless poor, and the Congress party itself divided in 2 wings – moderate and extremists, not to mention language differences etc. They exploited it to the full, setting one group against another to rule the sub-continent.
North and East Bengal with its Muslim populations was promised many posts in the administration and other advantages, whereas the West with a Hindu majority suffered injustice and discrimination. Rivalry and jealousy developed between the communities like poison, a cancer in the social body. That culminated, as you all know, in the horrors of the partition of the country in 1947. More than 5 million people were massacred in the riots, families uprooted, and bases of life destroyed.
But in those years we note that Vivekananda 
was holding up the ideals of India’s spiritual struggle and of moral force; Rabindranath Tagore was inspiring people to stand united in the love of the country by his exemplary and courageous actions and his songs. And in Maharashtra, we see the emergence of a militant Hindu nationalism led by an eminent patriot and philosopher, – a Chitpavana Brahmin – Bal Gangadhar (Lokmanya) Tilak who was soon to declare: “Swaraj is my birthright”! His fight starts against the ignorance of the masses, as he brings out 2 monthly revues: ‘Keshari’ in Marathi and ‘Marhatta’ in English to bring information to the people on national and world politics and on social as well as economic subjects. The British imprisoned him many times. In 1917 during his 6 year long imprisonment under horrible conditions in the Mandalay jail, he wrote a remarkable book “Gitarahasya” expounding his ideas on the philosophy of action inspired by ‘karma-yoga’ as exposed by Sri Krishna in the Divine Song.
Lala Lajpat Rai in Punjab and Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal joined in Tilak’s programme for self-govt. (swaraj). At the same time in Bengal young members belonging to revolutionary groups were attacking government officers with bombs and other firearms.
Repressive measures by the government spared neither the leaders nor other citizens. Young men and women patriots were being hanged without ceremony.
All this account is nothing more than a rough outline, a little attempt to recall events which had happened long before our Baba came of age. I can easily guess, that you’re wondering why your Saraju’s trying to bore you, repeating things, on which your history teacher and the school-books had informed you thoroughly. You’ll be patient, because I haven’t finished, and because it’s interwoven in our story.
Some of you remember, as I do, that the walls of our 2 homes in Mac Robert Gunj hadn’t many decorations. There were always a couple of calendars at strategic places like near the kitchen or so, and there were some portraits, in large frames, placed high on the sitting room walls. Even our guests must have noticed them. Apart from Sri Chaitanya singing in the streets and a picture of Durga pratima, there was Rabindranath in three-quarter profile, in his long blue-grey robe, there was Subhash Chandra Bose, as also Vivekananda, upright in turban, looking straight in front, with Paramahamsa’s profile in the background. At Dadu’s place we had Gandhiji, in black and white, eyes closed in prayer and Sri Aurobindo, whose hair-style was special. Those great men used to receive a garland as present when we had flowers. To us, they had somehow become members of our household.
In the 30s when Baba was a student in Calcutta, the capital had been shifted to Delhi since long. Leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, JL Nehru, Subhash Bose and countless others were most of the time in jails; the country was afire, rocked by agitations. Repression by the government knew no limits. In the Science College he had among his professors a great scientist, Prafulla Chandra Ray, for whom he developed a lasting admiration.
To be continued
Visualization & Illustration: Surya Ranjan Shandil
“When I became five years old my mother got my ‘hate khodi’ done (a ritual where the priest helps the child to write the first letter of the alphabet on a slate with a chalk) and sent me to Bijoy Pondit Mahashya’s Pathshala. He was a man of good built, fair complexion and wore a coarse dhoti and keds shoes. He walked with a slight stoop, wearing silver rimmed spectacles. His very presence inspired the pupils. He was my first Guru, who not only taught me to read and write but was also the architect of my character. In this Pathshala, I completed Vidyasagar Mahashya’s Borno Porichoy Part I and II, Shishu Shiksha Part III, Namta (tables) and basic grammar. At the end of the school hours, we had to stand on the way side and recite various shlokas in unison. I was the lucky recipient of his special love, affection and blessings. Not only me, he also looked up to my mother as his daughter. I bow to him in reverence.
“After I completed my basic education, I was admitted in class IV of the L.M.M.E. Minor School, run by the London Mission. People called it ‘matha bhangar’ school. The Secretary of the school Shri Moni Mittra, a pleasant looking man of medium height and a French cut beard, had adopted Christianity and lived in the school campus. Besides our school syllabus he also taught us The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Great Deluge, The Noah’s Arc, Sermon on the Mount, The Ten Commandments, The Pharohs of Egypt, Birth of Christ in the stable, the story of Adam and Eve and so on. Before the school started the students assembled in the verandah to pray O our heavenly father, show us the way…. I bow to him in reverence.
“Year 1922-23: I was now 12 years old. A new chapter was to begin in my life. My guardians decided that I should complete my High School from Calcutta. There was a High School in Arbelia about 3/4 km. from our house. But there was no pucca road. The connecting mud track used to become slushy in the monsoon season, difficult to negotiate everyday for a 12 year old boy.
“News came that I would be going to Calcutta and it was time to bid farewell to Baduria my village, which had fulfilled all my wishes of childhood days. I would be away from the chondi mondop with its adjoining courtyard, the eastern house (puber ghor), the northern house (uttorer ghor), my Chottomama’s house, which had sheltered me the last 12 years of my life – the fruit garden with mango, leechu, jaam, bel, kathal (jackfruit), chalta trees, whose every leaf I knew intimately. I would be away from the tetul tola, kali tola, chorok khola, durga mondop, which was like a place of pilgrimage to the villagers and where my mother and aunts enjoyed their picnics and observed vratas like ashok shoshti, dashara. During those days, they abstained from eating cereals and had only doi cheera, kola, aam, kathal. Their gaiety and laughter filling the air. The leaving was unbearable.
“The Ichhamoti river flowed nearby. The river water was the life line of the village and the source of our daily play. When the tidal waters would fill up the hollow spaces making small ponds we boys would submerge ourselves and play water games. The jele para (fishermen’s colony), the boshtom para, the rath khola, the fields of sugarcane, kool and khejoor, haat bazaar, Sub Registry Office, the sweetmeat shops are still engraved in my memory and the thought of leaving them was too tormenting.
“Besides all this my heart bled from the thought of separating from my loving aunts, my brothers and sisters with whom I had shared all my joys and sorrows and above all my snehomoyee jononee (my loving mother), clinging to whose sari even to that day had made me face so many barbs. How would I bear to be separated from such luxuries and wealth in my possession? The thought devastated me, throwing me in abject misery, to the extent that life seemed meaningless to me….”
The extracts from our Baba’s diary as translated and presented by Mesdi are essential for the understanding of our family history. Their value lies in the light they throw on the way of life as lived by people in Baduria – a village among many others in Bengal in the beginning of the last century. Those glimpses of village life seen through the eyes of a very young boy show his deep attachment to his environment, where nature is intact, living, and abundant. He is in a lively communication with the river, the trees, and with people making up the social fabric – surrounded at home by affection. His own sunny nature responds fully to the tender attention he receives.
Let us note the coexistence of different communities of the village population. In Jelepara they were mostly Musulman, the Boshtom (Vaishnava) were so to say casteless, but were received with respect in the mainstream Brahmin and other houses. Our Baba seems to have well explored all those sites and knew them intimately.
I can imagine the picture of Bijoy Pandit Mahashay in his Pathshala with silver-rimmed glasses on the nose. I’d have loved to meet him!
A little anecdote received from Ma : Our Chotothakuma was busy preparing some moa sweets, when Pishima Niharbala, came by and stopped to watch her. Seeing her little niece, Chotomamima offered her some moa, which were readily accepted by Khãdi (or Khãdu alias Nihar), who tied them inside the end of her sari. Chotomamima asked her why she wasn’t eating them. The answer was, she was going to share them with her brother. That sounds a bit like Durga and Apu in Pather Panchali, no?
The Chandi mandapa used to be the centre of the social life and culture, where the elders as
well as the young of Baba’s age met together. On many festive occasions there were kirtan and pala (play with narration), where a kathak accompanied by a chorus of singers and instruments like manjira and khol, flute, harmonium, and violin narrated ancient tales to an audience of spellbound villagers.
One such Pala entitled “Mathur” which Baba must have attended with Thakuma, tells the story of the cowherd-Prince, Krishna, leaving Gokul, his foster parents and playmates to go to Mathura. I understood that years later, when I heard a kathak playing it at a Paush mela-mandapa in Santiniketan as he sang the verse “moribo moribo sakhi – nishchayo moribo …”
The words came back to me from across my far off childhood – Baba’s voice singing in the bathroom in the house in Mac Robertgunj: “na porayo Radha ango na bhashayo jale”, and our Thakuma in her tiny thakur ghar listening to him and probably singing with him silently. And there I was, sitting under the shamiana covering the Melar Math-ground, with hundreds of villagers, many of them illiterate, who had come from all corners of Birbhum and Bengal – some in tears, others going up to the stage to the kathak thakur – himself under emotion, for his blessings. All were in communion with the story and the musicians. It was the winter of 1993.
But in the same province of Bengal not everything in the villages was idyllic. There was also dire poverty, superstitions, infant mortality, and dowry deaths. Somewhere not too far from Baduria was the place where our Binadi had been married, where she had lost her two baby kids and had suffered starvation and moral torture inflicted on her by her family in-law for long years before she could be rescued in miserable condition.
In that Bengal and India where our parents were growing up, chapters of another history were being written.
Already Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar had taken up the cause of the emancipation of women, of widows in particular and of the education of the masses. There was Bankimchandra Chatterjee and his monthly “Bangadarshan”, holding up of the ideals of the society. Raja Rammohan Roy, Prince Dvarakanath, and Maharshi Devendranath Tagore and others – reviving the values of Upanishad to open the minds of people practicing Hindu religion that had become a packet of meaningless rituals and often an instrument of corruption. The impact of the presence of the British as the ruling power hit Bengal early and hard, opening up new currents and channels of thought and action.
As early as in 1904 the nation was shaking its chains and the struggle for freedom was in preparation.
To be continued.
Visualization & Illustration: Surya Ranjan Shandil
Baba Comes To Calcutta
Time passed and Baidyanath went to the village school where his intelligence didn’t go unnoticed. The headmaster encouraged him to pursue his studies in Calcutta after finishing school. Thus the idea of higher studies made its way in his mind. But at home the atmosphere was different, there were responsibilities to be shouldered. The uncles decided that he had learnt enough and it was time he started earning money by opening a shop, for example.
To the young nephew the perspective of keeping a dokan (shop) was probably nowhere near the ambitions haunting his dreams. At the same time, defying Babumama’s authority was unthinkable. Going to study in Calcutta would cost money, and the question was – where was the money to come from? Surely not out of Babumama’s purse.
At that critical point appears on the scene – a fairy. Yes, how else should I describe that lady wearing a red bordered white sari draped in Bengali fashion, with a big round sindur bindi in the middle of the forehead and a smile letting out her slightly prominent front teeth permanently tinted by betel-juice? That ever smiling fairy (Baba’s Chotomamima, Bhutokaka’s mother) came out with a plan of her own, that of changing some gold ornament of hers into cash. So what had seemed out of reach became possible.
Going to Calcutta was surely an event for Baidyanath – the opening of a new chapter in his life bringing with it a taste of freedom and the promise of a wider world.
Those of you who have visited our Bibhapishima’s family in their house in Suri lane (Calcutta) may turn back the time machine to be able to imagine the conditions of boarding and lodging of our young student. I remember the house stuck between the other houses in a row, rooms with more darkness than light in them closing in a small open yard, where cooking utensils used to be washed. Mosquitoes of course and coal-fire smoke from all houses at regular hours of the day. Were people unhappy for that? I don’t think so, as life was like that in most parts of the city! And it can’t have changed too much when I went there as late as in the 60s. I remember Bibhapishima’s lovely smile while receiving us. She like other younger cousins, called him `Bodda’.
For him what counted was that he’d study. He soon started dispensing private tuitions to cover his expenses. Eventually he enrolled in the Science College in the University of Calcutta, where he was to finish with a Master’s degree in Chemistry.
I’ve retained the impression that besides the studies – his real interest in chemistry, life in Calcutta stimulated him in various other ways. In the 90s I often went to Calcutta from Bolpur by the Santiniketan Express. On arriving at Howrah Station either you cross over to the city by the famous bridge on the Hugli (Ganges), or board the ferry launch to cross the river. That crossing, by launch in particular, was a magical experience. At 4:30 in the afternoon the sun was hot and dazzling, the river surface was like melted fire as the boat cut through those little flames and a fresh breeze blew in your hair. And so often it made me think that Baba must have watched those sunlit waters in his youth in Calcutta.
A house of his own by the banks of the Ganga was a long cherished idea with him (I imagine it so), which he realized in Azadnagar.
But Calcutta wasn’t only that – it was so much more !
To be continued.
