“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
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Ranjan, it’s so nice to see the illustrations again. Boromashi, I have heard about ‘pala gan’ from Bangladeshi colleagues who are experimenting with the medium for rights education – but never has it been described in this manner. It also makes me remorseful that I have never seen it or heard it myself.
Comment by kalpalata December 9, 2007 @ 9:02 pm