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Memories
Of the Forties The
Turbulent Years A Personal Story
Part
I
M
Azizul Jalil
On
August 9, 1947, amidst gunfire, burning houses and shops,
we left our house on Lower Range in Park Circus in a government
Weapons' Carrier with two armed guards for the Sealdah Railway
station in Calcutta. My father was on the partition committee
for the public works department in the Government of Bengal,
and had opted for Pakistan. I had, therefore, to leave behind
my school, my close friends, and familiar institutions,
parks and other sights I was used to from my birth and I
had to says goodbye to many fond memories. I knew that perhaps
the country was being divided for good and we were going
to a new land I had never seen before. We were to leave
our land to which we may never return. The frequent communal
riots and political disagreements in the immediate past
had led one to the conclusion that further efforts to live
together would be futile. But the trauma of the change and
the sorrow for the division of the country remained with
me for quite some time.
It
seems now that it all happened only the other day. I began
school in January 1940- - I was then six and a half years
old. My father took me and my elder brother from Park Circus
to the Ballygunj Government High School in Calcutta for
the admission test-- in my case for class three. We were
both admitted -- it was competitive, as intake in every
class was limited to only thirty boys. Thus began my school
years in Calcutta that continued through the war years,
Bengal famine, political turmoil, and communal riots and
ended with the partition of India in 1947.
The
school was a government demonstration school attached to
the David Hare Teacher's Training College, whose principal
was kind of a supervisor of our school. The trainee-teachers
next door would sometimes observe our classes as part of
their training. The Principal Dr. K.D. Ghose, a Cambridge
hockey blue, sometimes played hockey with us after classes.
Our schoolteachers were all of high quality with good degrees
(some with first classes from the Calcutta University, some
gold medallists and a few with British qualifications).
Punctuality, discipline and good conduct were strictly imposed.
Our
school (which along with the Hare School was one of the
best in Calcutta) had as students--children from the Calcutta
Hindu elites at that time. Some of the famous names from
my school that I can recall were Sir Jadunath Sircar (historian),
Sir Bijayprasad Singha Roy (legislator), Annada Shankar
Roy I.C.S., Dr. Jnan Majumder (doctor and social activist)
related to the family of Suren Banerjee, and Professor K.P.
Chattapadhya (grandson of Bidyasagar). Muslim students were
only four or five in each class, mostly from the middle
class (government servant and professional families). We
had Maulana Akram Khan's (President of the Bengal Muslim
League) grandson in the school -- interestingly his father
was a communist leader. In spite of all the odds, some of
the Muslim students were able to compete successfully with
others in their respective classes.
I
want to give a flavour of the social and political conditions
during the time we were in school, particularly for the
post-Bangladesh generation. As school students we were exposed
to the intellectual, cultural and political issues of the
day, and at least in our school, there was close relationship
and friendliness between Hindu and Muslim students. In the
district towns, (Jalpaiguri and Dinajpur, which I used to
visit during vacations) relationship between the two communities
was even closer. Our family environment was a mixture of
local traditions and ceremonies. For example, we would celebrate
Muslim religious functions and at the same time attend the
Bengali 'Nababarsha' and halkhata functions
and visit the dance and other cultural functions for the
religious ceremonies of the Hindu community. We would also
visit houses of Hindu friends and they would come to our
houses.
Influenced
by family environment and school, we became regular readers
of newspapers, magazines and books of the time (e.g. Statesman,
Jugantar, Swadhinata and monthly magazines Bharatbarsha
and Basumati and humorous weekly Sachitra Bharat). We also
listened to Radio news and musical programmes (All India
Radio-- Calcutta Station). The most popular programmes were
the football commentaries (particularly between the Mohammedan
Sporting, East Bengal and Mohan Bagan clubs) and 'Anurodher
Asar, and Pankaj Mullick's 'Gan Shekhar Asar').
My father--a member of the Mohammedan Sporting Club -- took
me and my brother a couple of times to see important games,
which were exciting. We also used to clandestinely hear
the Azad Hind Radio, which often carried the voice of Subash
Bose (broadcasting first from Tokyo and later from Rangoon).
We used to buy books from the bookshops near our school
and also from the People's Publishing house at 144 Bankim
Chatterjee Street, off the College Street. I remember sometimes
going for a glass of cold coffee (frankly I did not quite
like it) at the Coffee House opposite the Presidency College
and near that bookshop. The Coffee House was a popular and
fashionable haunt for students, writers and intellectuals.
The
Bengal Famine of 1943 took place in front of our young eyes.
I could daily see the unimaginable sight of emaciated people
in search of food looking into the garbage bins in street
corners to get anything eatable. Most of these people had
moved from nearby rural areas in search of food -- they
were physically in no condition to work, even if there were
any for them. It was a shocking sight, which I would not
ever forget, and never wish to witness again. I remember
my mother and many others cooked rice and chapattis for
distribution to the hungry in our locality. At about this
time Shilpacharya Zainal Abedin who was a teacher at the
Calcutta Arts College drew his famous charcoal sketches
of hungry men and dogs struggling for scraps of food from
garbage bins at street corners.
In
1944, the daily Swadhinata, an anti-fascist leftist
newspaper started its publication. Being very young and
liberal in outlook, and concerned about the German and Japanese
atrocities in Europe and Asia, some of us were reading this
paper. We even contributed small sums from our 'tiffin money'
to help the paper and our names were mentioned in the front
page of the first issue of the paper. On the paper's first
anniversary, Ziaur Rahman, a medical student who used to
distribute the paper to our house every morning in Park
Circus as a volunteer, took me and my brother to the paper's
8 E Decker's Lane office in the Chowringhee area of Calcutta
to attend a modest function. I was excited to sit on the
floor with Muzaffar Ahmad (a founding member of the Comintern
and a leading leftist in India), Jyoti Basu (the Chief Minister
of West Bengal for two decades), Somnath Chatterjee and
other eminent politicians and writers. Ziaur Rahman became
a doctor, joined the army medical corps and rose to the
rank of a Colonel. While posted as the Principal of the
Sylhet Medical College in 1971, Pakistani army officers
took him away from his home one morning from the breakfast
table. He never returned.
In
late 1945, the Bengal provincial elections took place --
it was crucial because of the discussions on the imminent
transfer of power from the British. In Jalpaiguri (now in
West Bengal) where I happened to be, my maternal grandfather
Khan Bahadur Abdus Sattar (then President of the district
Muslim League) was seeking the League's nomination .The
other candidate was his brother-in-law, Nawab Musharraf
Hussain. I remember the League nominating committee's arrival
at the railway station and their being met by the local
dignitaries and two large decorated elephants of the Nawab.
The team was composed of Suhrawardy (then general secretary
of the provincial Muslim league), Nurul Amin and Mohammad
Afzal. The team met in the afternoon and interviewed the
candidates and chairmen of union councils and secretaries
of union Muslim league. It was done systematically and democratically
but in the end the Nawab, who had mobilised (by his own
buses and trucks) a large number of supporters for the occasion,
received the nomination.
After
the elections, my father took me to see the proceedings
of the Bengal Legislative Assembly. The mostly marbled building
was majestic with large columns and the main chamber was
round and beautiful. From the visitor's gallery I watched
the debates and verbal duels punctuated by humor of the
giant parliamentarians--Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Nalini
Ranjan Sircar, AK Fazlul Huq, Shuhrawardy, Shamsuddin Ahmad
and many others.
M.
Azizul Jalil was the Convener of the Dhaka University Sanskriti
Samsad in February 1951 and became its first student-President
in 1952. He is a former civil servant and a retired member
of the World Bank staff.
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