by JYOTI RAHMAN
List of names of Hindu students and professors massacred at Jagannath Hall on night of 25th March, 1971 by the Pakistani Army. CREDIT/Udayan Chattopadhyay
Nirad C Chaudhuri and Jatin Sarker were both born in Hindu families in the Mymensingh district of eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh. Chaudhuri, about four decades older than Sarkar, wrote his autobiography before India held its first election, and ceased to be an unknown Indian. Sarker also wrote his life story. Unlike Chaudhuri, Sarker’s was in Bangla, published in Bangladesh, never translated in English, and not available in India or beyond. He remains unknown. Which is a pity, because if you want to know what has happened to the land where both these men were born, Sarker is a far, far better guide than Chaudhuri.
Sarker, of course, stopped being an Indian on 14 August 1947, when Mymensingh became part of East Pakistan — the eastern wing of Jinnah’s moth-nibbled land of the pure. His family didn’t move to India. They were not atypical. Many Hindu families remained in East Pakistan. Perhaps it was the presence of Gandhi. Perhaps it was the fantastical belief that Subhas Chandra Bose would return in 1957 — a century after the Great Uprising, two centuries after the Battle of Plassey — to reunite Mother Bengal.
There were no trains full of dead bodies to and from Calcutta. Not that there was no Hindu exodus from East Pakistan. Far from it. In 1941, 28% of the people of the districts that became East Pakistan were Hindus. A decade later, the share had dropped to 22%. By 1961, 18.5%. There were emigrations in dribs and drabs, with major outflows during the communal violence of 1946, 1950, and 1964.
There were riots in India, too. West Bengal was a peripheral state in the Indian Federation. Those Hindus who moved from East Pakistan to India — mainly but not wholly to Calcutta — became part of that troublesome city’s doomed citizenry. No one really cared much for them in Delhi or Bombay, where power and wealth resided.
What of those who stayed back? Sarker describes the lives of middle class bhadralok (gentry) Hindus of mofussil East Pakistan in Pakistan-er Janma Mrittu Darshan (‘Witnessing the Life and Death of Pakistan’). While he stopped being an Indian on 14 August 1947, he didn’t become a Pakistani. That country was an Islamic Republic. Hindus were not equal citizens there. They were dhimmis, under the ‘sacred protection’ of the majority.
Sarker could never be a Pakistani, but his Bengali Muslim neighbours did not quite feel at home in Pakistan either. In 1971, when East Pakistan died and Bangladesh was born, Sarker thought he would become an equal citizen of a free country. A country that was created with the sacrifice of Hindus and Muslims alike (the image above lists Hindu staff and students of Dhaka University gunned down by the Pakistan army on 25 March 1971).
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)