Arnab Guha is a NRIOL featured columnist. To read about Arnab Guha, please Know more.
Each of the older houses in Jadavpur, Shaktigarh and Bijoygarh is a narrative in concrete. So are all houses, everywhere. There is history in every brick, every leak in the door through which the rain seeps in, every crack on the floor trailing off into a past reluctant to dissolve itself. But in this southern corner of Calcutta, the houses and shops have a common theme to their stories. Once upon a time, this area was called the "German colony" in condescending jest. The "Germans" were the refugees from what then was East Pakistan. Perhaps the name sought a hashed reference to partitioned Berlin. One does not really know. But the name stuck. And so did some prejudice. Not many knew, or cared to know, that not all who lived in Jadavpur were refugees; that many had arrived, by choice, from eastern, undivided Bengal. But the majority had fled in confusion and terror. They were the "Germans". In the southern margin of the metropolis, they set up their "colony". Men and women with a lilting Bengali that brought common speech closer to poetry; school teachers with Rabindranath, Shelley, mathematics and a dream to build a future; children in ill-fitting army surplus khakis, confused in a world with out rivers. Soon "colony" became a dirty word. It was, of course, ironic from the start. But the irony now strengthened itself against its victims, as the city felt threatened by images of frenzied hordes sweeping across the border, greedy for unlawful space. The "colony", always insecure, now further consolidated itself.
School teachers found themselves useless in a world where Rabindranath had become an industry, Shelley was hawked in footnotes to mediocrity, and mathematics was best used in shops. Consequently, the houses in the "colony" added an extra room or spared an old one to serve as the
... neighbourhood grocery, stationary or poultry. In fact, the poultry had a very special place in the heart of the "Germans". Almost every house kept some fowl, usually in a roof-top hatch. Some even ventured a goat. A cow was the ultimate trophy. Somewhere, somehow, they helped sustain an illusion of East Bengal, of home, of things left behind in a sudden hiccup of history.
But the highest priority was still accorded to education. The need for a trained awareness of one's socio-political situation was felt compulsively by these aliens in a city of smoke. The Communist movement in the state gave them a dialectical platform. The Party promised them a voice to articulate their legitimate needs. Soon the printing press proliferated in Bijoygarh, supported by the Party and affiliated intellectuals. Some of the houses raised a second storey. The colony started dismantling its fences and prepared to merge with the greater world of the Bengali metropolis.
The little children gradually forgot the rivers and grew into doctors, engineers, professors, leaders. The "Germans" found their way into Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, and then, into Los Angeles, New Jersey, Toronto. Industry and literacy in the state of Bengal fell from one of the highest in the country to a most depressingly mediocre level. The Communist regime was firmly enthroned. Villages were gulled, conned, terrorised, and deprived of an awareness of their entitlement to the most basic dividends of human progress. The state government maintained itself on the basis of periodic tube-wells and pucca roads, while entire tracts of rural Bengal remained ignorant of what their rights should be under the manifesto of any truly progressive government. Public parks were sold to private promoters. Students' unions degenerated into an elaborate apparatus of terror to serve the political interests of the Party. In the midst of it all, the "colony" came of age.
The roof-top poultry disappeared. And with it, the sweet dialect of Bengali. The houses rose another level. Some of the older Marxists went mad, feeding neighbourhood dogs and seeking comfort in poets whose works they could no longer afford to buy. Most died, and everybody ritually licked their fingers at elaborate funeral feasts. Others made money and moved into town. But somewhere, somehow, Bangladesh remained. Remains.
We who were born in the heart of the city and have seen no rivers, we who have no time for our grandmothers' tales, we who have only touched down at the Dhaka international airport on our way to Singapore, Los Angeles or Vancouver, have this space within ourselves that we can neither reject nor comprehend. As Irish fields lurk below the tall shadows of Boston, and northern winds blow Punjab through the cranberry farms of British Columbia, even so an old grandmother whispers in our blood, singing to us of rivers and of a land before our birth. Read more
- Arnab Guha in Canada
March 12, 2000
The views of this column are the author's own, and do not necessarily represent the views of NRI Online.
For a listing of past columns by Arnab Guha, please Know more.
