VIEW FROM BANGLADESH
We can only carry India in our hearts….Dharitri Bhattacharjee
On Aug 17, 1947, the people in East Pakistan came to know their fate. Two of them recall the pain of Partition
We can only carry India in our hearts….Dharitri Bhattacharjee
On Aug 17, 1947, the people in East Pakistan came to know their fate. Two of them recall the pain of Partition
Dhaka: I felt numb on 14th August, 1947, not ecstatic as I should have been, recalls 94-year-old Rabindranath Dutta Gupta, who now lives in Motijheel, Dhaka. A Ramakrishna devotee, he spends most of his time these days in the Mission. Dutta Gupta was born in 1917 in Chittagong. Despite his government job he believed with more conviction every passing year that the nationalist movement would usher in Indias freedom. It did, but along came Partition. In August 1947, Sir Cyril John Radcliffe, chair of the Boundary Commission, announced the Radcliffe Line that partitioned India, turning Dutta Gupta into an East Pakistani. August 14 was when Pakistan attained independence, a day before its new neighbour, India.
I was never involved in politics. But even I knew that Partition would be a messy business. I was in my teens when talks on Partition started doing the rounds, says Shri Indra Kumar Singha from Comilla. For the last 14 years he has been curating some 30,000 manuscripts in a library in Ishwar Pathashala, and preserving carefully the cultural heritage of the country of his birth. Born in 1929, Singha does not want to remember the dark decade and the years that followed when Partition proved to be nothing but a long, protracted and unfinished business. I remember how even on 14th August many Hindus and Muslims did not know where they belonged. They did not know if they were Indian or Pakistani, he says.
History bears evidence to the fact that Singha is right. Radcliffe’s Award was ready on August 12, but it was only published on August 17. So for those who rejoiced in the transfer of power ceremonies where Lord Mountbatten, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru were the indisputable heroes, it ought to be remembered, were only celebrating notional boundaries.
Neither Dutta Gupta nor Singha wanted partition of Bengal. Neither did the 11.4 million Hindus who suddenly found themselves in East Pakistan. On April 23, 1947, the Amrita Bazar Patrika featured results of a poll where it had asked if Bengali Hindus wanted a separate homeland. An overwhelming 98.3% Bengalis voted in favour, and 0.6% voted against the division of the province. On being asked about this poll, both Dutta Gupta and Singha express concern and suspicion about this poll and many other public discourses that came to conclusions that completed neglected the voice of Hindus living in East Bengal.
They clarified that no Hindu living in East Bengal wanted partition of the province as it would inevitably mean living as a minority in a Muslim majority country, or migrating later on.
Unfortunately their voices never reached the higher echelons of political circles where decisions were being made. By March we knew that transfer of power was inevitable. On 20 June, the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted in favour of partitioning Bengal, and in favour of the western half joining the Indian Union. Hindus in Khulna could still hope to become part of the Union, but we knew Chittagong had no chance. We were too far off, says Dutta Gupta. Actually even Khulna with its Hindu majority did not make it to India, one of the many examples that point to the rush job that Radcliffe did.
Though the two old men are now happy inBangladesh, there is one question that always haunts them: what was the point of it all? They say they are content to carry India in their hearts.