The Bengali writer Shankha Ghosh wrote three stories recording a growing boy’s impressions in the years leading up to Independence and then through the months immediately following Partition. The three stories, aimed at young readers, and in 2017 collected in a volume titled “Prose for Children” (Chhotoder Godyo), can perhaps be read as a trilogy of sorts: Sokalbelar Alo (Morning Light, 1964), Supuriboner Sari (Row of Areca Palms, 1990) and Shahorpather Dhulo (Dust on the City Roads, 2010). The stories are autobiographical — the watchful, sensitive boy who grows through them into young adulthood is the writer himself.
Written at considerable distance of time from each other, the books do not, however, form a continuous narrative in the way one would expect of a trilogy. Each book picks a particular and short-lived phase in the protagonist’s life and is populated by a distinct set of characters who do not appear in the other two books, apart from the protagonist and his mother. I hesitate to call them novels because they do not have the complexity of plot and the multiplicity of narrative strands that one associates with the novel. They are what Bengali children call golper boi (storybook), tales of the little things that move young hearts.
They also hold the adult reader in thrall: the little things are not so little after all. But that is true of all great children’s literature. What is unusual about Ghosh’s stories is the moment of history in which they are located. The creation of East Pakistan and its momentous aftermath for the Partition diaspora of Bengal is not an obvious choice of setting for children’s fiction. The choice of the storybook1 genre to write about a time of such painful upheaval may, therefore, appear unusual. But then, children, as much as adults, get caught up in cataclysmic events. Children’s fiction set against such contexts is rare, but not unheard of. Judith Kerr’s (of The Tiger Who Came to Tea fame) When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an interesting example. (Kerr’s tale of escape from Nazi Germany is also, incidentally, autobiographical.) Read in sequence, the three stories by Ghosh beautifully reflect the epic changes that Bengal lived through in the 1940s.
Also read: Conscience of Bengal
On the face of it, they seem to mark a departure from the main body of Ghosh’s work as a poet and essayist. Yet, all three stories are written, unmistakably, by a poet. Looking at a particularly difficult time through the eyes of a teenaged boy, they are told with an astonishing simplicity that could have come only from the pen of a poet of Ghosh’s stature. If the world needs its philosophers and its literature departments to make sense of the confusions and anarchy of history, it needs its poets to articulate the complex emotions generated by history. Ghosh’s stories are like poems in the way they focus on the emotional life of the boy protagonist at a particular moment in history, without getting caught up in the discursiveness of the novel. It is the storybook format that allows the author to do this, working like a sieve to catch only the boy’s thoughts as his family lives through a harrowing time. The youth and childlikeness of the narrative voice aids the drawing of clean, simple strokes on a canvas uncluttered by the wordiness and complexity that a novel would not be able escape. Unfortunately, the “storybook” status of the stories, marking them out as “children’s fiction”, has also had the inadvertent consequence of keeping them away from the attention of prospective adult readers. The “trilogy” is surprisingly little known.
At home, with his wife. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: Bidhan Chandra Pal
Sharing a light moment. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: Bidhan Chandra Pal
Morning Light: A story about friendship
Sokalbelar Alo (Morning Light).
The first book, Sokalbelar Alo or Morning Light, is set against the years of the Second World War. Born in 1932, Ghosh would have been seven years old when war broke out in 1939. The age of the three young boys in the story is not mentioned, but they are in school and they have the eighth grade behind them; so they must be at least 13 years old. Going by Ghosh’s own age, the story is presumably set in the summer of 1944, or even 1945, before the war ended. The horrors of Partition are still two or three years away. The communal frenzy of 1950 (after the relatively peaceful conditions of 1947-49 in East Pakistan), which drove out large numbers of Hindu peasants from Khulna, Jessore, Barisal and Faridpur, are not yet even imaginable. The mood of the narrative is captured perfectly by the title with its associations of the softness of the morning sun. It is, like most children’s fiction in the world, a story about friendship: Neelu, Barun and Keshav, and their somewhat more worldly-wise classmates, are completely immersed in their life in a tranquil township in East Bengal.
And yet, this is an unusual book in a fundamental way. Stories about young people and meant for a young readership are generally focussed on the moment. After we grow out of them, they take on the quality of a dream landscape in our memories. In Bengali literature, which among the Indian-language literatures is particularly rich in children’s fiction, the stories of Abanindranath Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Ashapurna Devi, Lila Majumdar, Satyajit Ray, Sunil Ganguly (and many others) show this quality. Theirs are fictional worlds that appear untouched by any threat to their existence. The fictional world of Morning Light is remarkable in its awareness of transience, a sense that life is uncertain and full of unexpected turnings, and that all experience is fleeting. At a time that is decades away from electronic mail and mobile phones, the boys are aware that their friendship can get interrupted at any point if their fathers get transferred out. This gives an extra edge to their time spent together, animated by an urge to make the most of it while it lasts. The climax comes with the death of Keshav, leaving Neelu and Barun to grapple with a kind of separation they had not bargained for. There are also sorrows working in subterranean ways that can bring about unforeseen separations, such as the one Neelu and Barun experience when Keshav’s widowed foster sister feels compelled to uproot herself from the family and go to live with her long-forgotten in-laws.
Walks at dawn
Morning Light begins and ends with walks at dawn. It opens with the three boys rising early to walk to the banks of the Padma, excited to be up before daybreak. It is an activity of joyous togetherness, an act of faith in the goodness of life. The story ends with Neelu and Barun walking to the station where Barun must board the train that will pluck him from their beloved “colony” on the Padma. (It would not be unreasonable to guess that this is Pakshi, the small town in Pabna district where the writer spent the better part of his childhood.) They walk with the knowledge of their permanent separation from Keshav, and that deepens the pain of the other separation that is now imminent. The world that they know is about to change forever. It is 1944 (or 1945); in a couple of years, the land that they know of as theirs will become “foreign country” that their parents may consider wise to leave. But they do not know this as the train chugs out of the station with Barun, the final moment of parting suddenly lifted off its weight of sadness by an unexpected act of compassion by the departing boy. Neelu is left behind with a sense of his aloneness, but also an awareness that life must go on —
The bridge was slowly filling up with light. One day the three of them would walk across to the other side—how often had they thought of doing that. But a war is raging. No one is allowed on the bridge while the war is on. Keshav is long gone. Barun has also left. Perhaps one day the war too will end. Maybe then Neelu will be able to walk across the bridge to the other side. But Keshav will not be there with him, Barun will not be there. He must travel on his own, all alone.
Row of Areca Palms: Caught on the wrong side
Supuriboner Sari (Row of Areca Palms)
The theme of separation is repeated in Supuriboner Sari (Row of Areca Palms). But the two separations are qualitatively different. In 1944-45, Neelu and Barun could hope to stay in touch through letters, and there was always a possibility that they might be able to meet again. At the end of Row of Areca Palms, it is Neelu who must depart, in the autumn of 1947, leaving behind a friend who desperately seeks an assurance that he will come back. It is an assurance that Neelu is unable to give because the boat that carries him away wrenches him off a homeland that is no longer his, or so most of his family believes. For his Muslim friend, however, the old homeland not just continues to be “home” but now offers a greater sense of belonging. The two boys, one silent, the other crying out an anguished plea, lock eyes across a widening chasm of water between them. They are divided by community, social class, and a new political boundary. This parting is final. Or is it?
Row of Areca Palms encapsulates that moment in the history of the subcontinent when every Bengali Hindu family caught on the wrong side of the border had to make a choice.2 Should they stay on in Muslim-majority East Pakistan or should they opt for the uncertainties of life in India? In public memory, the most striking images of the 1947 Partition are of the bloodshed in Punjab—the mass uprootings, the trains carrying corpses, the straggly processions trudging towards the border, the killings and rapes. In comparison, though not absolutely, East Pakistan remained calm. Yet, about 1.1 million3 Bengali Hindus migrated to India by June 1, 1948. The migrations continued through the rest of 1948 and 1949, becoming a tidal wave after the riots of 1950. But in the 1947-1949 period, it was, in most cases, not any actual attacks but a perceived threat of violence that made Bengali Hindus leave. Belying the relative calm of those early years of East Pakistan was an atmosphere of fear, nurtured by memories of the riots of 1946 in Noakhali and Tippera and the Great Calcutta Killings. Home had suddenly lost its assurance of safety.4
For readers familiar with south Bengal, the title Supuriboner Sari conjures up an image of areca palms gently swaying in the breeze, slim trunks pressed close together to hold up leafy crowns merging into a continuous, green canopy. It is a soothing image. Yet, the narrative makes it clear at the outset that something catastrophic is afoot. Neelu is making his last journey “home”, that is, the home of his maternal grandparents, with a handful of his relatives for Durga Pujo. It is 1947, and Independence has just come. This trip is markedly different from the Pujo visits of previous years when the entire extended family got together to go home. The adults travelling with him are jittery. When Neelu’s uncle finds a familiar (Muslim) boatman to ferry them on the last leg of the journey, his mother is relieved —
“Whose boat is it, dada?”
“Rahmat’s.”
“Rahmat? Oh, then we are safe. My heart keeps trembling. We’ve travelled this route so often, but this time it’s fearful, at every step.”
“Come on, what is there to fear so much?”
“Maybe nothing. Still…A known boatman is a relief.”
Highlights
- Shankha Ghosh wrote three autobiographical stories based on his own early life.
- The first story is set against the years leading up to Independence.
- The second story is about the family deciding to leave their home in East Pakistan and migrate to India.
- The second story, the most poignant of the trilogy, focusses on the dilemma of Bengali Hindus caught on the wrong side of the border in 1947.
- The third story has the protagonist on the brink of young adulthood and trying to make sense of his new life in Calcutta.
A contagious panic
If the 1946 riots in Noakhali and Tippera districts served as a template for what might happen, the anxiety deepened and spread as Hindu families started leaving. People did not want to stay on when they found their neighbourhoods emptying. As Neelu’s grandfather steadfastly refuses to leave, his remaining Hindu neighbours urge him to take stock of what is happening. Only a few Hindu families are left in the village, and they too are preparing to leave.
For Neelu’s grandfather, that is not a good enough reason to leave. But the rest of his family have already made up their minds. His eldest son tries his best to persuade him to leave, but there is no resolution to the conflict between the two points of view:
“This place, here, where we are sitting now, this is now Pakistan. So then, can we continue to live here? Should we?”
“Why? What is wrong? What is the problem?”
“What, isn’t there a problem? Riots in so many places, so much bullying, people getting away with anything. Staying here is to always be at the mercy of the whims of others…”
“Has anything like that happened? In this village?”
“Maybe not, yet. But how long will it take for things to go wrong? Anything can happen anywhere, at any time.”
The younger man knows in his heart that “this is not our land anymore”. The older man is rooted in the soil. “Can your own country become someone else’s overnight? Can that ever happen?” Across the anguished gulf that has now opened up between him and his children, grandfather explains, with a gentle sadness, why he cannot leave: “Think about it, that row of areca palms behind that kachari room, one by one I planted them all with my own hands, way back in the past, when none of you were even born. Little by little they grew in front of my eyes. From the banks of the canal to the steps of the courtyard, I pick out every blade of grass in the morning every day, as you know. All those mango, jackfruit, tamarind trees, I can’t stay without caressing them when the day ends…. Leaving all this behind, tell me, where can I go, how can I?”
“Us” and “them”
For his children, Partition has reinforced and magnified the “othering” of the Muslim, making it impossible for them to stay on in East Pakistan as members of a vulnerable and shrinking minority. The “bhadralok” Bengali Hindus, mostly landed, who left East Pakistan in the first wave of migrations had dominated the social hierarchy and were used to respectful deference from Muslim peasants, fishermen, boatmen, weavers, thatchers and sundry other odd-jobs men and women. One could use their services and even affectionately accept their loyalty, but there was a barrier that they could not be encouraged to cross. The children of the family might be permitted to have Muslim friends, but those friends could not be allowed into all private spaces, certainly not the religious ones, as Neelu finds out through a painful episode. One of his cousins tries to explain why Harun was scolded for playing with them on the chandimandap, but not Khokon, a Hindu friend. Harun, she explains, is “not a Bengali, he’s a Muslim”. If the life of a respectable Hindu could be mapped in concentric circles, the position of lowly Muslims was in the outermost one, except that human relationships often blurred the fault lines. (Sunanda Sikdar’s Doyamoyeer Katha, orDoyamoyee’s Story, and Mihir Sengupta’s Bishadbriksha, both autobiographical, explore the fraught relations between Hindus and Muslims in Muslim-majority East Bengal in mid twentieth century.)
Impact of Partition movement
The movement for Pakistan in the 1940s slowly but surely changed all that. It transformed the very body language of Bengali Muslims in the East Bengal countryside. Neelu’s Didima (grandmother) regrets that Fatema, whose husband, Abdul the local thatcher, is a favourite of the family, has not dropped in even once during Durga Pujo this time. She still visits the family now and then, but the old warmth is absent. And on those visits, Didima notes perceptively, she holds her head high and looks straight into the eyes when she talks. “Are they the same now as in the old days? Now they are everything.”
“They” were the Muslims, the despised but indispensable majority who were refusing to be trodden underfoot. East Pakistan was theirs, and some of them were interpreting the new sense of ownership rather literally. During the Durga Pujo of the previous year, Fatema’s son Harun had spelled it out quite clearly to his friend Neelu:
“All this will be ours one day.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Quaid-e-Azam has said, one day we will get all this [the beautiful natmandir, dance hall, of the temple of a Hindu household in the village].”
“You? What do you mean, you? Who’s you?”
“We, that is, the Mussalmans.”
“Who told you?”
“An uncle of mine lives in Barisal, that uncle told me. He said, all this is ours, everything, everything…”
This alienation intensifies in 1947, when Harun cannot be bothered to seek out Neelu. When Neelu goes to see him, the reception is cold. The coldness turns to hostility when Neelu, more out of an urge to make conversation than anything else, mentions that the village feels empty now. He just has to look, Neelu is told by Harun and his cousin Hossein, and he will see that the village is anything but empty. “Gafoor’s house, Jabbar’s house, they are all full, just go and see.” And as for Neelu’s own cousins who have not come for Durga Pujo this year, Harun dismisses them contemptuously: “And nor will they come anymore. Let them not, what do we care? This is not your country anyway, you are now people of another country.” His mother is more hospitable, but clearly not as welcoming as she once was.
It’s all, then, a question of perspective. The Hindus might find the emptying of their neighbourhoods traumatic, but for the Muslims it is a time of hope. Being a Muslim is something to be proud of now. The Harun who puts Neelu in his place is a far cry from the boy who, a few years earlier, could be told off by Neelu’s aunt for defiling, by his presence, the family’s Durga Pujo platform. That Harun had slunk away; this one would turn around and stand his ground.
Madness, collective and individual
Amid this changed equation between the two communities, Neelu’s family, like many others, has decided to migrate. To Neelu’s grandfather, the all-round panic looks like a kind of collective madness. Madness, in fact, is a theme running through the first two stories. In Morning Light, the mentally challenged boy who steals Barun’s pen shows up the cracks through which some people inevitably fall, their failure to reach the socially mandated milestones placing them in a kind of no man’s land in society. In Row of Areca Palms, the madness of Phulmami (one of Neelu’s aunts) mirrors the collective insanity that seems to have gripped society. “I don’t belong in this household,” she informs Neelu. “I don’t belong anywhere.” The Bengali Hindus uprooting themselves know they do not belong in East Pakistan. But will they belong on the other side of the border? Neelu’s slightly nutty Sejomama (an uncle) is equally unable to fit in, especially in an environment marked by uncertainties and requiring not a little worldly wisdom for anyone trying to stay afloat. As Neelu tells his mother, if Phulmami is mad, so is Sejomama.
Madness and women
If the theme of madness links the first two stories, thoughts on the mental and social spaces that are not easily accessible to women link all three books. The schoolboy Neelu of Morning Light, already showing a poet’s sensibility, finds himself thinking of imprisoned princesses as he listens to the singing of the neighbourhood girls who dutifully take out their harmoniums at dusk. Their singing, he has discerned, does not have the liberating light-heartedness with which his Chotomama (an uncle) can break into a song anywhere, at any time. For the sensitive adolescent, it is a daily ritual that underlines how the girls’ limited mobility is further restricted by nightfall. They have accepted their limits, whereas Phulmami has not. Her loss of sanity is manifested in the way she shuns the kitchen, does not bother about housework, comes and goes as she pleases, and writes poetry that no one but Neelu is interested in.
Writing poetry, she teaches the boy, goes beyond making line-endings rhyme and is essentially a craft that tries to translate feelings into words. She would rather use words, no matter how humdrum, that are faithful not to tradition but to what she wants to say. In poetry, as in life, she is ready to break rules if it takes her closer to where she wants to be. All searches end in vain when she goes missing, but the family had lost her even when she had been in their midst. She had broken out of their control much before she is officially “lost”. Their pain at the loss of a daughter-in-law, who is loved but not understood or accepted for what she is, seems to become indistinguishable from their pain at losing a cherished homeland that has become alien. The alienation, as the future poet understands, is rooted in their own fragmented consciousness.
Dust on the City Roads: The making of a poet
Shahorpather Dhulo (Dust on the City Roads)
The last book of the trilogy, Shahorpather Dhulo (Dust on the City Roads), ends with the narrator committing himself to a life of writing poetry. Neelu is now on this side of the border. Like most of the Partition diaspora, his family has made its way to Calcutta (now Kolkata) where, with education, there are better chances of rebuilding lives. The pages of the book are full of the young man’s wonder at the big city, his thrill at the cultural stimulations the city offers, and the inevitable disappointments.
Neelu’s father has enrolled him at a “home” for boys run by monks of the Ramakrishna Mission so that he can pursue his studies in peace, away from the rest of the family that is now forced to share space with many others in the cramped lodgings of a compassionate relative. Neelu is both attracted to and hemmed in by the discipline and rituals of the place. His poet’s sensitivity cannot help responding to the singing and dancing that is part of the worship there, just as it had responded to the keertan singing in the colony in East Bengal where he grew up. The discipline imposed by the monks cannot, however, prevent him from eventually asking his own questions and striking out to find his own answers. But the girl with whom he has unwittingly got involved has no option but to shut him out of her life. Teenage romances had little chance in mid twentieth century West Bengal, and this one has not even properly started before it has to end. Neelu, already forced to come to terms with much that he understands imperfectly, confronts the situation in the only way open to a budding poet. He fills his notebook with poems.
Shankha Ghosh. COVID-19 claimed him in April 2021. | Photo Credit: Courtesy: Bidhan Chandra Pal
The power of a story
One of the most touching moments in the trilogy has Neelu telling the story of Karbala to Harun and Hossein. He has read about it in Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s Bishad-Sindhu (Sea of Sorrow). Neelu is not only alive to the pathos of the story but is able to see parallels with Hindu mythology. The miring of the hooves of Hossein’s horse in the mud reminds him of the wheels of Karna’s chariot sinking in the ground at a crucial moment in battle — a comparison that instantly makes Hossein a tragic hero for anyone familiar with the Mahabharata. Human greatness in the face of certain death and the courage to do the right thing is what fascinates Neelu in Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s epic novel. His working-class Muslim friends may not be able to match the bookish Neelu’s access to the written word, but they, too, are quick to see a resemblance between Yazid’s and Duryodhan’s behaviour. Ultimately, the ability to invent, share and believe in stories is what sets human beings apart from other animals. Neelu’s recounting of the tragedy of Karbala creates a brief interlude in the narrative when nothing but the story exists for the Hindu boy and his Muslim audience, united in the magic that the tale creates for them. Stories build walls, but they can also break them.
ENDNOTES
- A book containing a story or a collection of stories intended for children, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
- See Joya Chatterjee, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967, 2007. In East Bengal’s population of 39 million, she says, there were 11 million Hindus, citing Radcliffe’s Award, which was based on the 1941 Census.
- Figure cited by Joya Chatterjee.
- There is documentary evidence, in government-sponsored and independent surveys, that bears out Ghosh’s explorations of the Hindu psyche in 1940s East Pakistan. Of particular interest in this context is a study, cited by Joya Chatterjee, of why refugees in a Nadia village left East Bengal: “Away from home: The movement and settlement of refugees from East Pakistan into West Bengal, India” by Tetsuya Nakatani in Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, Volume 2000, Issue 12.
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