Rise, rise O’ Sun God!

History records numerous uprisings against colonial repression but while remembering them we often forget the Santal rising where bows and arrows rose defiantly against guns and canons. As Mahfuz Sadique salutes the adivasi revolutionaries, the social minimisation of the Santals stare back us with mute grievance

‘What British Army fought was not a war. So long as Santals’ drum went beating, they went on fighting to the last man. There was not a single sepoy in the British army who did not feel ashamed’
— Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal.

Melodies of marooned lives
As the light drizzle of mid-June caresses the thatched hay roofs of the mud-huts, the distinct, soft melody of a bamboo flute coming from a hut floats through the small Santal village. As night falls upon their homes in Godagari thana by the river Padma in Rajshahi district, 222 kilometres north-west of Dhaka, Santal life appears to have changed little since the days of their first migration to the Barind or Bengal region (now Bangladesh) from far flung areas in Central India, Assam and Meghalaya, centuries ago. W.G. Archer the last District Commissioner of the Santal Pargana fondly termed the people ‘The ever-singing Santals’ and gave a passionate description of them in ‘original inhabitants of this land’ in his book ‘Hill of Flutes.’ The detailed account shows that the Santals have defended their cultural and social heritage against all odds. But what lies hidden in the darkness of the night is that this unique way of life is slowly fading away through the most potent of oppressions – economic and financial. As is the case with most of the adivasi (indigenous) communities in Bangladesh, their helplessness in elevating their lives to a better footing and thus prevailing with their own identity, lie in chronic abuse and violation of laws pertaining to land and labour.

Rise, rise in the name of Thakur-jiu!

While the irony of today’s Santal life is the grinding pressure of ‘eventualities’, exactly 150 years ago, a long day of June saw the souls of the soil rise in the name of the Sun Gods. The land they had known to call their own with sprawling fields of ploughed fresh earth sown with seeds of life were being trampled by marauding colonials and insensitive locals. And suddenly, the soft melodies that floated into the evening breeze turned into the roars of thousands of dark-skinned, bare bodied Santal peasants demanding the right to their life and livelihood on ‘their’ land.

While revolutions that had its roots in mass uprising have mostly been related to the common, or rather to bring into context — the marginal, very few have had grounding on the simple premise of rights only. Ideological footing has had a major role to play. The marginal portion of any populace had to be galvanized on the recycled ideas of ideologies in order for them to become proactive and being an area as rich in tradition of revolutions and a nurturing bed of future struggles, the Bengal Delta has always been a point to note in the chequered path of the subcontinent’s history. Yet, one particular uprising is unique than any other. For the very basic nature it had derived its idea from — a right to live the simplest of live. The Hul or Santal Rebellion that razed through this region exactly one-and-a-half century ago is unique; it was a fight to survive on one’s own land.

A classic case of years of oppression fuming through one final outburst of spontaneous dissent, the Hul or Santal Rebellion of 1855-56 started on the June 30, 1855. Jump started by two of the legendary revolutionary brothers, Sido Murmu and Kanhu Murmu, the headmen of Bhognadih Village near Berhait in the Sahebganj district of the Santal Parganas, Jharkhand. As a direct result of decades of economic exploitation and socio-political oppression by the colonial administration and their operatives – notably darogas (policemen), mahajans (moneylenders) and zamindars (landlords) – Sido and Kanhu, along with their two younger brothers Chand and Bhairab, mobilised 10,000 Santals and sympathizing non-Santals to march to Calcutta to demand a respite from this repression.

Having taken an oath from Thakur-jiu (god) to reinstate Santal rule, they were arrested on false pretences at Panchketia on 7th July 1855. Here, the movement became one of direct action as the policemen and their accomplices were murdered. The revolution quickly spread throughout the region as at least 50,000 other people demonstrated their allegiance to Sido and Kanhu by fighting against capitalist planters, railway engineers, regional elites and the Bengal native infantry.

It was one of the fiercest battles in the history of the subcontinent’s freedom struggles causing the greatest number of loss of lives in any battle during that time; the number of causalities of Santal Hul was 20,000 according to William Hunter who wrote it in Annals of Rural Bengal.

With the capture of political power of India by the East India Company, the natural habitats of the Adivasi (indigenous) people including the Santals began to crumble by intruders like moneylenders; in addition, traders and revenue farmers descended upon them in large numbers under the patronage of the Company.

Substantiating the harrowing tales of moneylenders, eighteenth century literature informs that the rate of interest on loan to the poor and illiterate Santals varied from 50 per cent to 500 per cent. These intruders were, needless to mention crucial links in the chain of ruthless exploitation under colonial rule and they were the instruments through which indigenous groups and tribes were brought within the influence and control of the colonial economy. Relevant to mention that discontent had been simmering in the Santal Paraganas (presently in Jharkhand) from the early decades of the nineteenth century owing to the most naked exploitation of the indigenous Santals by both the British authorities and their collaborators, the native immigrants.

The courage, chivalry and sacrifice of the Santals in the Hul were countered by the rulers with veritable butchery. Out of 50,000 Santal rebels, 15,000-20,000 were killed by the British Indian Army and the Company was finally able to suppress the rebellion in 1856, though some outbreaks continued till 1857.

The Santals showed great bravery and incredible courage in the struggle against the military and as long as their national drums continued beating, the whole party stood and fell by bullets. However, there was no sign of yielding. Once, forty Santals refused to surrender and took shelter inside a mud house; troops surrounded the mud house and fired at them but the Santals replied with their arrows. Then, the soldiers made a big hole through the muddy wall and the captain ordered them to surrender but they shot a volley of arrows instead. Despite repeated exhortations from the captain they continued shooting arrows and some of the soldiers were wounded. At last, when the discharge of arrows from the door slackened, the captain went inside the room with his soldiers and found only one old man grievously wounded, standing erect among the dead bodies. The soldier asked him to throw away arms, but instead, he rushed on him and killed him with his battle axe.

It is believed that Sido was captured by the British forces through treachery; Kanhu on the other hand was captured through an encounter at Uparbanda and was subsequently killed in captivity. The Santal Hul, however, did not come to an end in vain and had a long-lasting impact. Santal Parganas Tenancy Act was the outcome of this struggle, which dished out some sort of protection to the indigenous people from the ruthless colonial exploitation and finally the Santal territory was born. The regular police was abolished and the duty of keeping peace and order and arresting criminals was vested in the hands of parganait and village headman

The Hul surprised colonialists on account of the perceived loyalty of Santals to their systems of administration during the 1830s and 1840s; by late-1855 the movement had swelled to incorporate neighbouring areas such as Birbhum District, West Bengal and the colonial government resorted to the imposition of Martial Law. During the suppression many Santals were killed, punished by execution, transported or sentenced to hard labour. Belatedly, responding to widespread grievances, the new colonial administration of the Santal Parganas created the Santal Parganas Tenancy Act, whereby adivasi land could not be bought by non-adivasis, and Santal prisoners could be used to reconstruct villages and roads in the region. Since the suppression of the Hul and into the twentieth century, Santals continued to participate actively in anti-colonial freedom movements. In the postcolonial period, Santal politicians and activists have pioneered efforts to claim land rights and some form of national recognition regarding issues surrounding the Santals and their adivasi identity. Since independence, many marginalised Santals in Bangladesh have kept up a losing battle to hold their ground. Meanwhile, the Hul lives on as an inspiration to many Santals and non-Santals engaged in movements for social justice.

One-and-a-half century after the Hul, the lives of Santals are still marginalised. Starting from their land, their simple way of life, has been left decaying under pressure from the forces of non-Santals.

The land of forefathers

Raghunath Sardar, 53, a Santal of the village Kirli in Parsha thana of Naogaon district was a solvent and respected person. Sardar, who owned 45 bighas of land, a house with a good harvest saw his life as perfect. That is until he lost everything to village touts who grabbed his lands by forging deeds and legal documents. Now, he is too poor to fight in the court; though he has asked for financial help from non-governmental organisations (NGO), his status as an ethnic has hampered his attempts to get assistance.

Raghunath’s predicament is that of the majority of Santals. They are aliens in a land that is their own and both land-grabbing and manipulative laws are to blame for this situation. A draconian law that has been used and abused for the past four decades to grab traditional Santal land is the Vested Property, which was originally formulated in 1965 by the then Pakistan Government as the Enemy Property Custody and Registration Order.

In a report prepared for the Minority Rights Group, in conjunction with the Coordination Council for Human Rights in Bangladesh, Father R. W. Timm points out that 85 per cent of the adivasis of the north-west are landless.

Durbin Kisku and Martin Hazda, two Shantal leaders, said, ‘Three hundred acres of land of Panchandar, Badhar and Kalma unions of Tanor thana in Rajshahi have been recorded under the Vested Property Act. Half of this land belonged to the Santals and the rest to the Bangalee Hindus but just one or two local influential persons have grabbed this land and we held a procession recently against this move and had a gherao (laying siege) of the TNO office.’ Since filing cases to free these lands will cost a lot of money nobody went to court; such incidents are numerous all across the Santal locales.

So what about us?

This brings the bigger question of recognition; constitutional recognition as to their status as ethnic communities is a long standing demand of the Santals and the rest of the indigenous population of Bangladesh. Priscilla Raj in her article ‘Demand for Fundamental Rights Reinstated’ reports of a gathering of north Bengal adivasi activists in Dhaka during 1999, where they raised their demands again. Late Manobendra Narayan Larma, a prominent leader of the adivasis of Bangladesh raised this demand first in 1972 when the Bangladesh Constitution hailing Bangalee nationalism declared all citizens of the country as Bangalee. This squashed any hope of state recognition of the indigenous people of territorial Bangladesh.

To work, to live

Ninety-five percent of the ethnic people of north Bengal, mainly Santals, are related to agriculture and an NGO report shows that working members of 85 per cent families are day labourers. A weeklong survey on economy, social organisation and manners of the people of Dewrapara village, 12 kilometres from the divisional headquarters Rajshahi, conducted by sociologists Kazi Tobarek Hossain and Syed Zahir Sadek found that 93 per cent of the thirty-two Santal families were share-croppers or landless day labourers. The share-croppers cultivate land of others and for bearing all costs of cultivation they get just 50 per cent of the crops.

The scarcity of day labour work also pushes the Santals to the fringes of poverty. A day labourer having a family of six members might earn a maximum of Taka 30 a day and their plight is compounded by the lack of work during the seasonal lapses in the agricultural cycle; then there is the threat of flood and other natural calamities. In the April 1999 issue of the magazine Earth Touch, Khoka Pahan, 43, an adivasi day labourer of Manda thana in Naogaon district is quoted saying: ‘When we do not have work, we have to borrow from the money lenders to buy rice and often sell our labour in advance at cheap rates.’ And when there is no work? Pahan simply answers: ‘We starve.’

Requiem of a race

If a race, a nation or a community is to survive from one generation to the next, its culture, its lifestyle and its unique nuances need to be preserved. Understandably, without a viable livelihood they are marginalised and the result is their fading effect into the mainstream. Living in a country that territorially encompasses the same land that they have known as their own for centuries, the Santals of Bangladesh have been pushed further and further to the fringes.

At this juncture, education, reforms of land laws, constitutional recognition and a general compassion within the majority towards the melodious Santal men, women and children is essential.

And after all it is their Bangladesh too. Viswanath Singh, a Santal leader puts it right: ‘We have fought for this land in 1971 and we have our rights on this land; we want to live in this country.’

Background information: We Santals; The Annals of Bengal; Banglapedia

Published: The New Age/ July, 2005

Shamima Khatun: Biralakkhi to New York

Shamima Khatun interviewd by Mahfuz Sadique

New York had a visitor from Biralakkhi last November. Shamima Khatun wasn’t visiting the financial capital of the ‘free’ world to try out her luck; she’d made it already. She was after all the owner of the most innovative business in the world. Shamima was there as a guest of honour at the closing ceremony of the International Year of Microcredit, where she was awarded for the ‘Most Innovative Business of the Year’, one of four winners of the Global Microentrepreneurship Awards. It might have been her first journey from one of the southern-most villages of Satkhira district to New York, or to even Dhaka, for that matter, but Shamima is no stranger to long journeys. Her journey from a landless housewife to an ambassador of Bangladesh’s success story with micro credit was long. More than a decade long, in fact.
‘My father did what he could, a day-lobourer, basically,’ says Shamima, who was born to a family of five sisters and a brother. ‘We were as poor as everybody else. Most of us didn’t go to school. I got lucky. I studied till grade four,’ Shamima recounts. ‘After my school was stopped, I didn’t have much to do. So, I started dropping nets in the river by our house, and fishing for small fries, which I sold in the market sometimes.’
‘Around this time, Nowabenki Gonomukhi Foundation started a small office in our village,’ Shamima recalls. She was 15. And, like most girls in rural areas, she got married.
‘My husband Moniruzzaman’s family also very poor. They had ten siblings. Together we were so lost. We kept wondering what to do.’
‘Ours is a highly saline area. We can’t grow vegetables, or any crop, here. Most of us either cultivate prawns, or work in other people’s cultivations. Most of the vegetables we eat come from outside,’ Shamima lays down the first crystallisations of her business mind.
Shamima and her husband started selling vegetables in their local market. But as credit was scarce, they would never manage to make enough to buy more vegetables. ‘That is when I thought of joining the Ganamukhi Foundation. I reme-mber clearly, it was winter time, like now. My husband and I had a long discussion the night before we joined,’ the 26-year old entrepreneur explains.
One January morning in 1994, Shamima joined the Foundation. And soon, after another long discussion six months later, she took her first loan of Tk 4, 000 from the micro-finance institution.
‘I gave a long think to how we could best use our money. With Tk 1,000, I bought a bicycle for my husband. He would carry the vegetables from nearby Moutala to our haat. The remaining Tk 3,000, I invested in our products,’ Shamima explains.
In weekly instalments, Shamima started repaying the loan. Though it was hard work, at the end of each day, after putting away money for repayment and expenses, Shamima started putting away meagre, but crucial, savings of Tk 100-150.
A year had passed. Shamima had successfully repaid her loan. Come 1995 and those small daily savings coupled with another loan from Gonomukhi was no longer a small figure for a retail vegetable vending business: Tk 20, 000.
Things were never going to be same for Shamima. Two years of retailing, and in 1997 she had enough money to go wholesale.
She started renting trucks to bring large quantities of potato from other neighbouring districts. Unlike any miracle story of instant success, Shamima had to endure six years of day-to-day running of her business, which invariably took her outside her area. ‘It’s never easy. I woke up at the crack of dawn. I said my prayers. And though I ran a business, I did have a family to look after. My daughter was a child then. Taking care of her, and then doing household chores. My husband has been my anchor all through these years. He has stood by me, and worked with me in my business. We did all this together,’ the mother of two bubbly children and wife of an understanding husband remembers those years of perseverance and hard work.
‘Allah has been good to us. Every year, for the past eleven years, I have taken loans, every time more than the time before. And every time, I was able to repay the loan and even save more. So about three years ago, I had enough money to look into some other businesses,’ Shamima recounts.
‘As I have said, our area is very poor. They usually use open latrines. Even those who wanted concrete slabs had to get it from Shyamnagar, which is almost half-way to Sathkira town. The cost became high. So they refrained from getting any. As I had more money then, some of my villagers requested my to start a business that would make those slabs,’ explains Shamina.
So, with another loan, she hired eight workers, five masons among them. They started making concrete toilet slabs for her. While the locals started buying from her, the actual boost came, when she had convinced three Union Parishads to buy slabs from her as part of their sanitation programme.
After such a big breakthrough, Shamima had enough working capital to run her businesses properly. But her journey had not ended. ‘I thought, since if I had become a wholesaler, if I tried with some more capital, I would be finally able to bring a more stable state to my vegetable business. I wanted to go up. By then, I had a dream of owning a big business,’ Shamima points out.
In one giant leap, in 2003, she took a loan of Tk 200,000 from Gonomukhi. With all the savings she had from previous years, and the new loan, she was able to buy a truck. ‘Now I had no worry about transportation. I could bring in large quantities of vegetables and store them. I would sell to wholesalers in bulk. I could also rent out the truck.’
Shamima life’s has changed a lot. Now she doesn’t have to sit at her store always. She hires managers. ‘It’s still hard work. Maybe not as hard as before. My children are growing up. My little boy needs attention.’
‘Honesty has been my best strategy in business. And without the help of Gonomukhi Foundation, none of this would have been possible either.’
Does she like the recognition? ‘The people at Citibank, who sent me to New York, Mamum shaheb, and also Parveen apa of Palli Karmna-Shahayak Foundation. They all took so much care of me. At that program, I took pictures with a lot of people. The Indian lady, who was translating what I said, later told me that one of them was the daughter of America’s former president, Clinton. She was nice too.’
Before the image of Shamima holding hands with Chelsea Clinton in New York, on November 8, 2005, caught the attention of newspaper readers around the globe, few knew the name of a 15-year old shy girl from Biralakkhi, and her decade-long journey from despair to hope.

Published: Heroes/ The New Age/ January, 2006

Selim Al-Deen: Telling our tales, our way

Selim Al-Deen interviewed by Mahfuz Sadique

‘The tales of my farmers,’ he says as he takes a long drag from the tightly-held cigarette between his fingers, ‘is no less heroic than the Herculean feats of Achilles or Prometheus.’ Dying rays of a winter afternoon get caught up in the ensuing smoke, and as Greek tragedies fade away behind the veil, from behind his desk at his second-floor office in the dramatics department of Jahangirnagar University in Savar, Selim Al-Deen tells me a quintessentially Bengali tale. It is the tale of fighting against nature’s wrath, of fighting with tigers, of clearing dense forests for cultivation, and it is the tale of one man’s search to bring the soil and soul of a race to the pages of literature and the stage of drama.
Firoza Khatun was worried about his eldest son. Her third child, Selim, just couldn’t stop reading. This son of hers — born on August 18, 1949 — had taken to reading as if there were no tomorrow. As Firoza’s husband, Mofizuddin Ahmed, a deputy superintendent of customs, moved from one town to the next due to his job postings, she had to shuffle along with her seven children. Ever since Selim learned to read while they were at Anwara, Chittagong, he had read everything he got his hands onto. Comilla, their home district Feni, Moulvibazar, Kurigram, Rangpur, Lalmonirhat — the list of places Selim has attended schools at reads like a route crisscrossing Bangladesh. Perhaps as he stayed at one place for such short a span, books became his best friend. And by the time it was time for Selim to head out to university in 1966, he had made his choice: he would be a writer.
Selim recalls: ‘I read everything. By the time I entered university I had read most major works. My mother was so worried with my frenzied reading that she beat me once for reading all day.’
The classrooms of Dhaka University’s Bangla department were to be the breeding ground of minds which were to shape the coming decades. ‘It was my teacher Munier Chowdhury who spurred me to put my attention to drama. If I had to point out a catalyst for my first inclinations into a particular stream of literature, it would be Munier sir,’ recalls Selim.
And as Selim forayed into the realm of theatrics and looked deeper into original literature written for the stage, he started to have a grave realisation: ‘I almost felt insulted that starting from Roman literature to Shakespeare, all major languages of literature had great tragedies. Whereas Bangla utterly lacked any.’
It was with this realisation that drama as an established form within the scope of Bangla literature lagged behind most other languages that urged Selim to take up writing drama. But Selim admits that it would not be another decade till he would finally be able to create a unique Bengali ‘narrative’ stream in his acclaimed play Kittonkhola.
Selim Al-Deen’s fundamental contribution to the field of drama, and the literary form of Bangla drama, are many. But his crowning achievement has to be his success in giving Bangla drama a unique voice. ‘Techniques cannot be art. It is the realisation that it brings out. But to bring out that realisation depends a lot on the technique used.’
While Selim started out with his first play Libriam as early as in 1968, while still a university student, his early works were, in his words, ‘more centred on European themes at the time’. ‘Sartre or Camus came into my early work. But I realised that Western dilemmas could not be the basis of Bangla drama,’ says Selim.
Till 1977, Selim’s works such as Sharpa Bishawak Galpo, Jwandis o Bibidho Baloon, Explosive o Mul Shomoshya, Karim Bawali’r Shatru o Mul Mukh Dekha, Charkakrar Documentary were mostly based on the European school of thought.
‘Between 1978 and 1979, I spent considerable amount of time observing our folk forms of theatre, such as jatras. It was at this juncture that I sat down to write my first fundamental work on the new format,’ recalls Selim.
The result was Kittankhola, considered as the first major play based on the new format. Selim never looked back. Through plays such as Bashon, Atotai, Saifulmulk Badiuzzaman, Keramat Mangal, Hat Hodai, Chaka (later made into a film), Selim kept up his experimentation with formats such as ‘epic realism’, which he brought into Bangla plays single-handedly.
The early nineties saw Selim focusing on a new style derived from the folk traditions. In Jaiboti Konya’r Mon, the ‘kathya-natya’ style was used. ‘This was another tradition that had been ignored for long. This format was again used in Hargaaz.’
Selim Al-Deen has played a pivotal role in the theatre movement of Bangladesh with his involvement with one of the leading theatre groups in the country — Dhaka Theatre. One of its founding members, almost all of Selim’s plays have been staged by Dhaka Theatre. Selim has also been one of the key organisers of Bangladesh’s village theatre movement. He took the monumental task of creating the only dictionary on dramatics available in Bangla.
Having been awarded with almost all national recognitions possible in the field of theatre, Selim Al-Deen’s work is studied at many universities across the world. Several of his plays have been translated into other languages, and staged too. In fact, he is one of few Bangladeshi writers to have his plays staged by West Bengal troupes.
‘But my life actually comprises of another component that I take pride in. In front of my eyes, I have seen the dramatics department of Jahangirnagar University grow. If I were to sum up my life’s work, then 30 per cent of it would be related to the university,’ Selim points out.
Pressed to mention his greatest achievement in his own mind, he finishes, ‘I guess, I would consider my life’s work most relevant when considering Bangla drama’s search for its roots and a place in the firmament of world literature.’

Published: Heroes/ The New Age/January, 2006

Farhad Mazhar: ‘And the seed shall set you free’

Farhad Mazhar interviewed by Mahfuz Sadique

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‘Seeds,’ says Farhad Mazhar, when i ask him about the focus of his agricultural movement. The man behind the Nayakrishi Andolon (literally, the new agricultural movement) leans back and ties his long grey hair in a pony-tail, fixes the beads round his left wrist. We meet at the first-floor conference room of UBINIG (a Bengali acronym for Research on Alternatives to Development), the organisation spearheading the movement. The room itself stands out as a time-capsule of the 58-year-old’s life, which has been as eventful, as it has been controversial.
On the opposing walls are two worn-out Che Guevara posters. A wooden bookshelf on the floor is stuffed with daily newspapers, files of clippings, and old copies of Chinta — the Bengali magazine Farhad had founded, and also bears legacy to a crucial event in his life. It was Chinta that had carried Farhad’s essay (‘The Ansar Rebellion’) on the 1994 uprising of the paramilitary force. He was arrested under the Special Powers Act, to be eventually released through a court ruling, but only after a national and global outcry had ensued appealing against his detention, including an appeal in the The New York Times, signed, among others, by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
And as if to overpower all other objects in the room, and to point to his present preoccupation, a large framed map of the world with dots showcasing global biodiversity concentrations rests atop the bookshelf. The area indicating Bangladesh is almost clogged with red dots. Farhad Mazhar and the 50,000 farmers of the Nayakrishi Andolon want that map to stay as it is.
‘It was a book, Symbolic Logic, that first got me thinking,’ recalls Farhad. Born in Noakhali on August 9, 1947, Farhad’s ‘turning point’ in life, as he puts it, was that book by Bertrand Russell and AN Whitehead, which spurred in him the need to question conventional wisdom. ‘After getting into university (Dhaka University), I got involved with left-student politics. For me, I guess, it was a philosophical quest,’ Farhad reminisces.
But it was the dogged cynic in him, borne from the firm footings of logical deduction, which pushed Farhad to question the ‘idealist’ nature of left-student politics of the time. While the mid-sixties saw him involved with the politics of the Maoist-block of Chhatra Union, by the late sixties, having graduated with a Pharmacy-degree in 1967, a more decisive means to attaining the result of that elusive ‘class emancipation’ was crystallising within Farhad’s mind. Like many of his contemporaries, he also started contemplating ‘armed struggle’ as the final necessary thrust.
In the early seventies, as the left sought to place itself within the new political context, Farhad’s philosophical quest took a turn. ‘At that juncture, I got involved with the Purbo Banglar Sramik Dal,’ Farhad recalls. Popularly known as the Sarbahara Party (Sharbahara meaning proletariat), led by the firebrand Siraj Sikdar, their dream was of Bangladesh’s own Naxalite movement, a local parallel of the armed Maoist struggle in West Bengal.
This polarisation of Farhad from the mainstream holds a key to the gradient of his thought in later years. The intellectual dictates of the centre — be it political, social, cultural or economic, had started to find the sceptic in Farhad. Though his primary inclination to class emancipation remains intact till today, he had already started questioning the approach prescribed.
During this time Farhad Mazhar was also heavily involved with various cultural movements. He was a key member of the theatre troupe called Bahobachan.
But at the height of the frenzied struggle for change, Farhad left the country. After returning from a prolonged stay in America, where he had attended the New School for Social Research in New York, Farhad came back to the country in 1981 and joined the pharmaceutical operation of Ganasasthya Kendra. The involvement was to be short lived.
And it was in this period in his life that Farhad started engaging in, as he puts it, ‘the search for an effective way forward.’ Though, upon his return, he again started taking an active role in left politics through his involvement with the Oikya Prokriya, a political grouping attempting to unify the splintered Maoist factions in the country, the sceptic in him was lurking in the background. Alongside this, he gave crucial support to the Chhatra Oikya Forum in their fight against the dictatorship of President Ershad.
At the time, Farhad was a regular participant at several study circles of left political parties, which were also engaged at finding a new solution to the class problem. In fact, he still maintains and attends many such study circles, though not all of them are left-leaning. But it was at UBINIG, founded in 1982, primarily as a study circle addressing women’s issues through alternative approaches to the main issues of development, that Farhad found the key to his answer. ‘Between 1983 and 1987, the ideas generated from this study circle gave birth to what are UBINIG and Nayakrishi today. Countering the two basic principles of the development model prescribed by international entities: income-generating and export-based industrialisation approach, we felt that a community-based ‘sectoral’ approach was required,’ explains Farhad.
‘If you develop a specific sector, including all the support networks that it requires, an entire community, and its craft, will flourish. And it is sustainable,’ points out Farhad. Farida Akther, Farhad’s partner-in-life, was one of the key founding members of this circle.
While Farhad kept up with UBINIG’s soul searching for a way forward, the small study circle had gained organisational form through awareness programmes addressing health issues, mainly concentrating on infant mortality and population control. ‘This was a critical phase. We started to look into the possibility of getting involved with specific communities, or rather sectors, and try to provide them with support in the form of alternative ideas,’ explains Farhad. ‘It was clear from our studies that indigenous techniques of production had to be preserved. The only requirement was a more concentrated community-based approach.’
The first implementation of this idea was with the weavers of Tangail. ‘Rather than providing them with credit, we provided them with designs and an assurance that we would buy their products,’ Farhad elaborates. As an outlet for these products, UBINIG eventually created Prabartana in 1989, a sister concern that envisioned promoting artisans and weavers by bringing them to the niche, high-end market.
But it was to be an unlikely event that would give Farhad and UBINIG, the opportunity to implement their ideas at a far larger scale. The floods of September, 1988, which devastated the country’s crop, became an unlikely thrust for Farhad to get involved in implementing the ideas of community-approach to production. While generic ideas of production were at hand, the specific problems of farmers were another issue.
‘In Tangail, where UBINIG had already concentrated their work with weavers, farmers asked for help. They brought up the issue of seeds. The seeds for their winter crops were lost,’ recounts Farhad. Imbued with the intellectual rigour of the left, Farhad leapt into the problem. After many discussions with farmers, and through a study conducted by UBINIG in 1989-90 on the perception of farmers towards ‘modern agriculture’, i.e. chemical-based agriculture, it became clear that what was being dubbed as ‘modern’ was also ‘degenerative’.
And this is where Farhad Mazhar comes full circle: ‘just as Marxism is not intellectually suited for our culture, any attempt at implanting farming techniques and ingredients from outside — dubbed as modern — is fundamentally flawed.’
The problems pointed out by farmers were multifarious. Ranging from the declining fertility of the soil, progressive need for fertiliser usage to maintain yield levels to worsening health conditions, such as intestinal, skin and respiratory diseases, most of which farmers attributed to the increased usage of chemical fertiliser.
‘Nor UBINIG or I gave them anything new. Rather we just suggested them to go back to their traditional farming techniques. And that is how Nayakrishi came about. Since the techniques used are essentially indigenous, Nayakrishi at its core is a community-based farmer’s movement,’ Farhad points out.
‘To start with, we suggested that farmers make compost as a replacement to chemicals. They succeeded in the 45-day trial,’ Farhad recalls. But Farhad is cautious in pointing out that ‘such indigenous techniques have been passed on, and developed, from generation to generation through trial and error in different ecologies and landscapes.’
Somewhat contradicting the theme of ‘practicing indigenous techniques’ though, like their very own Ten Commandments, Farhad suggests that farmers who come under the Nayakrishi Andolon follow ten ground rules, which should dictate all farming practices. They are: ‘Water is life and also wealth’; ‘Seed is the totality of life activities, the metaphor and the organising principal of farming in material forms.’ And some wordings, along with traditional farm knowledge, carry subtle references to Farhad’s history with the left: ‘Agriculture is not merely milk and meat production and it is never a factory.’
Under the vision of Farhad, the Nayakrishi Andolon, while essentially remaining a peasants’ movement, has propelled itself to become one of the components — regionally and globally — in the fight to preserve biodiversity. The issue has gained gradual attention at global platforms since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, and now ranks as a key battle between translational-driven, capitalism-based economic discourse vs. the anti-globalisation camp. Farhad Mazhar is flexing his intellectual fibres to provide the farmers with the appropriate course of action.
Farhad’s mind, probably relishing in the process, points out: ‘Transnational companies are trying to make indigenous materials and techniques obsolete. If they succeed, our farmers will become prisoners to these corporations.’
‘And this is where seeds come in. To counter any attempt by large corporations to patent our traditional seeds, farming families of the Nayakrishi Andolon have set up seed banks of traditional varieties,’ explains Farhad. These are called ‘community seed wealth centres’, with elaborate networks of akhra (seed huts). Farming families also engage in seed swapping, in the process completely bypassing commercial seed. To give all these activities a strategic focus, the families have formed a nationwide network: Nayakrishi Seed Networks (NSN), mostly operated by the women of the household.
‘This practice not only helps farmers remain self-reliant, but, in turn, has become the primary protection for biodiversity,’ Farhad explains. In fact, in terms of protecting biodiversity NSN has become a formidable force: over one thousand rice and vegetable seed varieties. And further exhibiting Farhad’s first answer, a poster in the staircase of UBINIG’s office reads: ‘Keep the seed in your hand, sister.’
While an ever-growing peasants’ movement that came out of a study circle of disillusioned leftists remains as Farhad Mazhar’s key focus, his ‘philosophical quest’ that started decades ago has not stopped yet.
Some call it disillusioned, some see it as ‘radical’. Though, Farhad remains an independent, yet marginalised, intellectual voice in the country, his comments often stir up mixed, and often heated, responses. His attempt at bringing the Bauls, the wandering spiritual singers of Bangladesh, to the forefront of national culture, has earned widespread acceptance.
On the other hand, over the years, as more and more of Farhad’s lectures, writings and comments on philosophy, politics and culture have increasingly slanted towards giving an alternative intellectual expression to Islamic Socialism, and also an indigenous political language based on spirituality, he has drifted further away from the mainstream intelligentsia of the country.
Farhad remains dogged though. ‘My quest continues. My actions and my ideology have to be in unison. UBINIG, Nayakrishi Andolon are manifestations of my ideas. Economic and political struggle cannot be separate. With time, the politics behind it will also become more consolidated than now’, Farhad believes.
Does a man leave behind a singular legacy? Or is it fragmented, and should each string stand on its own? Time will tell, as it will also show whether Nayakrishi Andolon, Bangladesh’s indigenous peasants’ movement can stand the tide, and not be ‘overwhelmed in the modern world, co-opted or submerged beneath the staggering flow of business as usual.’
In Farhad, though, the eccentric cynic might just have found that elusive exception. Maybe he has, at last, found the ‘magical seeds’ of hope in the grand quest for ananda, which refers to ‘harmony with all entities of life’ in Nayakrishi farming.
Proof: ‘Nayakrishi will become a global movement in ten years!’
Interview: Mahfuz Sadique

Living with the sea

Mahfuz Sadique reveals how the inhabitants of the cyclone-ravaged coastal islands of Sandwip and Kutubdia could be changing the way people across the world deal with natural disasters

<> Nilufar’s father, Abdul Baten, 36, stands by the dirt road that runs beside their mud hut right on the embankment, his gaze on the horizon. ‘The nadi is swelling again. It is hungry. Soon, it will start eating,’ his voice has a tense undertone, but he is calm. What he, and the other inhabitants of this forgotten little Chuatoli village on Bangladesh’s coastal island of Sandwip call ‘river,’ is nothing less than the restless Indian Ocean. A gaze out to the horizon, and Baten’s words ring true: the mighty Bay is truly swelling up. ‘The west side of the island has already started eroding. Chunks of earth as large as houses are being devoured by the water,’ Baten points towards his right. There is no landmass there; just the endless sea.
Like their ancestors, Baten and the other inhabitants of Chautoli have lived by the sea for as long as they can remember. They have remained settlers of sorts, for theirs is a existence, the permanence of which depends on the whims of the sea. Sometimes they arrived as new landless settlers from the mainland to these islands along the Bengal coast that had risen out of the salty waters over the centuries, and sometimes, as slaves: both Ibn Battuta and the Chinese traveller Ma-Huen had accounted of ‘Bangali slaves in the Arakan Empire bought from the thriving slave-markets in Sandwip (Chittagong) run by the legendary Portuguese pirate Sebastian Gonzales’.
While lives lived by the sea sway with the rise and fall of the foaming waters, millions have adapted with the threat of cyclones, the saline, infertile soil and the shifting landmass. Two very different areas present a contrasting idea of the coastal life in Bangladesh. Sandwip under Chittagong district is one of the largest islands in Bangladesh with highly fertile soil, while Kutubdia under Cox’s Bazar district is relatively smaller and its soil is almost barren and fruitless. Between them, they represent the wide spectrum of life that is Bangladesh’s coastal belt. Living with cyclones, with minds of explorers, men from islands such as these were among the first from the Ganges Delta region to have set sail for uncharted waters of the high seas and settle as far off as Europe and the US, say historians. Some call them shrewd, but that is just their survival instinct. They are pioneers of sorts: be it the use of solar power as an alternative energy source in Sandwip, or the much lauded low-tech, high-impact Cyclone Preparedness Program (CPP) in place all along the coast.

As the MV Baro Awlia takes the final turn into the channel, and starts its slow progress along the south side of Sandwip to the right and the horizon to the left, the passenger trawler’s inmates are an eclectic blend; a capsule of the cross-section of life that the island has come to represent. The first-class cabins, and the front deck are mostly occupied by returnee non-resident Bangladeshis from as varied places as New York and Muscat. There are the well-off, educated urbanites coming to the island of their origin to settle land disputes, or to see family. Then there are the multitudes of small traders carrying goods varying from fruits from the mainland to Indian cloth. A pale young girl lies on the deck with her head on the mother’s lap returning from an aborted attempt to diagnose her illness at the Chittagong Medical College Hospital. Suddenly there is a commotion, and the yells from the deck eventually clear the matter: the ghat is in sight. With everyone starting for the two exits, there is a mad rush. As I step out through one of the exits, the sight takes me by surprise. What dock? My feet search for something solid, and eventually find the floor of a boat tied alongside the steamer. We are being offloaded in mid-sea. Yes, land is in sight from the boat, but the sheer thought of shifting from a steamer to a boat in mid-sea is no less horrifying.

There is no scope for discussion regarding the fare at the ghat. ‘These things are all fixed down here, bhaiya,’ the scooter driver tells me. The black-smoke-fuming three-wheeler that do not ply on the streets of Dhaka anymore have found their way here. Through bumpy, beaten down semi-pucca roads, the scooter takes us to Shiber Haat, several kilometres into the island and on the other side of the island.
‘The sea was at least a kilometre out, just a year back,’ says Mohammad Shamsuddin, a field officer at the Shiber Haat of Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, one of the first NGOs to have started operations in the island as far back as 1986, and also my hosts at Sandwip. As Shamsuddin performs an intricate dance of sorts with his bike, ploughing through the muddy dirt path on the embankment that is supposed to stretch all along the southern and western side of the island, he points to the brown, turbulent salty waters licking at the cliff-shores barely a few yards from the us.
Standing beside the road, there was Abdul Baten with his eldest daughter, thirteen-year old Nilufar. ‘My parents used say that my great-grandfather came here from somewhere up north in the mainland. We had our own house near the Sadar. When the “big storm” took away our house, we built it again. But a few years back, the sea started eating again. And now look what’s happened. I don’t have any land of my own,’ says Baten.
‘The land where you see my small mud hut is actually a part of the embankment,’ he says. The ‘big storm’ referred to by Baten is the devastating cyclone of ’91. As I had started to understand, life in these islands and all along the coastal belt had changed, in some fundamental way, since that cyclone.
The small courtyard of the Baten family was abuzz with Nilufar’s younger siblings — Irin, 10, Russel, 6, and Saiful, 2. They all hide behind the mother, Moriom, at the sight of a stranger. A mother of four, Moriom, has a tender glow on her face as she is expecting another child. She and her mother-in-law are spreading out peanuts on a mat to dry, which they will eventually sell in the local market. ‘How can I describe our life? Unsure; yes, uncertainty is the mainstay of our life,’ explains Moriom. ‘Look at my family. We are worse than beggars. This island is our only place. We cannot leave it. But where will we live when the sea eventually gobbles up this embankment too?’ she asks me. As I would find later, further west, along the road that brought me to their house, slowly but surely, her worst fears were coming true.
‘Sandwip was such a prosperous land when we were children. After all this land was blessed by the Baro Awlia,’ reminisces Mariom’s octogenarian mother-in-law. She was referring to the popular history that many centuries ago a Muslim pilgrimage while sailing past the then small landmass made a stopover for Asr prayers. Having been enthralled with the beauty of the island, an elderly pious man — referred to as ‘Baro Awlia’ — blessed the land. And that is when the small landmass became the vast island that Sandwip once was. According to some estimates, Sandwip was at one point as large as 600 square-miles.
Whether anyone remembers those days is not sure, but today’s Sandwip is shrinking fast. In fact, it’s nothing unnatural. Just as Sandwip had risen from the sea once, it will sink. For just a few kilometres across into the sea, a new land is rising. Though it sinks with the high and low of the tide, the islanders expect the landmass to become a full-fledged island within a few years. ‘With the length of the land that we can see from here, it might be as large as Sandwip itself,’ says Baten hopefully as he tries to show me a faint outline somewhere in the Bay.
Further down the embankment, I come face to face with the true nature of the wrath of the sea. Suddenly, midway, the dirt road and the embankment disappear. Mohammad Jasim and his family live, to put it literally, on the edge. In fact, as I take a few steps to the edge of the eroding landmass, Jasim pulls me back. ‘You never know what will haven. Large chunks of soil are sometimes washed away,’ Jasim explains. As he goes on to explain, he and his family collect fish fries from the coast and sell them at the local market. In fact, that is what most landless families do in Sandwip. These fries are eventually sold to hatcheries in Khulna, Bagerhaat and other southern districts.
‘Well, considering that we have no property to live off, it is the only source of earning that the sea gives us,’ explains Jasim. ‘But I have to move in day or two. The land where my house stands will be taken by the sea within a few days. I have found a place on the southern side of the embankment where it’s safer. In fact, come next week, the place you are standing will not be here. This sea has so many faces, it is beautiful to you but it is my undoing.’ He seems unperturbed at his imminent predicament. As Moriom had put it earlier, uncertainty is the only certainty in the lives of these islanders.
This uncertainty, paired with the seafaring traditions of the people by the sea, are main reasons why these islanders, and those from areas along the coastal belt, such as Noakhali, or even Chittagong, went in search of better land long ago. And some families in Sandwip even carry this tradition in their lineage. In Sandwip, family titles such as Sherang, Sukani, Tendol, Mondol, Laskar all have their roots with titles of workers and sailors of seafaring vessels. ‘A very famous family is that of Kala Miah Sukani. He is said to one of the first of their community to have settled in the US. Today, few members of that family live at Sandwip, and their entire extended family has moved there,’ explains Mazharul Islam, manager of BNPS.
As I went further inland, the next day, it became clearer that every family had at least one or two family members living abroad. This trend increased even further after the cyclone of ’91. With the lack of work, and a sustainable livelihood, many men migrated to find work in the Middle-East. Here, prosperity seems to come from external influences. ‘I came back last year after working in Jeddah for twelve years,’ Mohammad Monir Hossain of Noapara tells me. ‘My younger brother lives in Italy. And I hope go their soon,’ he explains.
As it came out, most families tend to feel that sending out the men to foreign land is the best way of ensuring prosperity. And if they could they would settle abroad. ‘What can we expect here? For generations, we have lived with the sea. But I guess this generation is tired of that. We want a stable life,’ Mohammad Billal of Choukatoli comments.
The change is visible. And even more so as I move further inland. Kazi Muhibullah, a retired school teacher, is a content man. Two of his sons are working abroad — one in Saudi Arabia and the other in Oman. The money that they have been sending has possible for his two-story concrete building right beside the main market of Chuokatoli. And it has brought another change that stands out as a jewel for an energy-starved country like Bangladesh. On the porch of Muhibullah’s freshly painted house, atop a pole is the newly bought 85-watt solar panel from Grameen Shakti. For a handsome Tk 35,000, Muhibullah’s house has electricity for light and television. Due to many years of government negligence, and dillydallying from part the Rural Electrification Board, Sandwip was long deprived from electricity. Then in 2001 came Grameen Shakti, and soon other organisations followed suit. ‘Presently we sell no less than 100 units of solar panels annually from my centre of Grameen Shakti,’ proudly proclaims Mohammad Zahirul Islam, a manager at the Shiber Haat branch of the company.
Throughout Sandwip’s relatively better off localities a quite revolution of sorts has been taking place. Keeping true to their instincts as explorers, and pioneers, Sandwip has taken on the solar adventure. ‘It is cheap, and at least I feel good that it is helping the environment,’ says a gleeful Muhibullah, who is one of the more educated, and conscious, members of his community. His proactive approach has earned him an added designation. He is also the head of the local team of the Red Crescent Society’s Cyclone Preparedness Program. He has been its head since the cyclone of ’70. Like many others who are voluntarily involved with the CPP, Muhibullah is one of the mainstays in the cycle preparedness efforts that become urgent year upon year.
The stories in Kutubdia, however, paint a more violent image of the sea, but the resilience of its people are a match for its ferocity.
‘I was holding her so tight to my bosom. Only Allah knows what happened,’ she says, eyes neither tearful, nor her voice emotional. ‘My fingers felt numb, and when I looked down, she was not there anymore. My little baby girl was gone – washed away by the sea,’ Shahela Khatun, 38, recounts the events of that fateful April night of 1991 when ‘the land became a sea, and the sea became a wave’, as another resident had one described it to a photographer. While clinging to a babul tree, she had lost her 3-month-old Yasmin, along with a son, Jasimuddin, and two more daughters, Sultana and Jannat.
Sitting on the uthan (porch) of her mud hut, you wouldn’t know death was once here. With three toddlers, Shahela feeds her 3-year-old Nahar. Though her life, and that of all her neighbours’ at Kutubdia’s Azom Colony, seems to have changed little over the decade, this community has been through a whirlpool of upheavals.
‘They came to my house to warn me of the coming storm, but this happened every year. I didn’t pay much heed to their words then,’ says Marium’s neighbour, Maimuna Akhtar, 42, who had lost a son and a daughter in ’91. ‘Now I do what they tell me.’
Across the Kutubdia Channel, by the shores of the mainland, as S. M. Zaker Hossain, 46, almost yells into his megaphone, and his partner Mohammed Iskander, 37, winds his handheld siren, the sleepy village of Mognama, still not fully awake from its early morning slumber, springs into a magical momentum. Grandfathers, clutching the hand of 6-year-olds tighter than usual pace towards Hossain; young men look up from the adjoining salt fields; and some housewives loosely holding their toddlers, wrapping their saris over their heads as a veil, hurriedly come to the bamboo picket fences, suddenly the entire village is on alert.
‘What is the signal,’ an old man asks Hossain, inquiring of the numerical standard of danger signals denoting storm intensity; 10 being the dreaded highest number. ‘It’s a drill,’ tells Hossain. As those who had gathered around him start to leave, not a bit agitated with the false alarm, the Unit-2 team leader of Mognama’s Cyclone Preparedness Program (CPP) takes off his Red Crescent vest, gets down from his bicycle, and with pride beaming from his sunburned face, comments, ‘How things have changed!’
‘Things have truly changed,’ says 58-year old Abdul Malek, another veteran Red Crescent volunteer under the CPP, ‘since I started out way back in 1972. After the cyclone of ’70, the Red Crescent came to our village. When they called for volunteers for the three-day training, I and my neighbor, Abdur Rashid here, joined up. Whereas, back then, people paid little attention when we told them about warnings, after the cyclone of ’91, they started listening.’
The people of Mognama, along the Bay of Bengal, are no strangers to tropical cyclones and storm surges. Villagers like them, and those in Kutubdia, and 5 million others, inhabitants of mainland locales, and islands dotting the coastline, fall within the High Risk Area (HRA), which spans a staggering 8,900 square kilometres in 13 districts of Bangladesh. The HRA is classified as the zone most vulnerable to cyclones.
The Bangladesh coastline has experienced a total of 66 major cyclonic storms from 1797 to 2001, and numerous smaller, yet equally fatal ones. Coastal configurations, and bathymetry of the Bay of Bengal, along with the fact that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which is situated near the equator, and where winds from the two hemispheres meet, shifts with the apparent movement of the sun across the Bay, makes it a breeding ground of cataclysmic cyclones.
These cyclones can typically whip up inland wind speeds well above 200 kmph, as was the case in 29th April, 1991, when gusts of 225 kmph and tidal surges topping 7.5 meters lashed the villagers of Mognama and other such coastal communities, killing nearly 140,000 people. With little to protect them, the last bastion between life and death for these villagers remains any early warning system. This in turn enables them to take refuge in the nearly 2,000 cyclone shelters, mostly constructed after the ’91 disaster, all across the HRA. And this lifeline of early warning comes from none other than Bangladesh’s homegrown, low-tech and simple, yet effective system known as the CPP.
‘The CPP, initiated in the late sixties with substantial help from the Swedish Red Cross Society, geared into full operation after the cyclone of ’70, and is now managed jointly by the Government of Bangladesh and Bangladesh Red Crescent Society. It is one of the most successful cyclone preparedness programs in the world’, claims Mohammad Nasir Ullah, Director of CPP. And now he has formidable international footing to say so. At the Second World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan in 2005, the program was flaunted by world experts as a classic example of an effective warning and dissemination tool. Eva Von Oelreich, head of the disaster preparedness and response department of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies dubbed it ‘as a global model for an early warning system.’
The CPP operates Asia’s largest radio network: 35 High Frequency (HF) transceiver radios with a main base station located at the Dhaka headquarter; a field station system of 97 Very High Frequency (VHF) transceivers to receive and transmit messages; and finally transistor radios used at village level to receive meteorological information and cyclone warning signal bulletins transmitted by Radio Bangladesh in special weather bulletins on regular basis during the time of cyclones or depressions.
But the true foot soldiers of this extensive network are the 33,324 volunteers of CPP, divided into 2,777 units of ten men and two women, across the coastal belt. These well-trained volunteers are equipped with appropriate warning equipments, such as megaphones, sirens, public address equipment, signal lights and signal flags. The volunteers are also provided with appropriate gear such as rain coat, gum boots, hard hats, life jackets and torch lights. ‘We can warn nearly 8 million people, and fully assist 4 million to the cyclone shelters,’ says the director of CPP.
‘The entire program has a significant training and public awareness component,’ Nasir Ullah points out. ‘On recruitment our volunteers are given preliminary training by the CPP officers. A three-day basic training is then given to the volunteers, batch by batch, on different aspects such as dissemination, evacuation, sheltering, rescue, first aid and relief operation,’ he explains. The training of volunteers is complemented by an extensive public awareness program that includes cyclone drills and demonstration, staging of dramas/ folk songs, distribution of posters, leaflets and booklets, film/ video shows and radio and TV programs.
As Shahela of Kutubdia stirs the rice in the pot on the earthen stove, she knows what to do when the next storm comes. ‘I am alert whenever I hear the sirens and the megaphones. I will not lose any more of my sons and daughters to the sea,’ she says, as she looks up at the sea. ‘Never again.’

Published: SLATE, The New Age/ August, 2006

‘Living to tell the tale’

Mahfuz Sadique chronicles stories of those who stayed, those who left, those who fought and those that were captured

Dr Samir Kanti Saha
Fled with his family from their village home in Noakhali and was registered with a refugee camp in Agartala
We lived in Dadpur village under Sudharampur thana of Noakhali district. My father was a commissioned agent, and we led a well-off life. I was studying in class ten at the time of the war. We left our village a few weeks after the war had started. We went to our maternal uncle’s place in Choumuhuni and stayed there for 15 days. But as that was getting increasingly insecure, we left for India in mid-May.
We hadn’t even gone 4/5 kilometres from the ghat when we were stopped by a boat which had Shantibahini members in it. They searched the entire boat and when they couldn’t find anything, they did something that I still find unbelievable. They just dropped a few bullets and a gun on my father’s lap and yelled out: ‘Here we have found weapons.’ We were brought back to Choumuhuni.
After persuasion from an uncle and a family friend, they eventually did let us go. We left on that boat and eventually on foot, we finally reached Agartala. I still remember we had to walk for hours on the Akhaura road. The people who were travelling with us on the road became our companions. They helped us carrying sacks and in a way they were a solace amidst all this mayhem.
We started living in this one-room slum quarter, very close to the refugee camp. We were registered with the camp, and had to go there to collect ration. Of all the memories I have of the camp, the most aching is the one of my mother crying. She cried regularly, especially whenever she started cooking, as she remembered how we used to live compared to what she was feeding us now. But my father never cried. He was always strong.
My father and I were returning from the camp with ration one day. My father had the heavy rice sack on his head, and I had the lighter sack of lentils on my head. As we were walking home, it started raining. It was fun for me. But as I looked up, my father’s body was shaking, he was crying. As a teenager that was something that really shook me. I watched my father, Chandra Kanta Shaha, employer of hundreds, a strong man, crying. He cried all night after coming back home. I guess, now that I look back, probably it was the feeling of hopelessness for his children and the life that he had painstakingly created getting lost in front of his eyes that pushed him over the edge.
All through those months, we were known as ‘Joy Bangla’. We rarely had any names. As physician, I find it amusing to recollect that in the camps and the vicinity there was a spread of conjunctivitis. And it also came to be known as ‘Joy Bangla’. They would say, ‘S/he has caught Joy Bangla.’
Sometimes, we would get a jackfruit for 20/25 paisas and that would be our supper. We slept on one single bed. We did not have any pillows, and my parents used a piece of brick with a cloth on top.
The camps were all so cramped too. With their blue plastic roof, in a single compartment lived several families. We sometimes played games. But every day there were times when the entire camp centred around the transistors where the Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendro would be playing. At home, my mother was mostly gloomy; but when the Kendro was playing some item, maybe the Charampatra or even the news read by Deb Dulal Bandyapadhay, her face would light up with hope.
At the camps, religion was never a factor. As I said earlier, we were all Joy Bangla. That was our religion and our identity.
Finally, in December, we left for Murshidabad. We started feeling that the war was going to end soon. One of my uncles lived in Murshidadbad. For me, the day of liberation came when I took my little sister, Kabita, on the handle of my cycle and slowly pedalled into a liberated country. We went to the bordering village of Ajani in Rajshahi, where my father had business and we had lived earlier. We saw collaborators being rounded up.
As I look back, those were such troubling days. The sense of humiliation I saw in my father’s eyes would haunt me fore a long time. That was the most painful experience of living in exile without hope.
Dr Samir Kanti Saha is a professor of microbiology at the Bangladesh Institute of Child Health, Dhaka Shishu HospitalShaheen Anam
Was in Dhaka throughout the war, and assisted guerrilla activities from her home, which was one of the major safe houses in the capital
It was early April, probably the first week. My brother, Wasif, and several others — Bodi, Towheed, Badal, Samad, Atik — came to our house in Dhanmondi with about five or six rifles. They were .303 rifles. They dug up a hole in the ground and concealed the weapons there. The fight was going to start. We were all young. I was in university, so were the others. Now I look back, and think, how were they even thinking of fighting a city full of army with those things?
Though there was fear, our age permitted us the liberty of adventure, or even excitement. We were doing something. And I felt bad as I stayed home and my brothers and the others were out there without food, or shelter, for days.
As the months passed by, our house started to resemble a warehouse. We stored blankets, medicine and anything that was required. Our almiras, floors were overflowing with these items.
On some occasions there were as many as 10 to 12 young freedom fighters at our place. They would be either planning or hiding for the time being. On one such occasion, a captain in the Pakistan Army, Rizwanul Islam, came to our home, without notice. I knew him by acquaintance from my school days at the Cantonment Model School. As he walked into the drawing room, there were at least ten men sitting there, all guerrilla fighters. It was a tense situation. He had a brief conversation with us and left. He probably guessed their identity, but did not inform the authorities.
Several months into the war, we heard that the army was conducting house-to-house searches in Dhanmondi. We got scared. Our house had so many belongings of freedom fighters. We just locked the doors and left. Fortunately, our house was not searched.
But on the morning of August 29, I woke up at gunpoint. A soldier was pointing a gun at me as I woke up. I told him to stand outside the room as I had not even got out of bed. As I came out, I found the whole house was ransacked. The whole house was swarming with at least 200 army personnel. They had searched every corner. Then they took us to the back of our house, where the dugout was located. The fighters had taken the weapons sometime in May, but inadvertently left the place bare.
The army men told us that they knew that weapons were kept there. When asked where my brother was, my mother told them that he had gone to Pakistan to visit relatives. We had some relatives in Pakistan. Actually, he was Agartala at that time. When they could not get any information, one of them suddenly pulled one of my younger brothers by the arm. They threatened us by saying that they would get all the information they needed if my brother was ‘properly’ interrogated. Both my mother and I grasped my younger brother and started yelling that we would not let them to take him away. At this point, a senior official came and broke off the standoff. He warned my mother and told us to refrain from helping any fighters. He also said that they knew that my brother was a freedom fighter, and he should stay away from such activity. Later, we learned from our neighbours that earlier in the morning they had surrounded the house and brought a limping man to the house. It was Bodi Bhai. They tortured him.
There were several such safe houses all over the capital. There was Atik Bhai’s house. Then there were Shirin Haque’s, where my brother took refuge when he came back from Agartala, Alam Bhai’s, Chullu Bhai’s office. The army had captured Bodi Bhai from Chullu Bhai’s place.
After the August incident, we were very disheartened. I am ashamed to think now, but many of us who were desperate to get news of the captured and to get them released, went to a peer. Poor Jhinu apa! She went and cried at Pagla peer’s feet so many times, thinking that he might be able to get her loved one released. Those were really hard times. Several of those who used to come to our house were captured and the worst was feared.
Then finally, December 16 came. On the seventeenth, Shahadat Bhai came to our house with Chullu Bhai. There were so many others. They were firing blanks. We were so happy! We went to Jahanara Imam’s house. We feared the worst for Rumi, her son. But she was so resolute.
For us, the generation that liberated the nation, a common frame of reference binds us. Those were glorious days. When I look back, I feel proud that our generation had liberated the nation.
Shaheen Anam is executive director, Manusher Jonno, a non-governmental organisation working on Human Rights and good governance.

Kazi M Iqbal
Captured in early June, 1971, while on a guerrilla mission, held and tortured in a prisoner of war camp in Dhaka Cantonment, and later at the Dhaka Central Jail, till December
I was studying at Dhaka University. On March 28, I left the city. First I went to Jhenidah, and then onto Magura. I crossed the border near Meherpur. I trained at the camp under Tauqfique Elahi, Bir Pratik. At the end of May, or maybe early June, we went into Pakistan territory to blow up a train near Jibonnagar, Darshana under Kushtia district.
We were staying at a safe house. Two others and I were caught with explosives, guns. The 18th Punjab regiment’s Bravo company captured us. I find it amazing that even after catching me with explosives and weapons, they did not shoot me. I was first sent to a camp in Darshana. Then from there onto Chuadanga, then Faridpur, Jaidevpur and eventually the dreaded Prisoner of War Cage No 1 at the Dhaka Cantonment. Just think about it — it was called a cage. As if we were animals!
Life at the camp was just horrifying. There were all kinds of people being held there. A half-moon warehouse had been turned into a camp. There were at least 1,000 inmates at any point of time. PIA loaders, college teachers, government officials, day labourers — they were all there. The infamous Field Interrogation Unit of Major Faroque brought in many inmates.
I was interrogated and tortured. My entire body had marks of beatings after I was released. Starting from beatings with belts and hunters, to standing on your knees for hours and burned by torches, there were many forms of torture. The main attempt by the interrogators was to degrade and humiliate the inmates as much as possible.
‘Thala, bati, kombol, ei tin shombol’ was the saying at the camp. We were given a mess-tin. That was the only container we got. We carried water in it, used it for washing and carried food in it. The food we were given was barely food. A blob of rice, and a slap of cooked dundul, those vegetables, which are eventually dried for scrubbing. For some weird reason, they did not give any salt in the food. In the morning, we just got a mug of tea, sometimes cold and if we were lucky slightly warm. By the time I left the camp, I had come down to 80/90 pounds. I was young, but others were worse off. The sight at the camp was no less horrifying than the images seen in World War II movies, and those of Nazi concentration camps. Many went mad after several months. Many more were completely mentally unstable.
My interrogation went on as usual. They asked me what I would do to if they let me go. I said that I would go back to India. So they beat me even more. Eventually, they let me write a confession. I took full liberty and started writing my life’s history, which eventually led to nothing. During those days, we saw many freedom fighters, and some Indian soldiers being brought in. Samsher Mobin Chowdhury, Bir Bikram, was brought in one day. He was limping from his wound.
Finally, in October, I was transferred to Dhaka Central Jail. Compared to the PW Cage, that was like heaven. Though I was held up at a small cell with several others, the situation was quite different. For one, we could eat to our hearts’ content. We could take as much rice as we wanted. And the cooking was edible, with salt.
Sometime after I had been sent to the Central Jail, I was told that I would be tried under Marshal Law. There was also an underhand deal going on, as I later learned. My father was summoned to the cantonment, and told that if he gave the investigating officer a bottle of whisky, they would punish me, but would not beat me. My father gave it without a question.
My trial was a mockery. When I declined to call any defence, they appointed a lawyer on my behalf. His opening words were: ‘He is guilty, but kindly reduce the punishment.’ Anyway, by this time December had come. And when on December 4 India gave its consent, we knew the end was near. As the jail was an open compound, we could see the early attacks of MiG-21 fighters coming in from the other side of the city.
On December 17 we got out. Shahadat Chowdhury came and took us out. I went to my aunt’s house near Science Laboratory.
The days at the prisoner camps were like a nightmare. They were days when we lived on the borderline between rationality and insanity. Other than the memory of eating arum for the first time while in Dhaka Central Jail, I didn’t bring back any good memories.
I look back and wonder how we survived that cage.
Kazi M Iqbal is a director at the Consolidated Tea & Lands Co. (Bangladesh) Limited, a subsidiary of Finlay

Ishtiaque Aziz Ulfat and Major (retd) Manzoor Ahmed, Bir Pratik
Left Dhaka for training camps in the early days of the war, and fought for the entire duration
We were friends since childhood. One lived at Abhay Das Lane and the other at Ram Krishna Mission road. In early March, even before the war had started, we being the youthful rebels we were, had planned to hijack a Pakistan International Airlines plane. But we abandoned that plan.
About that time, we also made many Bangladeshi flags and sold them. We had collected a lot of money from the sales and were hoping that they would come in handy if there was a resistance. It did. Then came March 25. All night there were trucks plying on the roads. On the night of the twenty-sixth, they burned down the Ittefaq office, (Ulfat’s house was right next to the paper) and we could feel the heat coming out of the hot iron.
When the curfew was lifted on March 27, we went to see what had happened. Near the Ittefaq office, a teenager was lying dead stuck in between the gap of the gate of a house. Everywhere we went, there was death. Shankharibazar, Shadarghat, everywhere! We had only one thing on our mind at that point — revenge.
All our brothers were friends with each other. When news came that Khaled Mosharraf had started a resistance, Manzoor’s brother Akther was also among those in the 4 East Bengal Regiment in Kishoreganj, we felt we had to do something.
After an initial visit to Pirojpur, we got instructions from Major Jalil, who was in Barisal, to go back, and collect more young men from Dhaka and come back. After returning we gathered several others, and eventually three of us — Ulfat, Manzoor and Shelly — left Dhaka.
We reached Madaripur. There we stayed at the residence of the Bhuiyan’s, who were very helpful. Then we went on to Bagerhat, where the manager of the Australasian Bank gave us refuge and helped us. We finally reached Shelly’s paternal home in Satkhira. After staying there for a day, Shelly’s family wouldn’t let him come with us. So, he stayed back, and later joined us in war. We took his watch and all the money we could.
Eventually on April 20 we crossed into India. We reached Manzoor’s maternal home in Hoogli. We stayed there for nearly ten days. Then started the long journey to Agartala, and Matinagar camp, which was the first camp for training. Kolkata to Bihar, on to Shiliguri, Lauding, Dharmanagar and finally Agartala. We ate at the Ashoka Restaurant and went to look for the Shonamuri camp.
Those were golden days. We felt like David in the novel Exodus, or like some character out of Kiriti Ray’s book. The journey we took, looking for the war, was probably the most enduring, as those were the days when we were starting to know the world too. We had just finished college. In a way, we grew up with the war.
Ishtiaque Aziz Ulfat is president, Freedom Fighters Peoples Council
Major (retd) Manzoor Ahmed, Bir Pratik, is a director at Agro-based Industries & Technology Development Project

Major (retd) ATM Hamidul Hossain, Bir Bikram
Fought in the war, got caught by the Pakistan Army, and was subsequently let off, rejoining the war
In March, I was at home in Syedpur under Rangpur district. My father was the sub-divisional police officer there. I had come back home after finishing my studies at Gordon College in Rawalpindi. I left for training right when the war started. I went to Panikata in Darjeeling. After initial training, I came back and, set up a camp at Anginabad in Balurghat. It was made up of 121 fighters, most of them civilians.
Several months into the war, we were planning to blow up a bridge near Syedpur town. So, I decided to go and ‘recce’ (reconnaissance) the target myself, as it was near my hometown. The 48 Field Regiment (Artillery) and the 26th FF Regiment of the Pakistan Army were stationed in the area. Early that morning I started off by bus. The bridge was heavily guarded, and the bus was stopped at a regular patrol post on the bridge. While they were searching the passengers, I closely observed the positioning of the patrol post and other parameters. It was about 9:30am. Everything went fine.
After entering the city, I went straight to a friend’s place to get news of my family. The authorities were holding my father at that point. I was on my way back, on the same bridge, and the same checking. But this time before I realised anything, they strapped my hands and blindfolded me. They took me straight to Syedpur Cantonment. After a while, still blindfolded, I heard salutes and boots clicking. Then I heard the duty officer saying that the adjutant officer was going to interrogate me.
By order of the adjutant, they opened my fold. As I looked up, the man standing in front of me looked very familiar, but I could not place him. Then, he looked straight at me and said, ‘If I am not wrong, you are Tareque from Pindi.’ In a flash, I remembered who the army officer was. Captain Khaled Latif Chowdhury was the cricket captain of the small community team we had back in Chaklala in Rawalpindi. He was a few years senior to me at Gordon College.
He asked me to follow him to his office. There he offered me tea. After that he took me to his mess, which was then at the Syedpur Technical School. It was about 3:30pm. After giving me lunch, he locked me from outside and went off. While in there, I tried all forms of ways to escape. As the sun was setting, I desperately tried to escape, in vain.
Finally, he came after dark and asked me to follow. ‘There is a divisional meeting at Bogra. Come with me’ All this time, he had not asked me even once whether I was a freedom fighter.
So with a Wanton Dodge Truck at the rear, I got up beside him on the M38 jeep, while he told his runner and driver to sit at the back. As we approached Taraganj haat, he abruptly stopped the car. He told me to get off the car. I didn’t oblige, as I knew many such incidents when they shot prisoners from the back. So the captain got off, came over to my side, pulled me down and dragged me to a Banyan tree nearby.
‘I know you are Mukti. And I know you will go back to India the moment I let you go. But yaar, we are friends right. Go. I won’t shoot you. Do you have money?’
And then he gave me some money, and warned me not to take specific routes as their patrols were on them. He got on his jeep and drove off. Not until the red tail lights of the jeep had faded did I gain my composure. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I was let go even after being captured, and that too after they had clear knowledge that I was a freedom fighter.
Many years later, when I was the first PSC graduate on a scholarship to Pakistan at the Quetta Staff College, I met Khaled Latif Chowdhury again. ‘You are back again,’ he boomed. As I look back, I realise that wars are so complex. There is pain and death, but also a human bond that cannot be broken.
Major (retd) ATM Hamidul Hossain, Bir Bikram, PSC is a manager at Padma Oil Company Limited

Mirana Zaman
Fled Dhaka during the war and lived in a village in Tangail
39, New Elephant Road. Yes, I will always remember that house. On the ground floor, we had a pharmacy called ‘Sheba’. We lived on the first floor. We lived there until March 27, 1971. I gave voice for the radio and my husband, QA Zaman, was a manager at the Daily Ittefaq. As the month of March entered its third week, things had started to get tense. We were confused about what was going on. We could feel that something was going to happen. Like many homes in the capital, we had put up the new flag, the one with the map of Bangladesh on it. My three daughters made it.
Then on the night of March 25, around 9:30pm, my husband, Atik Bhai, and others in the neighbourhood went to the turning at Science Laboratory. Now that I think of it, they were so naïve — they were setting up some sort of barricade on the road, as news had spread that tanks were waiting at the Dhaka Cantonment on their way into the city. Then sometime after 10:30pm, we started hearing large bangs and saw smoke rising from the Dhaka University and other adjoining areas. At that time, Dhaka did not have so many high-rises, so from our house we could see smoke bellowing from many buildings. I clearly remember the time because the radio was on, and we were listening to a regular program. A man with a very distinctive voice used to conduct a program on Akashbani that made subtle fun of Pakistan. It started at 10:30pm.
We got scared at that point. We switched off the lights and pulled down all the curtains. Now that I think of it, amidst all this tension, we had forgotten to take the flag down. As the night progressed, we could hear heavy vehicles plying on the road in front of our house.
No one slept that night. In the middle of the night, a military convoy stopped at the house on the opposite side of the road. It was the house of Moazzem Bhai. He was one of the accused in the Agartala Case. Through the slit of our curtains, we saw military personnel threatening the family. As they were about to take them away, Moazzem came into the room. Later we learned that he had been hiding in the attic room. The moment he entered the room, they shot him several times. They took his body to the truck. It was a gruesome sight. They carried his body like that of an animal. In the morning, a man going to the neighbourhood mosque was shot on the street.
After that there was total paranoia. We were just waiting to get out of there. On the morning of March 27, they had lifted the curfew for just two hours. We took nothing. We just locked the door and left. I remember that the recorded March 7 speech of Sheikh Mujib, transmitted just a few days ago and given to me for safe custody, was locked in my almira.
On the morning of March 27, my family, the family of my two brothers-in-law and my brother left for my village. As my husband’s family had come from West Bengal after partition, they had nowhere else to go.
There were about seven to eight cars and jeeps filled with people. My brother’s car was on the lead. He was tall and fair, and could pass off as a Pakistani. We were so tense all along the way. Near Mirpur, there were Biharis out on the streets killing innocent Bangladeshis. One such group stopped us. I do not know what my brother said but eventually they let us go. No one came out of the cars during this time. We were stopped, again, in front of the Savar cantonment; but they let us go too. All along the way, we kept whispering any prayers we knew. One of my brothers-in-law, Colonel Qazi Nuruzzaman, whom we called Phul Bhai, was in grave danger as he was in the army.
We finally reached our village in Karatia in Tangail. Though it was a village, it was quite developed. It had electricity even at that time. Ours was the Syed Bari. It was a big house. However, there were so many of us. There was cooking all day and it was a makeshift kind of living.
While we felt relieved for a few days, it worsened on April 3. Phul Bhai had left by this time. He left the moment we arrived at Karatia, looking for the war. He was so restless. He felt that something needed to be done. The army came on April 3. They came firing, left and right. Many of us fled the house. All the cars were damaged.
The days in the village were always full of uncertainty. Around mid-April, it was no longer safe for Phul Bhai’s family to stay at our place. So they were sent to an even more remote village called Gandhina. The army raided our house several times during the months leading to December. A kabuliwala in the main town always came to our house to warn us of any army raids. On one of these days, they ransacked the house.
Every time the army came, every man, woman and children had a small sack with them as they fled. They had a spare piece of cloth, a gamcha, and in some cases some sort of dry food.
After several weeks, the families of my brothers-in-law went back to Dhaka. Later they fled to India. But as my mother was ill, I stayed back. I had requested my husband to leave with my daughters, who were young then, but he would not leave me back there alone.
I had to come to the capital sometimes. All along the way, I would see dead bodies lying by the roadside. As a one of the big houses in the area, and known to be supporters of the Muktibahini, freedom fighters regularly came to the house. But the saddest day was on Eid day. There was a small canal behind our house.
On the morning of Eid, I had gone to the back of the house. I saw several young boys lying on the bank. They were barely teenagers, and so skinny. They were doing reconnaissance for freedom fighters. I asked them to come in and eat some shemai. But they were scared, and did not come in. It was the saddest of sights.
All through the war, I kept feeling that why had I not died at the very beginning. Then this omnipresence of death would not haunt me every moment. The radio was a relief. The Shadheen Bangla Betar Kendro kept spirits up even amidst dark days. As the months progressed, news of Kader Siddiqui’s fighters fighting the Pakistani army came and we started to regain hope. Gradually, during daylight hours, the Pakistani army ruled, and by night, it was the reign of the Muktibahini.
Then one morning in December we saw hundreds of umbrella-like things dropping from the sky. The fields were bare as the harvesting season was over. Then we realised that they were paratroopers. Before we knew it, December 9 came. Our region was liberated. We eventually came back on December 17. On our way back to Dhaka, I remember seeing many bodies of young Pakistani soldiers lying by the roadside. I felt sad. They were young boys, son of some mother. They had little understanding of what was going on.
As I look back to those days, I realise that a shadow of death hung over us throughout those months. But those were also days which bore our history. They hold tales that will never end.
Mirana Zaman, an actress, has performed in Bangladesh Betar and Bangladesh Television for many years.

Published: The New Age/ December, 2005