Mukti: Free to Be Born Again: Partitions of Indian Subcontinent, Islamism, Hinduism, Leftism, and Liberation of the Faithful

By Sachi G. Dastidar

Mukti: Free to Be Born Again is a history-based autobiographical nonfiction created on three decades of fieldwork in Muslim-majority Bangladesh and Hindu-majority India. Many strands of real-life drama have been weaved together with 1947 Hindu-Muslim, secular-Islamic, and 1971 Islamic-secular, ruling-minority vs. oppressed-majority partitions of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Because of precarious plight, individual and village names have been fictionalized. The story focuses on transformation of a society by the oppressor, oppressed, Islam, and Hinduism. The story ties Indian and Bengali history, views of Muslims and Hindus, role of Bangladeshi Hindu refugee elites in India, pogroms, devastation of minority communities, role of anti-Hindu Islamism and anti-tradition Communism, life of poor oppressed-caste Hindus left behind in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, and more. Dastidar is the first to break a taboo by writing in 1989 about the poor, oppressed Hindu minority left behind by the Hindu-refugee elites in India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496944818

Sachi G. Dastidar

Dr. Sachi G. Dastidar is a distinguished professor of State University of New York. As someone belonging to a family who was cleansed from Pakistan/Bangladesh, partition of India, and subsequent changes in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have been of interest to him. He is a rare individual among tens of millions of Hindu refugees who has gone back to his ancestral home in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. He now helps thirty-three schools for the poor and the orphaned in Bangladesh, West Bengal, Assam, and Mizoram, having built nine schools/dorms in Bangladesh, and one more each in West Bengal and Mizoram states. Several of his books cover 1947 and 1971 partitions—Empire’s Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent’s Vanishing Hindu and other Minorities; Living among the Believers; This Bengal, that Bengal (in Bengali); and This Is My Home (in Bengali). He has authored over seventy-five articles on the issues and has twice testified in Washington about the plight of non-Muslim minorities in a Muslim-majority subcontinent. He heads the Indian Subcontinent Partition Documentation Project (ISPaD).

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© 2015 Sachi Dastidar. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   12/01/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4483-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4482-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4481-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918019

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter I Shuva Rani Joins the Mother

Chapter II Swarup-kati: The Land of Mother Kali

Chapter III Swapup-kati: The Land of the Faithful

Chapter IV Who will marry a Hindu Widow?

Chapter V Shyamnagar of Shuva

Chapter VI Sani Puja: Praying for Lord Saturn’s Blessing

Chapter VII Bibhuti Headmaster’s Matchmaking

Chapter VIII The Era of Partition: Desh-Bhaag

Chapter IX The Vanishing Act

Chapter X Headmaster’s India Pilgrimage

Chapter XI Amal’s Aaddaa Gossip

Chapter XII The Journey of the Truthful Headman: The Community Leader

Chapter XIII Strange Bedfellows

Chapter XIV Calcutta Darshan

Chapter XV The Aashirbaad: Formal Engagement Ceremony

Chapter XVI In Search of Kalikapur

PREFACE

Mukti is a product of love and pain of at least three decades. It is a byproduct of over three decades of field work, social work and travel in the 1947 Partition-affected Bengal –Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), West Bengal (now called PaschimBanga) State of India – as well in the neighboring states of Northeast India – Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Manipur, Arunachal, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Odisha (Orissa) state’s Bangladeshi Hindu-refugee-settled Dandakaranya Forest, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. During my travel in Muslim-majority Bangladesh I have come across the term ‘mukti’ from many, especially indigenous pre-Islamic Hindu, and lately Buddhist, families as they pray for liberation from their suffering. Mukti is an often-used term in Hindu-Buddhist-Jain philosophies which means, according to Sahitya Samsad Bengali-English Dictionary, ‘salvation, nirvana, rescue, liberation, relief, freedom from earthly attachments’ and more (Sishu Sahitya Samsad Private Ltd., 24th Printing, Calcutta, p 761). Book Mukti is a non-fiction with many fictionalized names for their protection as well of their homes and villages. The book is directed towards Western readers many of whom may have heard of India, yet very little is known about post-partition Muslim-majority Bangladesh and Hindu-majority West Bengal, the effects of Indian Partition on the people of the Bengali-speaking region, the former mixed Hindu-Muslim Bengal Province of Colonial British India. Although Partition took place in 1947 its effects continue to this day.

The story is based in Bengal – the present-day Bangladesh, and West Bengal and Tripura states of India – covering the largest Ganga-Brahmaputra delta of the world. It is a lush evergreen charming land crisscrossed by rivers, streams and canals, yet with harsh reality for tens of millions of inhabitants. This is a place where both modern Indian Renaissance and Hindu Reformation Movement were born in the 19th Century. It is also an area which witnessed three unnatural large-scale mass killings in the last part of the 20th Century: The Bengal Famine of 1943 in the era of bumper crop during British rule, the India-Pakistan Partition carnage of 1947, and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 against the Islamic Republic of Pakistan of which Bangladeshis were the majority. Yet no one was held for those mass killings.

One of the effects of 1947 Partition in the northwestern British India was the creation of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, with partitioning of Punjab Province; and later partitioning of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. Indian part declared herself a secular Republic of India. With that partition almost the entire non-Muslim minority of Pakistan, well over quarter of the population – Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsees and Christians – was killed or cleansed, bringing the minority population down to barely 2% of the population. This is often referred as jhatka killing or killing in one stroke. After partition of Kashmir in 1948 the non-Muslim minority population of Pakistani Kashmir came down from a fifth to practically 0%. In the east Bengal Province was partitioned to East Bengal/East Pakistan (joining as the majority population of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, later called Bangladesh) and West Bengal State of India. Yet a treaty was signed in New Delhi on April 8, 1950 by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan that forced East Pakistan’s (Bangladesh) Hindu minority to live in perpetuity in East Pakistan, and no rehabilitation for Hindu refugees was allowed in India, unlike refugees from West Pakistan i.e., from the provinces of Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier Province. In 1947 eastern Bengal’s minority Hindus (plus a relatively small number of Buddhists and Christians) was 30% of the population, including many areas where they were in majority. Since 1947 that minority non-Muslim population has come down to less than 10% in 2014, with over 50 million Hindus missing from the Census. Anti-Hindu pogroms would continue regularly taking thousands and thousands of lives, with confiscation of homes and businesses by declaring their property as Enemy Property, and cleansing of tens of millions. Yet the privileged-caste Hindu-refugee elites quickly rose to power in two Hindu Bengali-majority states in India: West Bengal and Tripura. They would champion liberal, left and Marxist ideologies but refused to show solidarity with the oppressed, mostly belonging to Hindu oppressed castes. The minority Muslim population in Hindu-majority West Bengal in India has gone up from 18% in 1947 to 27% in 2014, is spite of migration of tens of millions of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh. It is estimated that the one-third of West Bengal’s 90 million people (2011) are of Bangladeshi-refugee origin.

As I traveled with my entire family with children in tow it broke many of the social taboos. We were welcomed in homes lot easily, by poor and rich, and by Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, especially by women. Women’s hesitation of talking to a man was broken with the presence of another woman and children. I have written short stories in both English and Bengali covering our experiences.

The Bengal of British India was known to be a relatively-tolerant mixed Hindu-Muslim society where both Hindu and Muslim nationalism played significant role. In a surprise twist of history after Partition of Bengal and India in 1947 both Bengals took stride towards intolerant politics, one anti-Hindu Islamism, the other anti-Hindu Leftism, led by Bangladeshi (East Pakistani) Muslims and Bangladeshi (East Pakistani) Hindu, albeit refugee. The book delves into that ethos and contradiction, although politically incorrect and, at times, impolite.

I have authored several books on the issue of partition and change. Among them are, Empire’s Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent’s Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities (2008), Living among the Believers: Stories from the Holy Land down the Ganges (2006), A Aamaar Desh (in Bengali, This is my home; 1998), and Ai Bangla, Oi Bangla (in Bengali, This Bengal, That Bengal; 1991). I have authored over dozens of articles on the issue as well as have made numerous presentations in the U.S., India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Europe. I have also testified in Washington D.C.,

Seeds of Mukti was first sown in early 1990s when many of my friends and associates asked for translation of my Ai Bangla, Oi Bangla (This Bengal, That Bengal.) Afterwards appeared my A Aamaar Desh (This is my home), a collection of Bengali short stories. I am not sure when I first started writing Mukti, but it must have been late 1990s. Soon I finished a collection of a short story book for Western readers, Living among the Believers: Stories from the Holy Land down the Ganges. Only after completion of my Empire’s Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent’s Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities in 2006 and published in 2008, I started penning more of Mukti. Thus, looking back, it must have taken over 15 years or more to complete the project.

I am a firsthand witness to several contradictory flows in Bengali, Hindu, Muslim and Indian cultures. Some of that I have tried to share with the readers. One of the contradictions is the presence of fatalistic tolerance as well as hardcore intolerance. In the same space some find the presence of spiritual connection to the land, water, flora and fauna while some feel no connection at all yet glorify everything Arabic, Russian or Chinese. One finds militant defenders of the oppressed while the same activists militantly oppress the oppressed. Some champion for the rights of the religious and linguistic minority while oppress their own minority. The people who champion anti-caste messages also oppress the oppressed caste. People who claim to be deeply religious keep on destroying temples, deities, ashrams and forcefully convert the uninitiated. Those who were victims of British colonialism yet colonize other people’s lands. People who champion Hindu-Muslim cohabitation refuse to live with the other, while calling who live next door to the other as communal or racist. Then there are people who are internationalists but refuse to cross international border to visit their ancestral lands yet travel tens of thousands of miles to be a tourist in distant lands.

In the midst of despair there are courageous defenders of the oppressed. These protectors work at individual level, sometimes risking their own lives. There is another aspect that I witnessed during my field work is the conflict between indigenous polytheism with missionary monotheism. There are few places in the world where this conflict is as stark as in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India as all the pre-monotheistic polytheistic religious practices have been eliminated except for India and a few places surrounding India. From Arabia to the Americas, from Peru to Poland and from Norway to Namibia all the indigenous practices are lost forever to museums. Their beliefs are treated as ‘non-living’ or ‘old myth’ cultures. The brutality of destruction of old practices had not been that different from what polytheistic Yazidis and monotheistic Christians faced during ethnic cleansing, killing and beheading by Islamists in 2014 in Iraq and Syria.

In the Subcontinent one’s name gives away one’s language, region, religion, caste or tribe, as in Europe or Africa. At times these give away their position in the society. Thus for non-native readers further explanation has been provided, yet superfluous or redundant to knowledgeable persons.

Mukti covers bits of fast vanishing traditional rituals through concurrent forces of displacement, modernism, politics, urbanism and monotheism.

I have no power to protect individuals and families who have shared their deepest feelings to my family. I have no power to protect their villages either. As a result I have not used the real names of individuals, villages and neighborhoods. As much as possible I have used comparable caste, gender, religious and regional names – which many not be easily discernable to non-natives, and used fictitious names of their villages to protect from possible repercussion. Unfortunately people have sought help when I visited torched homes, destroyed temples, ruined cremation areas or ashrams. I have been approached by families seeking arrest of killers of their son or daughter – the first graduate of a poor family – who were still roaming free. Yet all those victims sought mukti, liberation, from suffering to live in the land of their ancestors.

I dedicate the book to venerable Jiban Maharaj, a Hindu monk in Bangladesh, who rose from a peasant background to become a swami or ordained monk, and in spite to very serious challenges the poor and oppressed monk have chosen to live in his homeland. He is now an inspiration to tens of thousands of tolerant Muslims and is a pillar to thousands and thousands of oppressed Hindu minority providing courage to live at home with dignity.

CHAPTER I

SHUVA RANI JOINS THE MOTHER

Whenever I go to Halishahar District I try to visit Shuva Rani and her parents, Mr. & Mrs. Jibon and Saroja Ghosh, at their Paban-kati village in the riverine south Bengal. My family and I met Shuva mostly at her parent’s hut where her two boys live, but not Shuva and her daughter Purnima. The entire family is always there to greet us. They would always like to give us the traditional welcome by touching our feet as a sign of respect. We would always refuse Jibon, Saroja and Shuva, and other older persons of the village, to touch our feet to overcome any perceived class difference. But the village children, and that of ours, were a different story. But when our children Joyeeta and Shuvo would attempt to touch their feet in respect, they would vigorously oppose, ‘No Baba,’ Baba being an endearing term than father, ‘don’t do that. We’re poor.’ There are others who anxiously wait for our return as well. By Indian tradition I am Shuva’s kaka, a paternal uncle, and my wife Shefali a kakima, paternal aunt, endearing terms for an intimate person with whom they could share everything. They would say that they are able to share their haarir katha, secret words that are hidden in kitchen storage pitcher, haari. Kaka or uncle is frequently used as a sign of respect in the Subcontinent culture, than a family relationship or because of age. In Bengal, as in the rest of India, uttering older person’s first name is considered disrespectful, uncivil and bad mannerism. Everyone calls their uncles, aunts, older brothers and sisters by a relationship not uttering their first names, for example, First Uncle, Second Uncle, Lotus Aunt, Rose Aunt – Lotus and Rose being substitute for real names, Middle (older) Brother, Youngest (of the older) Sister(s), and so on. Our children called Shuva, Shuva Mashi, the maternal aunt, also a common custom in the Indian Subcontinent. Shuvas are Hindu in a predominantly Muslim nation. Gradually Shuvas became our relative or aatiyo by local Bengali tradition. Aattiyo, or atmiya in Sanskrit, literally means soul-mate. Whenever we went to the village they wouldn’t know what to do for us! From the moment we set our foot they and other villagers would make sure that we feel we belong there. ‘Babu, Sir, this is your village,’ they would insist. If green coconuts were available in trees of their little homesteads, someone would climb the trees immediately and offer us coconut drink. If cucumber was in season, they would offer that. Or, paan, the betel leaf from the vine. Or, if nothing was available they would send some village boys to climb the tall chalta trees to get us some of those sour-testing layered-skin roundish green fruits normally used for pickles. Otherwise, a few wild flowers. Shuva and her parents are very poor. More precisely, very, very poor. By the United Nations statistics they fall into the fourth quartile of the Fourth World nations - barely surviving on $150 dollar a year for the family of eight of three generations! They can hardly afford two meals of rice and lentils a day, but they are not starving. They became our ‘protectors’ in the village. And somehow we became their sanctuary. In our village expeditions we always kept our luggage and valuables at their furniture-less mud-walled, thatched-roof hut without a moment of worry. Our possessions must have been worth several years of income for the family, but missing any of our items has never been a concern to us. Moreover, the jute sack- and bush-protected bamboo machan platform called ‘toilet’ was extremely helpful, especially for my wife Shefali and daughter Joyeeta.

Jibon’s home is a mere 8’x12’ rectangular room divided into two spaces by a jute sack curtain hanging from a string. During daytime the curtain is lifted so that the room becomes one space. The room sits on a 3 ft high earthen plinth, and the front wall is made of mud, reinforced with bamboo. Other walls are made of bamboo matting, in places allowing sunlight to enter, and rain in monsoon causing real misery. On the back plinth a small hole was clearly visible. While proudly showing his home around, Jibon said ‘Babu, Sir, every time I close these mouse holes they reappear in days. Shuva’s Ma doesn’t like it. These become snake dens.’ Jibon in typical traditional style didn’t utter his wife’s name, instead said ‘Shuvar Ma’ or Shuva’s Mother, Mother of my Daughter. Saroja, of course, will always address Jibon either as ‘Shey’ or him, or ‘Shuvar baba,’ Shuva’s Father. In Bengal, as in rest of India, even if husbands use the first names of their wives, as they are older than their wives, their wives would never utter their husbands’ first names, much less use it on a daily basis. In the more recent urban version of it is ‘Ogo’ (hello) or ‘Shunchho?’ (Are you listening?) I still get a laugh thinking how one of my aunts, Modhu Pishi, Aunt Honey, harassed the local mailman trying to deliver a registered letter for her husband. With my uncle absent at home the mailman agreed to deliver the mail if Modhu Pishi could identify her husband and mention his full name, a logical request. Aunt Modhu charged back, ‘From what planet are you from? Don’t you know that I am a married woman? Can’t you see my wedding sankha conch bangles or my wedding sindur vermillion mark?’ The mailman realizing his mistake promptly apologized. ‘Are there any children around?’ he asked in desperation. ‘No.’ Then Aunt Modhu Pishi started her quiz. ‘Can you say another name of moon?’ But moon being one of the gods has 108 names. After some head scratching mailman started with ‘Chand, Chandra, Chandrama, Sashi, Sudhakar’ until he came up with ‘Sudhangshu’ when aunt ordered him, ‘That’s it. Stop there! That’s his first name,’ then she added the family last name.

The front of Jibon’s hut has a 3 feet wide verandah which doubles as a living space and one end of verandah acts as a kitchen. The room and the verandah are covered by a Bengali-style dochala, double-slopped, thatched roof. The front side has one entrance door, while the back wall has two small windows. While the squeaky almost-see-through battered wooden door can be secured with a wooden khil cross-bar, the windows are mere holes in the mud wall secured by wooden sticks instead of iron bars. Windows had no leafs; only torn gunny sacks acting as drapes. On summer days it allowed breeze to flow through making the heat slightly bearable, but in monsoon ‘indoor’ was not much different from ‘outdoor.’ Water came from the top through leaky roof and from sides through the windows. There is a fading floral alpana design on the floor at the front door. The mostly white with red patch alpana is made out of white lime and red vermillion liquid pastes. Goddess of Wealth Lakhsmi’s white foot prints follow the vine like alpana pattern from outside to verandah to all corners of their home, especially towards the pictures of gods, goddesses and leading personalities — the imaginary corner of wealth of the wealth-free family — to the non-existing bed and the corner called ‘kitchen.’ A torn sari serves as the bedding for someone, while a few earthen pots — some broken — serve as storage for ‘valuables.’ Rolled coils of hay serve as pillows. There are no other objects in the room. Several pictures from old calendars of Goddess Kali, Mother Durga — both goddess of strength and protection and reincarnation of the same Mother, Lord Krishna, the 19th Century Hindu reformer Sri Ramakrishna, Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the Bangladesh independence leader Mujibur Rahman decorate the walls. Surprisingly there was a picture of young Preetilata Waddedar of East Bengal a martyr of Indian independence struggle against Britain, seated like demon-killer Ma Durga. Saroja kept the hut and the front yard spotlessly clean, dutifully cleaning after offering the early morning prayer to the rising Sun God Surya Dev, for bringing the daylight, and then again in the evening before lighting a lamp for Goddess Tulshi, the mint-like tulshi plant, representing respect for all plant life, and to drive away the fear of darkness of night. Jibon and Saroja would invite us, ‘Why don’t you spend the night here? We will sleep outside.’ On this visit Mrs. Saroja Ghosh also confided ‘The suitcase you gave us, along with a few clothes and utensils we had been taken away during last year’s ‘riot – anti-Hindu pogrom. As they could not find Shuva’s father, they badly beat me up. By the grace of Mother Kali I survived. They were looking for Shuva who hid herself among the floating hyacinth in the leech-filled doba marsh on the back of our neighbor’s home.’

‘Now either we take turns to eat on one earthen plate that neighbor Aunt Mashi gave us or use banana leaves as dinner plates. For you we will get some banana leaves.’ Jibon assured.

Jibon and Saroja call their home as ‘Notun Barri’ or new home. They refer a two storey wooden house as their ‘Purono Barri’ or old home. That building, one of the oldest of the area, belonged to an indigenous Hindu Das family, one of the first residents of the area hundreds of years back. The Dases were called a ‘bonedi’ family. Bonedi means a family with long tradition and roots to the area, with proper culture and good education, ideal grooming and someone to whom the villagers may look up to during the time of crisis and for leadership. Over the centuries the Das clan became owners of land, many of them became teachers in schools and colleges. They were in the civil service, political parties and more. For generations Jibon’s family was cow herders, who also took care of Das’s cows. Jibons themselves owned couple of milk cows as well as goats. By profession and caste they were milkman, goala, although only a few of their family members follow that profession now. Immediately after the Indian and Bengal partition of 1947 there were several threats on the Dases, however, not until the 1950 there was no actual frontal attack on the family, only verbal abuse in the bazaar, or discovering slaughtered cow parts in their family temple, or unsigned letters with marriage proposal for the extended family’s pre-teen daughters to old Muslim men in their 40s and 50s. During the 1950 anti-Hindu pogrom, the Islamists on a well orchestrated attack on the family decimated the clan, their Hindu workers and neighbors. Some were killed; many others were forced to flee to India. Even today Saroja would say, ‘Many of the girls and wives were kidnapped and eventually converted to Islam. Halim’s wife Rabeya told me at one of her secret sessions that her original name was Parul Bala Kirtaniya wife of Raja Ram Kirtaniya,’ the former oppressed-caste peasant neighbor of Dr. Das. They were simply ‘lost,’ as people would say. For the first couple of years Rabeya wasn’t allowed to step out of their home. It eased a bit after the birth of their second child. Jibon’s father Gouranga at that time worked for Dr. Kalpana Ranjan Das, a physician. As attack on Kalpana Ranjan was imminent Gouranga and his wife Binoda Sundari ran to his boss Kalpana Ranjan and brought the large extended family into their one room 60 square feet hut. Gouranga thought that their poverty will protect them. This was the last time that Dr. Kalpana Ranjan Das and his family entered that poor man’s home for overnight stay. On the third night Gouranga and Binoda Sundari helped their life-long protector to the river bank to catch a dinghy of Hindu boatman Kanailal Majhi which eventually took them to India in two days of trek and boat ride. At the Das residence the gang not finding the doctor and his immediate family, first looted their home of their possession of seventeen generations, then beheaded the old Dulal-Dadu or Dulal Grandpa, looking after the home first cutting open his bowl, then stuffing cow flesh on his mouth, and finally setting the home and the cowshed full of domesticated animals on fire. Dr. Das made several attempts to return home from the plastic-covered refugee shelter in an eastern suburb of Calcutta. After many threats from local Muslim gangs and advice from Muslim and Hindu well-wishers they gave up the idea of returning home. However in an effort to keep some link with his homeland they gave formal ownership of their share of the 700-year brick-built old property to Jibon’s father Gouranga Ghosh, who belonged to a traditional Hindu oppressed caste as did Dr. Das. Local influential Muslims could not accept the idea of a poor, oppressed-caste Hindu living in such a historic building. The thugs did not have to wait too long. During the 1964 anti-Hindu Hazrat-Bal Danga pogrom Pakistan government rechristened an old racist law with a new name as Enemy Property Act. This law allowed confiscation of only minority Hindu properties without any cause, compensation or notice. A Muslim had to lodge a complaint in a local police station that their Hindu neighbor is an ‘enemy of the state’ and thus its property an ‘enemy property.’ No reason is needed for a newly arriving Muslim to call an indigenous living Hindu in his homestead for a thousand year an ‘enemy of the state.’ One night after the evening Muslim Maghrib namaz prayer, a group of thugs came to Jibon’s Purono Barri Old Building – the ancestral home of Das family – and ordered them to leave the property in the next fifteen minutes. They ordered, ‘you malu bastard’ malu being Arabic-based derogatory word for Hindus and non-Muslims, ‘leave this Hindu Enemy Property immediately. Police won’t protect you. You know that very well. We will be nice to you if you leave this building in next the 15 minutes; your wife and daughters won’t receive any pleasure from us. In the name of God we will allow you to build a hut in the back of this building.’ The thugs brought a freshly severed cow’s head with dripping blood to rechristen their new booty. And Gourangas ended up building a new hut which they called Notun Barri, new building.

Before my journey from the US I would always write ‘Jibon-Babu, Mr. Jibon, from the City we will take the overnight launch to Barisal City. From Barisal we will catch the morning 6 O’clock bus. We will be reaching the Saktiganj bus stop by 8 AM and then it will take us about 30 minutes to reach your home by foot. If we can hire a rickshaw, we might be there a few minutes early…….’ And most of the times Shuva Jiban’s oldest daughter, will be at the bus stop at 7 in the morning, hours ahead of our arrival to greet us. In the monsoon the last quarter of a mile will take us longer since the unpaved clay roads become muck-like slippery and treacherous path for people like us. Sometimes Shuva will wait with her friends and children. Shuva would always insist that we visit her home in the neighboring Swarup-kati village where she lived with her daughter and her in-laws.

Because of our upcoming hurricane tour, I wrote Jibon ‘…this time I may not be able to visit you. I have very little time. In Dhaka I will be staying either at the residence of NaserDa, Older Brother Nasiruddin or with BhusanDa,’ Older Brother Bhusan. Bhusan is short for Mr. Indu Bhusan Poddar, a Hindu, who knew my parents but whom we discovered after four decades of lost contact due to the partition of 1947. Mr. Nasiruddin Ali Islam, a Muslim, is a friend of mine. Nasiruddin or Naser is also known by his Bengali name as Shujohn. Shujohn in Bengali means a good man. They are from the same area as that of my parents who lost their home of 16 generation after a pogrom, but hung on to the idea of ‘return’ for few more years. Both Mr. Poddar and Mr. Islam have taken it upon themselves to be our local guardian during my family’s visit home. They have now become our ‘relative’ or aattiyo as the locals usually refers as such in colloquial Bengali.

After I have barely settled down at Nasiruddin’s in Dhaka, the home helper Habib informed me Saheb,’ a common Bengali Muslim and north-Indian form of address for Sir, ‘yesterday someone came to see you from your village, but I can’t say who it was. He didn’t give his name. He will come to see you tomorrow morning. He said that he is your aattiyo.’ Habib, the servant boy, is a 13 year old Muslim from the same locality as that of Nasiruddin and that of my family.

Habib then murmured ‘……the man indicated that it was quite urgent.’ He continued, ‘but I don’t know how can he be your relation? He looked dirty and poor. He looked Muslim.’

I wondered who might that be, since the people I know at Paban-kati village it will be too expensive for them to come here by paying for buses, overnight ship and rickshaw.

Before I could get up in the morning, I heard a knock at my door. ‘Sir, someone is waiting downstairs to see you,’ said little Habib from the other side of the bedroom door. ‘He said, he came so early because he didn’t want to miss you. He said you are his uncle, but wouldn’t give his name. And said it is urgent.’ Habib added, ‘He doesn’t look like your relation. He is poor, and a Muslim.’

‘Please ask him to wait, I will be there in a minute’ I instructed Habib.

I arranged myself quickly and came down to meet my guest. There was a skinny, dark 5’-2" tall man, with bushy hair with unshaven face and wrinkled skin. A man in his 40s or 50s, little dirty, but looked much older. In rural areas peasants age quickly because of their back-breaking work in the field, poor health condition plus relentless heat of the tropical sun. The man was wearing a blue checkered lungi sarong wrapped around his waist and a crumpled half-sleeve pink Hawaii shirt torn on the left shoulder. On one hand he was carrying a shopping bag made of jute fabric. At my sight his eyes glowed and he gave a big smile. Before I could say anything, the man quickly bend down and touched my feet, then folded his palm and said ‘Namaskar,’ as well as ‘Aadab’ in Muslim-style greeting.

I said ‘Namaskar. Aadab.’ Greetings. But I could not recognize him, and said, ‘Please forgive me, I am getting old. Where have we met?’

The man smiled again, ‘Uncle Kaku, don’t you remember me? I am Ramzan. Mohammad Ramzan Khan. I am the share cropper neighbor of Jibon’s family. I have come from Paban-Kati. Shuva’s parents have sent me for you. Last time when you were in your village, I was with you. My daughter played with your kids. I went with you to the neighboring Durgapur village.’ Ramzan took a deep breath and continued, ‘Don’t you remember? I carried you bag. You even gave some cash gift to buy my daughter some mishti, the Bengali sweet, and clothing.’

‘Oh, yes. Of course I remember now. You daughter’s name is Radha. I called her Radha Rani Begum. Isn’t that true?’ Ramzan nodded. Radha is the name of Lord Krishna’s companion, a Hindu sage; an unusual name for a Muslim girl. But Radha also means a pretty face in colloquial Bengali. This also follows a long Bengal tradition, as in many other parts of India, among Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists to keep names not along religious lines but with names with regional identity and meaning. ‘Seeing her beautiful face, Radha’s mom called her by that name. The local maulana Islamic preacher gave her an Islamic name, Zebunnessa Khatun, which no one knows,’ Ramzan confided.

After a little pause I continued, ‘But Ramzan-Babu, Mr. Ramzan, Why are you here? It is so far from Paban-Kati. Why Shuva’s parents sent you? When have you come to Dhaka? Where are you staying? Did you have your breakfast?’ Ramzan did not pay much attention to my questions.

Ramzan reminded me that as a person of means I should call him by his first name and not with a formal overtone addressing with mister. ‘Why are you calling me mister, babu or saheb? Just call me Ramzan. I am a very low caste poor landless Muslim peasant. A share cropper. I am staying in Paikpara Basti slum near Mohammadpur neighborhood. I am staying with my, fufu, father’s sister,’ Ramzan said using a Bengali-Muslim word for his paternal aunt. ‘His shack is located on top of the Paikpara Jala swamp. He lives there with his family in one small room. I came here the day-before yesterday. I went to the other address as well. Kaki, Aunt Saroja Ghosh, Shuva’s mother, said that you will be giving me the transportation money.’ He stopped, caught his breath, and then continued, ‘At the village we took collections for my fare. Had you not come here I would be in a big, big trouble. But Bhusan Uncle from the other house was very nice. He said, had I missed you, he would have given me the money for my entire trip and for food……’

‘Why have you come here?’ I cut him off. But Ramzan was not listening and continued ‘…I barely slept. I was afraid I might miss you. I got up before the Muslim fazr azan Morning Prayer call, then came running for you. I walked these couple of miles.’ Suddenly Ramzan stopped. There was complete silence for a few seconds. He seemed to reassure himself, contemplated for seconds, and then whispered something which I thought was a Muslim prayer. Ramzan then talked to me looking at the floor ‘Shuva in no more with us. She is dead. Ma Kali, Mother Goddess Kali, has taken Shuva to Her bosom. Ma Kali gave Shuva her life, and She took her back. Even her 15 year daughter would have been finished as well. One of the maulavis, an Islamic preacher, and some local Muslim boys were after that little girl. You must have known that Purnima was saved by one of your relations in Dhaka city. Haven’t they told you? He is the one who saved Purnima. Paban-kati villagers have sent me to take you to our village.’ Then he added, ‘Babu, Sir, you belong to us. Please come to the village with me.’

Ramzan then narrated the entire story without catching a breadth. Afterwards I would hear that story from my ‘relation’ Kamolda, Brother Kamol, followed by Jibon and Saroja, from Purnima and from so many others. Unless I was a first-hand witness to this, it would have been difficult for me to believe such things can happen today. I know there is less security in villages compared to cities. I also know that women of all faiths have even less security in both rural and urban areas. Then for the minority Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, tribal or non-tribal, rich or poor, there is practically no security at all. That security is completely non-existent for Hindus in rural areas. Shuva Rani was a village woman in that society. She was pretty smart and talented by any standard. She was literate. And if she was born in a middle-class family, I am sure, she would have gone far. Because of her talents she became the head of the ‘Self-sufficient Village Committee.’ Later on government appointed her to be a social worker. That job paid her a couple of hundred takas, few dollars, per month.

Politics of Identity:

Depending on political polarization, minorities are often the victims of both ruling and opposition parties. Ramzan told me that Shuva and her teenage daughter started getting threats from ‘criminal-revolutionaries’ of both ruling and opposition groups. Finally one day in the middle of the night Shuva along with Purnima fled her beloved Swarup-kati for the Big City. Mother and daughter found jobs in the garment industry. They rented a shack on top of a marsh where she eventually had an untimely death because of poverty, hunger, decease and for lack of treatment. In the Big City Shuva would always walk miles to be with her Uncle Kamol - the only person of means she knew there to share her pain and pleasure. There is a saying that ‘People under severe stress are often saved by their death.’ Nowadays many Shuvas are unable to be even ‘saved by their own death.’ Shuva couldn’t either. At times minorities were prevented from giving last rites to their loved ones. After Naser’s neighbor’s physician uncle died in his native Surma District many neighbors told the family ‘Don’t take the Hindu malaun’s body through the streets at this time.’ ‘Don’t take it through our neighborhood.’ ‘In the name of God the Merciful those streets are closed to namos.’ Malaun is an insulting and derogatory Arabic-based word used to describe non-Muslims, and namo are equally derogatory word for Hindus derived out of namasudra, Bengali name of oppressed caste now used by Muslims to denigrate all Hindus and non-Muslims. Even those patients who were treated by the uncle free of charge hesitated to oppose those inhuman acts. There are always courageous Muslim men and women, who seems exception to the norm. My friend would say, ‘In the land of God, there’s no God.’ Mr. Kamol had lots of trouble in giving the last rites to Shuva as well, especially for the cremation ritual. Finally with the help of the Ma Durga Mission, a Hindu spiritual organization, the body was cremated practically next to a highway on a make-shift cremation ground all the while hearing insults and slurs from passing strangers including ‘funare jahannam khaledina iha’ – let the infidel burn in hell, the Arabic which otherwise even the cursers did not understand. For the past several decades many of the old cremations grounds have become ‘enemy of the nation’ through the application of the Enemy Property Act. The Act allows confiscation of Hindu property without any compensation and without any notice for eviction. Before her mother’s death, the only question the orphaned Purnima kept asking her Kamol Grandpa repeatedly ‘Kamol Dadu, would Ma look after me from the heaven?’

For the last few minutes a Muslim Ramzan wept for a Hindu orphan Purnima and kept telling ‘We couldn’t save Shuva. I have offered puja offering for Purnima at the Hindu Kali Mandir temple. I have sought blessing from Allah. Would you please look after Purnima and the other children? Otherwise they would be destroyed.’ Before we could finish our conversation, my other appointments had already arrived.

Next day I was invited to the home village of friend Mukul. The door was opened by a Hindu widow whom I believe I met at Mr. Bhusan Poddar’s residence last time when I visited the Big City. At that time her entire family, a son, daughter-in-law, grandson all used to work and live there. At that time Mashi, the aunt, had said ‘We are from a faraway place called Ganga-chhori, few hours beyond Rongpur in the north. We used to be weavers there. This is about a day’s journey by bus or two days by boat and bus.’ Later when I talked to Aunt Mashi I asked her while thinking about Shuva’s last rites, ‘Aunt Mashi what do you do there when someone dies at your home?’

‘What else to do? We are Hindu. We cremate!’ Mashi is a Hindu widow and as a result wears a white borderless thaan sari — an outfit for perpetual mourning. Thaan is practically a man’s dhoti outfit, almost like what the dead husband used to wear.

‘Oh, then you must have nice cremation grounds there.’

‘Yes.’ I felt so relieved. Mashi continued ‘In our area we have lots of Hindu fishermen, weavers, privileged caste Brahmins and Kayasthas, oppressed-caste namasudras, peasants and blacksmiths. All castes live and eat together. There, next to our temple we have our cremation ground. We have all our festivities at that temple. Even Durga Puja of the Mother Goddess is held there.’ Traditionally Hindu priests came from privileged Brahmin caste and namasudras represent the traditionally oppressed Hindu castes. She continued ‘But my son’s in-laws have serious problem. In their area there is a very old cremation ground; hundreds of years old. Now they are prevented from giving last rites there. Those who can afford they send their dead 30-40 miles away taking half-a-day to a day depending on the modes of transportation. It takes lot of money. Hindus are not allowed by the local Muslims to bury their dead either. The only way out is to give mukhagnee and then let the bodies float in the river carrying the fire. Haven’t you noticed how precarious it is in this area? Some believers would like to have Hindu bodies to be eaten up by dogs,’ the ultimate insult. She completed her statement with a big sigh, then wiped her eyes with a corner of her white borderless sari. Mukhagnee is touching the Sacred Eternal Fire in the lips of the departed, a Hindu ritual, and then light the pyre with the same flame for the body to be consumed by that fire. The Sacred Fire which created the Earth eventually consumes the body to be returned to Mother Earth, a symbolic act that descendants must perform.

Once the last rites of Shuva were performed by Purnima and Kamol, he took Purnima to her grandparents at Paban-kati. A Bengali proverb says that news is carried by the blowing wind. Within a few hours of arrival of Kamol at Paban-kati village, the old Islamic preacher, arrived at the door step; now accompanied by several young men. On this occasion they were very polite, and had a simple brazen ‘request.’ ‘Could we have Purnima for a few days?’ The preacher said he will treat Purnima ‘as my own daughter.’ This time it was not an order, but a respectful request.

Purnima held tightly her grandfather Kamol’s hand and urged ‘Grandpa, Dadu, don’t leave me here. Mother will also help us from the Heavens! Ma will return back here.’

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CHAPTER II

SWARUP-KATI: THE LAND OF MOTHER KALI

If you ever go to Swarup-kati Village, the residents of Swarup-kati — Swarupkatians —would tell you that their village is no different from any other village in the Indian Subcontinent. They will also tell you that their village is unique. They are, of course, correct. It is true that from a distance all villages in the Indian Subcontinent look alike: not a place of residence but almost like a forest, especially in Bengal. Every homestead is covered with evergreen fruit and flowering plants, coconut, banana, bamboo and other trees where the buildings are practically invisible from a distance. Every village is further subdivided into several para or neighborhood given to distinct caste, clan, tribal, religious, artisan, and professional groups. If a village has only ‘one group,’ say, Muslim or Hindu, then their divisions of paras are based on clan, ‘family,’ class, sub-caste, or profession. In the Swarup-kati area there is an extended family of Christians as well. It is said that Christians were converted ‘recently’ between 19th and 20th centuries after the coming of the Portuguese and their missionaries. It is also said many of them were forced by Hindu privileged-caste elites to renounce their faith either for their association with the meat-eating unclean mlechho friends, especially for their beef-eating habit, just as the earlier Hindus forced many of their coreligionists out to embrace Islam for trivial or imaginary reasons. It is also said that a few other Hindus were accused of accidentally smelling cooking of beef curry, thus expelled from the Hindu samaj society as smelling is considered half eating, ghraneno ardha-vojanam. Then there are a few Hindu Santhal households. Santhals, except for self-identification as ‘tribal’ they are Bengali Hindu, speaking Bengali, intermarrying and following same rituals. To outsiders all Swarupkatians are identical, indistinguishable from one another. They look and behave alike although some individuals and families identify themselves strongly with their religious identity and others with clan. A seasoned observer is able to identify many of the residents by their dress, jewelries, bracelets, sindur vermillion mark, facial hair and hair styles individually or when worn in combination.

At close range, the villages are indeed unique; even their paras — neighborhoods — and their families. Since many families often live for generations in the same place, often in the same house, going back to hundreds, even thousands of years, each family evolves certain tradition, distinct from a neighbor. Paras develop similar tradition; as do villages. Village institutions – temples, mosques, cremation grounds, graves, samadhis or memorials of holy men and women, old banyan trees, schools, zamindari (rural landlord) estate and kuttachari (court or lawyer’s office) buildings, pond or river bathing ghat steps leading to water, crossing of important paths are different from village to village. These give villages their distinct characteristics. Differences may hardly be deciphered unless one lives in the villages or walks the paths with another swajon – one’s own acquaintance, or with an aattiyo (atmiya) relative from the village.

Indian Subcontinent, and Bengal including Bangladesh, is one of the densest places on earth, but a stranger would hardly find any evidence of that in the countryside. All villages are covered with greeneries. Local residents use village paths, away from the main roads, to do their daily chores. Paths often cut through private properties rarely noticeable by outsiders. Cities are different, of course, with their population spilling out on the bare streets to be experienced by everyone, and properties separated from each other by high brick wall.

Swarup-kati would have been atypical village except for Ms. Shuva – meaning feminine goodness or auspiciousness.

Birth of Swarup-kati and Her Early Days:

No one really knows the exact date of the founding of the village, but everyone seems to agree who their first residents were. Resident oral historians say that after an unprecedented plabon cyclone and flooding in the fourth quarter of the first millennium of the Christian era, Swarup Ram Kali arrived by boat with his wife and five daughters and four sons to the new land that emerged from the riverbed. Mr. Kali, as the oral historians would say ‘was a devotee of the Creator of the Cosmic World, Mother Kali, the black Mother Goddess, the protector of humans and killer of demons. In his dream Swarup Ram was instructed to come to the new land from the faraway Kanakpur district, also in Bengal in eastern India. In those days it took over a week by boat to come here. When he came here there was nothing but the virgin land raised by the changing course of Saraswati River. Ma Kali instructed him to build his hut in the northeast corner of that new island where he would find a black granite statue of Goddess Kali when he was digging for a pond.’ True believers still say that ‘Mother instructed Swarup to dig the pond at that location. Swarup Ram was given a divine instruction of locating the stone black sculpture of the Mother.’ Locals would tell you that Swarup Ram called his new village Kalikapur: the land of Goddess Kali. On the other side of the new river island where the boats docked, with time a bazaar came into being. It was named Dayaganj by Swarup’s family after the mother of Swarup Ram, Dayamoyee Debi. As the word of Lord Kali’s divine appearance spread, ‘people from far and near came to visit a new temple that was built in the course of time, taking perhaps many decades; perhaps longer. Gradually many pilgrims settled on the virgin land. As his daughters got married Swarup Ram was able to persuade his sons-in-laws to settle in Kalikapur,’ as the story goes, instead of daughters going off to live with the in-laws. No one really knows when the metamorphosis took place and Kalikapur changed from Swarup-kati - the land of Swarup reachable by canoe and a bamboo stick or kati (kathee.) On paper Kalikapur and Dayaganj still exist, or shall we say existed, but in reality they are now neighborhoods of Swarup-kati. Old congested area near Kalibari, the Home of Lord Kali, the Kali temple, is still known as Kalikapur. The bazaar and the river-port village of Dayaganj flourished for centuries until most of it was washed away by another flood of Saraswati in the mid-1800s.

In this region many village names end with ‘kati’ meaning a stick or a pole instead of pur or village, or ganj or market, because villages became associated with bamboo poles. In this delta area accessibility and survival still depends on boats. People has to use bamboo poles to navigate their boats by pushing one end of it into the shallow, and frequently narrow, river beds or into muck of the marshes, instead of using paddles to row their boats. Some streams are so narrow, especially in the dry summer months, that paddling would indeed be impossible. Metamorphosis also occurred to the families. Now there are no families associated with the name Kali. It is said that Swarup Ram Kali was from an oppressed fisherman jeley caste; allegedly a relatively oppressed or ‘low’ caste rank in the imaginary caste hierarchy. However, with the divine blessing of the black Goddess Ma Kali, the family moved up in the caste ladder, it is said, to a higher peasant caste, and finally to the priestly Brahmin caste. One branch of the family ended up with a caste name Haldar, the other Chakraborty, now both are called privileged or ‘upper caste’ priestly families in that imaginary caste gradation. The temple is not worth mentioning in terms of architecture, possibly rebuilt several times, the latest being in the mid-1800s after the flooding. Many local believers, Hindus and Muslims, would certainly tell you that ‘our Goddess Kali, the Creator of the Universe, is jagrata (alive.)’ Many also believed that the flooding of the 1800s was the result of dishonoring Ma Kali by some non-believers. Her kharga sword, curved at the top, was stolen during an Islamist attack ‘and thus the Mother didn’t protect her children when the flooding occurred later’ as the saying goes. ‘After another abuse, when the mandir (temple) was again attacked by ‘non-believers,’ came the manushya-krita (man-created) mahamari famine that took millions of lives in Bengal.’ The Great Famine of 1943 when between 3 and 25 million people died is known as the British-created man-made (manushya-krita mahamari) famine. During this period of relatively good crop the British Administration horded the rice harvest in their warehouse and destroyed about 60,000 country boats – the only means of conveyance in the delta. The colonial British Administration claimed that this was done to prevent those boats not falling in the hands of the Japanese during WW II, but Indian nationalists claimed otherwise. However, the result in Bengal was catastrophic: a mass starvation or genocide.

I still remember that our parents told us that on their way to our Chhoto Dadu, which is my mother’s father, younger, chhoto, of the two grand-fathers, dadu, that their boat would often stop at that Swarup-kati Kalibari, the home bari of the black Goddess Kali on their overnight journey to other towns. Mother used to say that on their ‘last visit was in the year of ‘bombing’ when we fled Calcutta for ‘your’ Lakhsmankati village first, afterwards for my paternal Madaripur village.’ That was in 1942 when Japan bombed eastern end of British India, including parts Bengal, while trying to capture the Asian parts of the British Empire. ‘Swarup-kati was very much like your village Lakhsmankati,’ both parents would confide. ‘In Lakhsmankati village your ancestors lived for over four and a half centuries. They too were the first settlers in that virgin land which rose from the riverbed, till they were evicted after the Indian Partition of 1947. There couldn’t be any people more indigenous than them. In 1570s-1580’s they moved from the Gava village where their written history goes back possibly to the first millennium, and even longer in oral history.’ If I had never set foot in these villages for even one moment – from where they fled from – it will remain as ‘my village’ to the village residents for many of my future rebirths to come. It did not take the villagers even minutes to welcome us and our U.S.-born daughter and son as ‘your’ Lakhsmankati and ‘your’ Gava on our very first visit. I still remember that on the last visit how Mr. Narahari Bhunjamali, Mrs. Shova Rani Tantee, both from caste-oppressed Hindu groups, and Mr. Abdul Wali Bhuian, an oppressed-caste Muslim, all poor peasants, were trying their best to make us feel at home by telling stories about our parents and grand-parents, which they have learned from their parents, as if they witnessed that the day-before. For those who can not read or write remembering the past though oral tradition becomes all too important. These provide links with the past. It is no wonder that Hindus created a tradition whereby they had to remember the names of at least past fourteen fore-parents to seek the blessings during ceremonies related to birth, death and marriage.

Arrival of Non-Believer:

No one really knows as to who were the first Muslims to settle in Swarup-kati. But village historians, Muslim and Hindu, would tell you that ‘only recently,’ could easily mean 100 to 200 years back, ‘the first Muslim appeared here.’ Many of those historians would suggest that some branches of the Kali family took to Islam either voluntarily or by force of sword, whereas others would claim that some members of the clan were expelled from the Hindu samaj (society) for some un-clean acts: possibly for smelling beef being cooked, or worse even, seeing a cow being slaughtered, or eating chicken eggs. Some others would claim that the ‘recent’ Muslim rulers from faraway Indian north ordered the elder Kali to convert to Islam by eating beef in public and renounce his faith in order to protect his family as a punishment for an ungodly act, even when Muslims constituted a tiny minority in India, Bengal and in Swarup-kati. ‘One of the daughters had to become one of the wives of the king and was renamed Ayesha Begum from Padmabati’ many oral historians would tell you. They will also tell you that majority Hindus have no record of protesting oppression by minority Muslims. While some others yet claim that ‘first Muslim settlers came from North India via the ‘distant’ Rarh region of Bengal which is barely 150-200 miles northwest in northern Bengal not far from Swarup Ram’s native village. Whatever it is, there were many Muslim families with Kali, thakur or priest, and Haldar as their family name. One may even find names like Kali Mohammad Chand in old graves. In general in the recent past there were tense as well as amicable relation between religious, caste and professional communities, until 1800s when religious tensions started to rise paralleling the anti-British nationalist struggle in India and Islamic Wahabi re-conversation movement in Bengal. Communal tension reached its peak at the time of Muslim-Hindu Bengal Partition of 1947. Muslim and non-Muslim areas of India were partitioned. In Bengal this historic event is colloquially known as desh-bhag - division of the land, partitioner-bar — the year of the partition, and hindusthan-pakistaner bachhar — the year of Hindustan-Pakistan (division.) Hindustan is the old name of India used by ancient Persians as well as the Muslim Moghal rulers of India who came from Central Asia to establish their empire. Beginning in the mid-1800s as the re-identification took place in the Bengali community, several Muslim families dropped Kali for Kalimuddin and Kalim, supposedly more Islamic names. Only one Muslim family retained Thakur as their last name, while others took Arabic or Persian names. Most, though not all, Haldars retained Haldar as their family identification. With self re-identification taking place, many Muslims persuaded themselves through the preaching of local Islamic moulavi priests and Islamic party activists that they have nothing Bengali in their ancestry. They all had Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Afghan or north Indian root, but certainly not Bengali. Accordingly, they were to take Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Afghan and north Indian names, instead. Professor Rafiudddin Ahmed, a Muslim, highlights this transformation in his book, The Bengali Muslims 1871-1906: A Quest for Identity (Oxford University Press, 1981) quite well. Some of the Muslim, Hindu, caste- and skill-exclusive, and mixed villages around Swarup-kati are Gazipur, Bot-tala, Narkeldanga, Domejur, Habiganj, Krishsna-nagar, Kumirgram, Bosepara, Nazirpur, Goalpara, Durgapur, Garia, Gopalganj, Baghmari, Ranir Khet, Madarihaat, Faizganj, Kumarganj, Ghoshpara, ImamGarh, BagdiPara, Barddhaman, and more.

Kalikapur Tirthasthan – The Holy Place:

Many Hindus, along with local Muslims, frequently claim that Kalikapur’s Goddess Kali is one of the 51 most important Hindu holy pitha or pithasthan sites of the world. These are tirthas or special place of pilgrimage devoted to black Goddess Kali, the killer of demons and preserver of her human daughters and sons living on earth. Residents will tell you ‘Mother Kali is a true Mother. To scare off other demons She wears a garland of demon skulls killed by her in order to protect humans and gods, from the demons.’ The Mother has a pitch black complexion like many Indians and Africans, a round glowing face, large beautiful eyes staring directly at you, a thick long black hair reaching Her ankle. Her tongue protrudes in shame for touching her husband Shiva by foot. Kali could easily be a beauty from Bengal, India or Africa. It is said that as She was killing demons no one could stop her even when the demons were destroyed; not even Her parents, other gods and goddesses. It was stopped only when her husband, Lord Shiva, who intentionally laid down on Her path. Once Goddess Kali mistakenly touched Shiva’s body with her bare feet, she stopped her search for demons. In shame came out her tongue, and Kali’s demon-killing drive was stopped. Very few beyond the local area believe the pithasthan story: that Swarup-kati is a pitha. Nevertheless, this claim had put severe strain on pilgrimage to the nearby Shikarpur Pitha, which claims to be a real pitha.

On visits to Shikarpur Pitha in Barisal District one is told that since partition of Bengal in 1947, very few devotees have been visiting as Shikarpur is in the Muslim-majority nation,