Calamities and Chroniclers

The receipt of the photograph, quite out of the blue, sent by an old friend, brought back a flood of memories- of discussions, with this friend and his parents, about the man in the photograph and his work, close to almost half a century ago. That man is my friend’s maternal uncle, his mother’s eldest brother and his father’s closest friend from his youth.

???????????The face in the photograph is perhaps a little less universally recognized than it deserves to be. And then, it is more recognized in the state of West Bengal than elsewhere although the scope of his work extends beyond his native state.

???????????Well, some of you may have known that it is Bijon Bhattacharya, playwright, actor and activist. In Bengal he is best known as the writer of the 1944 Bengali play Nabanna, roughly translatable in English as the New Harvest. The play is based on one of the most harrowing of events in Bengal, the famine of 1943 that resulted in the death of three to five million people, depending on one’s propensity to believe in official figures with or without the proverbial pinch of salt. There isn’t much scope here to dwell upon the politics and sociology of the famine, but how successfully has the play been able to portray the suffering of the people, exacerbated by the greed, indifference and neglect of other people, their own, and of an alien government. The play became iconic and, other than being performed all over Bengal, rural and urban, with the playwright himself as the principal character, it was coincidental with the formation of the Indian People’s Theatre Association(IPTA) which was preceded by its purely Bengali avatar the Gananatya Sangha(people’s theatre organization).

???????????Bijon Bhattacharya was one of the founder members of IPTA and another of these, the famous writer and film maker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, immortalized it on film as Dharti Ke Lal(1946), the first and perhaps the only film to be produced by IPTA, and almost the entire cast was IPTA members as well as cadres of the Communist Party.

???????????So intimately associated with the Bengali psyche became the famine that it later found expression in two more films by two of India’s greatest directors- Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket(Distant Thunder, 1973) based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, and then Akaler Sandhane(In Search of Famine, 1980) by Mrinal Sen, based on the novel by Amalendu Chakrborty.

???????????Bijon Bhattacharya went on to write seventeen plays for the Gananatya Sangha as ?well ?as for the Calcutta Theatre Company.

Bijon Bhattacharya had had a rather successful career as an actor as well- not only in theatre but also in film. Although he was associated with a host of films, he is particularly remembered for being the expression of ‘The Pity of Partition’*, in the characters he played in the Partition Trilogy made by his friend, fellow IPTA member and Communist Ritwik Ghatak- Meghe Dhaka Tara( Cloud Capped Star,1960); Komal Gandhar(E Flat, 1961) and Subarnarekha(1965). Bhattacharya also starred in Chinnamul(The Uprooted, 1950) by Nemai Ghosh,?perhaps the first film on the Partition.

???????????Accounts heard on many occasions in my childhood, narrated by my mother who was a very young girl in Calcutta in the 1940s, of thousands of people driven to the City by the famine- desperate, starving people living and dying in the streets, skeletal mothers with skeletal children in their arms, going from house to house begging for food and their plaintive cry, “Ma, ektu phan dao go!”(Mother, give us a little rice water!)- remains fresh in my mind even today.

???????????However iconic the status of Nabanna as the definitive piece of literature on the Bengal famine of 1943, it wasn’t the only one. There were others as well, written almost concurrently, published in the same year, 1944. One was Ela Sen’s Darkening Days with ‘drawings from life’ by Zainul Abedin. The ink drawings captured the pity and the horror of the lives of the suffering people, and Abedin, who was only in his twenties at the time, went on to become the father figure of modernist painting in the country that was later to become Bangladesh.

???????????The other book was perhaps a little more remarkable in the sense that it was written and published far away from the scene, in the Punjab, and also because of the writer who was so special in so many ways. The book was titled Bengal Lamenting, and published by Lion Publications after first having been serialized in The Tribune. The artist whose sketches adorn the book was already famous - Sobha Singh. The writer is Freda Bedi, an Englishwoman who embraced the cause of Indian freedom even before arriving in this country. While studying at Oxford as Freda Houlston, she became an ardent activist of Indian nationalism, fell in love with and married fellow student and Indian nationalist Baba Pyare Lal Bedi. In India both actively supported the movement for Indian freedom, and Freda was even imprisoned for six months by the colonial government. She was also the first white woman to become a Buddhist bhikshuni. Of her three children, one is the actor Kabir Bedi.

???????????Getting back to Bijon Bhattacharya’s claim to fame as an actor in films, I’d used the term ‘The Pity of Partition’. I realize that was not without some irony, however real the pain of being uprooted from their age old location or ‘bhita’ in Bengali, for the ones that had to leave the erstwhile East Bengal. I had, of course, taken the term from the title of the book by the historian Ayesha Jalal, on the life and work of the Indo Pakistani Urdu writer and her uncle Saadat Hassan Manto, particularly on his stories of the Partition.

???????????Although the number of stories on the havoc caused by the Partition has been more, in numbers as well as in languages- Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Sindhi, set in the Punjab, than in Bengal in the Bengali language, there is a similarity as well as a shared absence in that both?primarily deal with the loss and suffering of the Hindu and Sikh population. In Indian literature there isn’t much about the displacement and uprooting of Muslim families. This is certainly the case in Bengal where Partition literature is almost always an expression of the trauma of having to leave behind a home and a way of life and the contrasting squalor and indignity of life as ‘vastuhaara’ or ‘udvastu’ both meaning homeless, in Calcutta and elsewhere. This nostalgia is hugely represented in the collection called Chhere Asha Gram (The Abandoned Village, ed. Dakshina Ranjan Basu, 1975).

???????????The characters of Ghatak’s Partition trilogy also express a similar despair, but importantly, there is also an attempt to rise up and create a new life. That part is pure Ghatak.

???????????I am not aware of too many stories about the Muslim experience in Partition India. A story like Jadein (Roots) by Ismat Chugtai and a brilliant film like M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (The Searing Wind, 1974) are few and far between.

???????????Manto has been able to capture the real ‘Pity of Partition’ as well as universalize it, in his Partition stories where the perpetrators as well as the victims of the madness unleashed are Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. And, in the two stories that most famously highlight the absurdity of Partition, the action takes place in the most fluid of spaces- an asylum for the mentally ill situated on the border between India and the newly created Pakistan in Toba Tek Singh, and the no man’s land and a dead canal between contingents of opposing armies in Tithwal ka Kutta. And the protagonists, if one may call them that, are the most innocent creatures totally devoid of any agency, a mad man in one and a pariah dog in the other.

??????????? Well, that was the past. If we dwell enough on the follies of man as recounted in them, we can perhaps avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

?Notes:

·????????Jalal, Ayesha. The Pity of Partition: Harper Collins India, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, 2013

·????????Excellent accounts of Ela Sen and Freda Bedi, and their Benagal famine books can be found in blogs by Andrew Whitehead

? Jayant Dasgupta