Sudipto Das's Blog, page 4

Art is The New Science

I studied in a missionary school run by the Ramakrishna Mission – a residential one, in the barren and backward hinterlands of Bengal, quite far away, in the 80s standards, from my home in Calcutta. As expected, we were always under the tight noose of the monks. More than the discipline, what appeared quite intolerable to many was the fact that arts, sports, athletics, music, elocution, dramatics, creative writing, reading non-academic books in library, meditation and even a course on Indian culture were compulsory, apart from of course the normal academics. I would hate the sports and the athletics but looked forward to the music classes. Given my oratory skills I felt ashamed of myself and looked at my friends, who spoke so well in the debates and elocutions, with awe. Indian culture was something that was hated by all. Dramatics was fun. The library class soon became a pursuit for evading the librarian and procuring books deemed inappropriate at our age. Overtime, we all got tired of coming up with newer excuses to dodge the classes we hated and I started landing up on time for the morning athletics and someone we all felt shouldn’t ever sing, just to make sure that the birds didn’t get frightened in a serene afternoon, started attending the music classes regularly, much to our horror.

Few years later, when I was doing my engineering, again at a place quite disconnected from the rest of the world, in an institute established on the lines of Shantiniketan, the word university founded by the universal educationist, philosopher and poet laurel Rabindranath Tagore, upholding the tradition of the Indian style of all-round education, most of us had the same predicament. The English and Economics classes were the most hated and very few people participated in the socio cultural activities, which were no longer compulsory. Not many of us developed much appreciation for liberal arts, or got into the habit of reading non-academic books. The logic was very simple – we had chosen engineering only because we either hated arts or were not good at it.

A quarter century later, when I look around and try to figure out which of my friends have really “excelled”, I do recall what we would be reminded every day in school – that Vivekananda wanted education to be all-round and that education is the manifestation of the perfection already in us, and so on. It was indeed true that the ones who were very active in socio cultural activities or sports or had a very good hold on language or had multiple hobbies have actually “excelled” better than the ones who were only into academics. The ace swimmer of our hostel during engineering leads a bank in Singapore. The best elocutionist in our school, who would always get the highest scores in English and Hindi, has been into a series of very successful startups in the Bay Area. The one who still amazes me with the number of books he keeps on reading regularly is an accomplished fashion designer and heads the apparel division of a very famous brand in India. I can go on and on. I’m sure they would all feel indebted to the monks of our school and the founders of the Indian Institute of Technology for imbibing in them, though forcibly at times, the habit of reading books and taking interest in multiple things, especially various forms of liberal arts and sports.
And this is not for no reason.
Michael Simmons, an award-winning social entrepreneur and bestselling author, in a well-researched article, People Who Have “Too Many Interests” Are More Likely To Be Successful According To Research, sums it up very well in the title. Citing various examples and researches he harps on the importance of the same three things our monks had imbibed in us – (1) continuous learning through reading books, (2) being a polymath with interests in multiple things and (3) appreciating various forms of art. He points out, Barack Obama read an hour a day while in office, Warren Buffett invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career, Bill Gates read a book a week and took a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career.
Warren Buffett has pinpointed the key to his success this way: Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.
Larry Page has been known to spend time talking in depth with everyone from Google janitors to nuclear fusion scientists, always on the lookout for what he can learn from them.
Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” 
Not learning at least five hours per week (the five-hour rule) is the smoking of the 21st century, Simmons infers. He cites from the book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, by Charles Murray, most widely known as the co-author of The Bell Curve. The study of the most significant scientists in all of history uncover that 15 of the 20 – the likes of Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, Laplace, Faraday, Pasteur, Ptolemy, Hooke, Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, Maxwell, etc. — were all polymaths.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Feynman, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marie Curie – are/were all polymaths.
The father of Modern Indian Science, Jagadish Chandra Bose, was perhaps one of the most illustrious polymaths in the recent times. An acclaimed physicist – he was the first person in the world to have successfully demonstrated the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves, thus making him the inventor of radio/wireless communication – his interests soon turned away from electromagnetic waves to response phenomena in plants; this included studies of the effects of electromagnetic radiation on plants, a topical field today. He was also an archaeologist and one of the earliest writers of science fiction in India, apart from being the founder of the Bose Institute, one of the oldest multi-disciplinary research institutes of India.
Very recently, one of the recipients of 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, Abhijit Banerjee, is also a great chef, who could very well go ahead and win the Australian Master Chef, humors his brother.
10+ academic studies find a correlation between the number of interests/competencies someone develops and their creative impact.
Simmons gives few advantages of being a Polymath.
Advantage 1: Creating an atypical combination of two or more skills you’re merely competent in can lead to a world-class skill set.
Advantage 2: Most creative breakthroughs come via atypical combinations of skills. The paper, Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impacthas found that an analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work. “There’s a very longstanding idea that the creation of a new thing is about putting existing things together in a new way,” says Jones, an associate professor of management and strategy and the faculty director of the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. “That is, combinations are the key material of creative insight.” Even Isaac Newton famously proclaimed, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Most of the newer areas of research are actually multi-disciplinary in nature. A welfare project like autonomous response to queries by Indian farmers in their language of choice would involve in-depth skills in diverse fields like comparative linguistics (to identify the correct dialect and language), psychology (to understand the mental state of the speaker and respond sensitively), history (to appreciate the historical and cultural nuances), apart from advanced AI/ML enabled technologies for speech recognition, translation and finding the right answers to the questions asked. Real-time remote surgery is one of the many talked about usages of 5G – anyone could guess the number of disciplines involved in making this happen.
Advantage 3: It future-proofs your career. “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive,” said Darwin, “but those who can best manage change.”
Advantage 4: It sets you up to solve more complex problems.
The HBR article, Research: CEOs with Diverse Networks Create Higher Firm Value, points out that diverse network would give CEOs access to diverse sets of knowledge, which can lead to novel ideas and willingness to tackle innovative projects. Heterogeneous social ties would increase a CEO’s ability to obtain a network of foreign contacts and identify good business opportunities. What this finding implies is that, apart from the conventional ways of learning – through books, schools, teachers, etc. – it’s also important to learn through diverse social interaction, mingling with all types of people around, traveling to new places and understanding new cultures and peoples. It’s no wonder that both Narendranath Dutta and Mohandas Gandhi had undertaken a painstaking journey across India to understand the peoples and cultures of their country, before they became Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi, two of the most successful leaders of modern India from two different walks of life. In Sanskrit, there’s a name to the seeker of wisdom through traveling and interacting with people – parivrajak.
Now that we understand the importance of multiple interests and diverse knowledge, let’s see which all domains seem to be more relevant and useful in the coming days.
In another HBR article, Liberal Arts in the Data Age, the author says, “From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.”
The author cites three books in this context. Scott Hartley, the author of the first one, The Fuzzy And The Techie, first heard the terms fuzzy and techie while studying political science at Stanford University. If you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie. But in his brilliantly contrarian book, Hartley reveals the counterintuitive reality of business today: it’s actually the fuzzies – not the techies – who are playing the key roles in developing the most creative and successful new business ideas. They are often the ones who understand the life issues that need solving and offer the best approaches for doing so. It is they who are bringing context to code, and ethics to algorithms. They also bring the management and communication skills, the soft skills that are so vital to spurring growth. If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, we must push them to widen, not narrow, their education and interests. He ticks off a long list of successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities: Jack Ma, Alibaba – English, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube – History and Literature, Brian Chesky, Airbnb – Fine Arts. Steve Jobs is of course the most prolific one in this long list.
In the second book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities, the authors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, professors of the Humanities and Economics, respectively, at the Northwestern University, argue that when economic models fall short, they do so for want of human understanding. The solution is literature, they say. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do. Nothing could be more true than this. Quite a bit of Gandhi’s understanding of humanity and the crystallization of his concepts of nonviolence is influenced by Tolstoy, especially his novel War and Peace. Same holds true for many of Tagore’s novels, especially Gora, in the context of people’s understanding and reaction to Gandhi’s Satyagraha. Novelists are among the best observers and teachers about peoples and their cultures.
Finally, in the last book Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, the author Christian Madsbjerg argues that unless companies take pains to understand the human beings represented in their data sets, they risk losing touch with the markets they’re serving. He says the deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and people.
In this context it’s quite relevant that the Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who studied computer science, philosophy and psychology, but said a course in theatre taught her a lesson she uses daily in technology product development. On the stage, she said, the playwright has to explicitly explain what’s happening, or leave it to the audience to understand implicitly.
The HBR article, The Best Leaders See Things That Others Don’t. Art Can Help, says the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes. Art, it turns out, can be an important tool to change how leaders see their work.
“Study the science of art,” said Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the greatest medieval polymaths. “Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
“The greatest scientists are artists as well,” said Einstein, who was also a violinist and would carry his violin everywhere he went.
Steve Jobs perhaps made the most important concluding remarks about the importance of art. “Technology alone is not enough,” he said. “It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.”
It might not be an overstatement that what we’ve been talking about is actually a retelling of what Vivekananda had said more than a hundred years back: What we want is to see the man who is harmoniously developed great in heart, great in mind, [great in deed]… We want the man whose heart feels intensely the miseries and sorrows of the world… And [we want] the man who not only can feel but can find the meaning of things, who delves deeply into the heart of nature and understanding. [We want] the man who will not even stop there, [but] who wants to work out [the feeling and meaning by actual deeds]. Such a combination of head, heart, and hand is what we want.
A great combination of “head, heart, and hand” is the essence of an all-round education, that makes a great leader, a great CEO.

The History and Geography of the Kashmir Problem

Image: Courtesy USA Today
Booker prize winner and Human rights activist, Arundhati Roy, while addressing a seminar titiled "Whither Kashmir? Freedom or enslavement?” and organized by Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) in Srinagar in 2010, said, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.” It’s a matter of conjecture as to what India she was referring to and what history she had dug into. Let’s do some simple facts check.

First, let’s see what’s India.
The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang (also written Xuanzang), who visited India in the seventh century (almost a millennium after Alexander) during the reign of Harshavardhana, rightly wrote, “It (India) was anciently called Shin-tu (Sindhu, the river), also Hien-tau (Hindu); but now, according to the right pronunciation, it is called In-tu (India)… The entire land is divided into seventy countries or so… Each country has diverse customs…” So India, according to him was a super country of seventy or so countries. I think that’s the most apt definition of India, as it has been since many millennia.
The Greek historian Megasthenes too, a millennium before, had referred to the “entire land” by one name – Indica. And the Persian polymath Al-Biruni, four centuries later, wrote the book Taḥqīq māli-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah, Confirming (tahqiq) all Topics (maqul) of India (Hind), Acceptable (maqbul) and Unacceptable (mardhul), referring to India as Hind, in the 11th century. The Arabs still refer to India as Hind – the granularity of the provinces and languages and ethnicities are not visible from outside, as it has been over the past few millennia.
This country of countries, India, which appeared as a single homogeneous entity, seen holistically, was perhaps united administratively for the first time by Ashoka in the third century BC. Ashoka also created a large Asian Union comprising almost all the existing governments in South and South East Asia, enabling seamless trade and exchange of commodities, peoples and cultures across a very large area, something much more than the recent European Union.
During Ashoka’s time India was the largest economy comprising almost 35% of the world GDP. (China’s GDP was around 25% and that of the Greeks little more than 10%). India’s dominance in the world economy remained intact for the next two millennia, always maintaining a staggering 25-30% share of the world GDP, till the beginning of the 18th century, when the British arrived. There’s indeed a reason behind this.
In just 120 years, between 1700 and 1820, India’s GDP fell from 25% to 15% of the world GDP, and by 1947, when India was partitioned, it was at a mere 4%. So what exactly did the British do? They just broke the scaffolding which supported the Indian economy for millennia – the security of uninterrupted production and the safety of free trade across the entire subcontinent. They broke the federal structure of the subcontinent that functioned like an efficient and united country for millennia, and disintegrated it into isolated regions, cutting the seamless trade. The entire economy collapsed in no time. Suddenly the people of India were not allowed to produce and trade freely. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is the best chronicle of this devastation. People who had been cultivating their own food aplenty were suddenly forced to cultivate opium and indigo, and trade only with the British. Soon, for the first time, India saw hungry people, and famines.
India’s independence in 1947 didn’t do much good. The truncated India was severely bereft of the entire trade network which was the lifeline of her economy for more than two millennia. The “Kabuliwala” (immortalized by Tagore in a very poignant eponymous short story), the Afghans, who were household names in Bengal disappeared soon, like the Kashmiri shawl not much later, from Bengal and elsewhere. Free movement of people and trade collapsed between the frontiers.
It’s not for no reason then, that Sri Aurobindo had cautioned on 15th August 1947, when India was portioned, and which was also his 76th birthday, “India today is free but she has not achieved unity… In whatever way, the division must go; unity must […] be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India’s future.” It was therefore not a surprise to anyone in the know, when the spiritual flag of united India, designed by him, was hoisted at the Aurobindo Ashrama in Pondicherry after the Article 370 had been abrogated by the Govt. of India in order to integrate Kashmir completely into India. Aurobindo had wanted the flag to be hoisted whenever a separated part of India would rejoin, thus celebrating the idea of a united India.
Now let’s come to Kashmir.
Hiuen Tsang talked in length about Kia-shi-mi-lo (Kashmir) as one of the seventy Indian countries,“enclosed by mountains… The neighboring states that have attacked it have never succeeded in subduing it. The capital of the country on the west side is bordered by a great river.”
A verse from the Rig Veda, The Ode to the Rivers, (Book 10, Hymn 75, Verse 5) goes like this:
Shutudri stomam sachataa Parushni aa| Asiknyaa Marudvridhe Vitastayaa Aarjikiye shrinuhya aa Sushomayaa ||
O Shutudri (Sutlej), O Parushni (Ravi), [you] favor this hymn [of mine]. With Asikni (Chenab) [and] with Vitastaa (Jhelum), O Marudvridhaa (the combined river of Chenab and Jhelum); with Sushomaa (Sohan) O Arjikiyaa (upper Indus), hear [my hymn].All the major left tributaries of the Indus are enumerated in anti-clockwise manner, starting from Sutlej, barring Beas. It can be argued that the mere mention of Jhelum (Vitastaa) doesn’t mean that Kashmir was a part of the Rig Vedic India. But the fact that the ancient word Vitastaa is still preserved in Vyeth, the Kashmiri name for Jhelum, surely says something else. The very next verse talks about three rivers Trishtaamaa, Susartu and Sveti, which, from the order they are mentioned, could be very well the right tributaries of Indus in Kashmir, with a possibility that Sveti could be Gilgit. But much more striking, as the Harvard Indologist and Vedic scholar Michael Witzel has pointed out, is the fact that the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which gave the identity to India, her peoples and cultures, is very likely a loan word from the much older Burushaski language, remnants of which are still spoken in few isolated pockets of Kashmir. In the Burushaski, Shina and Dumaki languages of Kashmir “sinda” means river and that explains why there are multiple rivers in Kashmir with the name Sind (Sonmarg is on Sind).
The Greek historian Hecataeus, in his description of India, referred to Kashmir as Kaspapyros (surely related to Kashmir’s old name Kashyapapura, the city of the Rig Vedic sage Kashyapa), in the sixth century BC.

Rajatarangini, the first Indian book of secular history written by Kalhana in the 12th century, is a chronicle of the history of Kashmir and India since the time of the Mahabharata war. The 102nd and 104th verses of its first book says, Ashoka, who has killed all his sins, shaanta-vrijina, embraced the doctrines of Jina (Buddha), prapanna jina-shaasanam, built the city of Srinagari.
So the discourses on Kashmir not being a part of India can rest for ever. Like any other part of India, it has been, and should remain an integral part of India. Now let’s look back and try to analyze why there has been so much fuss about Kashmir’s special status since 1947.
When India was partitioned, most of her peoples were never asked which part they wanted to be in – India or Pakistan. Bengal and the Punjab were attempted to be partitioned allocating the Muslim majority areas to Pakistan and retaining the rest in India. But that left out numerous regions on either sides with contrasting demographics – Hindu majority areas in Pakistan and Muslims majority in India. People of these regions were never asked whether they were fine with their fates – especially the hapless minorities who decided to stay back in Pakistan.
Moreover, there were some major anomalies, all of which favored Pakistan. The whole of Khulna district of Bengal with 50.7% Hindu population was awarded to (East) Pakistan. To decide which country they wanted to join, Sylhet, a part of Assam, was offered a referendum, which was thoroughly rigged in favor of Pakistan. When plebiscite was offered to the princely states of Junagarh, Hyderabad and Jammu & Kashmir, Jinnah insisted that the decisions should be left to the rulers and not to the peoples, because he was more interested in Hyderabad, a Hindu majority princely state ruled by a Muslim, than J&K, exactly its opposite. Given this, Pakistan shouldn’t have had any problem when the Hindu king of J&K wanted to join India. Period.
So, from the very beginning Pakistan’s actions in matters of Kashmir were uncalled for. Their attacking Kashmir in 1947 in a bid to free it from India could be similar to India trying to free Khulna, Sylhet (in East Pakistan) and the North West Frontier Province (under Frontier Gandhi, they wanted to join India) from Pakistan, which very logically India never did. And for the millions of people who became victims of the partitions and who were not consulted before their fates had been decided by someone else, they learned to accept the eventuality and move on, building their lives from scratch. Extending the same logic to Kashmir, it would be ludicrous to even accept the argument that their accession to India was unjust. The accession, like any other part of India, should have been unconditional from the day one, just to maintain the parity with the rest.
The reality is, even the Kashmiris eventually learned to move on. Till the eighties there hasn’t been any disturbance. Not a single incident could be pointed out to vindicate that the Muslims in the valley were being subjugated by a Hindu majority India. On the contrary, the Kashmiri Pandits can’t remember since when they stopped celebrating any festival outdoor, fearing reactions from their Muslim “neighbors”. There was of course this dream of the two sides of Kashmir (J&K and POK) uniting someday, like many, who had to leave their homes in East Bengal and settle in India, still living with the utopia of a reunited Bengal. But that didn’t lead to any violence or terrorism, till Pakistan, in the eighties, started indoctrinating the youths in the valley, first with communism and revolution, with inspiration from Guevara, Castro, Nietzsche, Chomsky et al, and then slowly with radical Islamization.
Two elections in the eighties were rigged in Kashmir, but all elections in Bengal and Bihar have been rigged till the nineties. So, that was no justification for resorting to violence and terrorism, but it was very smartly exploited to begin with the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus and Sikhs in the valley.

Over six months, starting with the winter of 1989, the entire Pandit population was terrified with rampant killings and rapes, threatened with dire consequences and finally forced to leave, with the masjids announcing openly: Yetiy banega Pakistan, batav rosti batanivy saan, This will be Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women; Raliv, Galiv, ya Tschaliv, Merge, Die or Flee. All the while, during this short period of six months, the Indian government kept silent, when chits were being pasted on the doors of the houses of the Kashmiri Pandits daily, announcing who should leave next. The present militarization of the valley was only after this.
The truth is that the issue has never been a fight for Kashmiriyat. It was always, like Pakistan, to do away with everything else than Islam, totally obliterate all the non-Islamic identities that have thrived for millennia and try to create, futilely though, an Islamic identity. It’s nothing but the popular slogan Iqbal had coined: Pakistan ka matlab kya la illaha illalah, which translates word by word to “Pakistan’s meaning is there is no god but Allah”. This obsession with carving out an Islamic identity, disowning the millennia old unalienable Indian history, heritage and connections is the root cause of Pakistan’s identity crisis, which explains why they are a failed state. Totally contrast to this is how the few other non-Arab Islamic countries like Bangladesh, Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia have so well preserved their non-Islamic rich cultural heritages.
The people who are spearheading all the “struggle” in the valley are least interested in Kashmiriyat. Most of them don’t even speak the language – they prefer Urdu, I’m told. During the Swadeshi movement, when the Indians wanted to boycott everything British, they didn’t slyly send their kids to Britain for education – they created their own institutions like Jadavpur University in Calcutta and Banaras Hindu University. On the contrary none of the separatists’ kids study in the valley. It’s also not about their hatred for India. Otherwise so many Kashmiris wouldn’t have had business interests across India, pointed out a Kashmiri Pandit friend of mine. A Chechen separatist, she added, would rarely enter into any business with Russia. A little fact check will reveal that nothing of Kashmiriyat has been preserved in POK, but still no Kashmiri separatist or activist ever talks about that.
Moreover, I myself figured out during my trip to the valley in 2017 that the minority Shias are not at all antagonized to India. Nor are the Hanzis, the boatpeople who are not part of the mainstream Islamic communities. Both these communities have been marginalized. Pehle Kafir (Hindus and Sikhs), phir Shia, phir Hanzi, that has been the agenda and the clarion call. The fact that the Shia majority Gilgit-Balistan in POK today has a totally different demographics should say it all.
It could be argued that India should have honored the special status given to Kashmir (in the form of Article 370) and promised as a part of the accession pact. But then, India did honor the commitment in spirit as the demographics in the valley didn’t change at all over the years (apart from the 100% exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, for which of course the Indian government was not responsible) whereas that in POK did drastically. And as to honoring the commitment in letter, it’s up to the Supreme Court to judge if the abrogation of Article 370 really violated anything.
So practically, the entire issue about Kashmir is a Sunni Wahabi narrative perpetuated forcefully by a few with vested interests and supported by Pakistan. That’s the root cause of everything. It’s also perhaps, as pointed out to me by a Kashmiri friend of mine, a hidden agenda fueled by the racial supremacy of the ruling class of Pakistan, who didn’t want to share the power with the dark skinned and Bengali-speaking Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (he would soon become the first Prime Minister of Bangladesh) even though he had got a massive majority in the 1970 general elections in Pakistan, just because they felt he was racially inferior.
India has to put an end to all these. India needs to be united, not because she has been such all along, but because, that’s how she can survive longer, as a strong economy and a prosperous and free place.
The need of the hour is to gain the confidence of the indoctrinated Kashmiris and convince them that it’s for mutual benefit that we all stay together.

Kashmir and the idea of a United India

Talking about nations, Tagore had said, “The peoples are living beings. They have their distinct personalities. But nations are organizations of power… Nations do not create, they merely produce and destroy.”
On 15th August 1947, two nations were “produced”, not created, but the India or Hindustaan or Bhaarata Varsha, thriving with its diverse peoples and cultures for many millennia, was destroyed.India can’t afford to be destroyed once again.
It’s not for no reason that Sri Aurobindo had cautionedon that day, which was also his 76th birthday, “India today is free but she has not achieved unity… In whatever way, the division must go; unity must […] be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India’s future.” It was therefore not a surprise to anyone in the know, when the spiritual flag of united India, designed by him, was hoistedat the Aurobindo Ashrama in Pondicherry after the Article 370 had been abrogated by the Govt. of India in order to integrate Kashmir completely into India. Aurobindo had wanted the flag to be hoisted whenever a separated part of India would rejoin, thus celebrating the idea of a united India.
Tagore didn’t survive to see the birth of the two decapitated nations, much of his lands and people in East Bengal becoming part of a nation (Pakistan) he might not have been excited about. His anxiety at the partition of India might have been similar to that of Aurobindo’s. So, let’s try to understand the reason behind the anxiety, and at the same time, the idea behind a united India or Bhaarata Varsha.
Many people have often commented that India as a nation never existed and that it was the creation of the British. In the same breath it has also been claimed that India was never united till the British came to rule India in the eighteenth century.
Yes, India was never a “nation”, in the western sense, and in the sense Tagore had referred to it as “organizations of power”. India, Hindustaan or the more ancient Bhaarata has been rather a “varsha”, which literally means a “division of the earth” in Sanskrit. Bhaarata Varsha is then a place on earth peopled by disparately diverse human beings, with as much diverse cultures, languages, shapes and colors, but still having a very distinctive common aspect which made all of them look homogenous, when seen from a distance. This homogeneity, we will see, is nothing but the spiritual unity of the peoples of the entire landmass from the Gandhara (parts of present Pakistan and Afghanistan) in the west to Magadha (present Bengal-Bihar) in the east, from Kashmira in the north to the Dravida in the south.
Interestingly the Sanskrit term “varsha” in Bhaarata Varsha, the land of Bharata, is akin to “varshaa”, rains, implicating that the former would have come from the sense of the land of the rains that support the lives of its peoples. (It also means a period, a year, coming from the periodic nature of the rains). So, more than the power that rules a nation, it’s the rains, the symbol of life and growth, that signifies Bhaarata. With the same line of thought it can be realized that, it’s this “life” or rather the way of life of the diverse peoples of Bhaarata that has always appeared quite homogeneous to anyone external. That explains why despite the diversity, India has always been seen as one unit, one entity, which came about to be designated by the name of the mighty river anyone must come across the moment she stepped into India from the west – Sindhu, Indus, Hindu.
The first occurrence of the term “Hindu” as the designation of a land is found in the Avesta, the earliest scriptures of the Zoroastrians, written in a language very close to the Rig Vedic Sanskrit in Eastern Iran sometime around 1000 BC, where it appears as “Hapta Hendu”, the Avestan words for Sapta Sindhu, referring to the land of the Seven Rivers, which surely points to the undivided Punjab. Very soon various forms of the word “Hindu” came about to mean not only the Punjab, but the entire Indian subcontinent. By the time Alexander reached the Sindhu, in fourth century BC, Megasthenes, the Greek historian, started writing about the Indian history and when he completed he named his magnum opus Indica. It was just a matter of time that the Hapta Hindu became Hindustan, but it retained the same original meaning of Bhaarata Varsha – a sea of Great Humanity, Mahaa Maanava, as Tagore would put across.
India has always been diverse, disparate but still not disintegrated. The people from outside the subcontinent wouldn’t see the granularity. But in reality, even the Rig Veda (RV Book 7, Hymn 18), written not later than 1500 BC, talks about a Sudaas, the King of the Tritsu tribe and a descendant of the legendary Bharata the subcontinent eventually would be christened after, fighting against ten other tribes – Bhrigu, Druhyu, Turvasha, Paktha, Bhalaanas, Alina, Vishaanin, Shiva, Anu and Puru – and uniting them. Even during the time of the Rig Veda some of these tribes and their languages and cultures were so different from each other that the speech of the Purus appeared scornful, mriddhra, to others (RV Book 7, Hymn 18, Verse 13), and it was a matter of shock to some that the people of Kikata, perhaps Magadha of the later times comprising modern Bengal and Bihar, didn’t follow the ritual of preparing the milky draught, aashira, by heating it in the kettles (RV Book 3, Hymn 53, Verse 14).Till now we’ve been only talking about the spiritual unity – unity in the way of the lives of the peoples of India. But any form of unity that doesn’t result in the overall growth and prosperity of the humanity is meaningless. Talking about growth and prosperity, the topics like governance, economy, security etc. can’t be ignored. It was very clear at an early stage of our civilization that it was also essential to have a homogeneity in the governance, a uniformity in the administration. It was needed not for anything else, but to foster better trade and commerce between its every part and create a self-sustaining economy. This would eventually give the peoples enough safety and security to be “free” in the real sense, with the “strength to our activities and breadth to our creations”, as Tagore saidabout freedom.But what could have been the binding force to create this uniformity? Interestingly, it’s the inherent spiritual unity that would again bind the peoples, and it’s in this context that Buddha played a great role. In the Bengali period novel Maitreya Jaatak, centered around the life of Buddha and His interaction with Bimbisaar, the King of Magadha, the author Bani Basu very wonderfully recreated the times with the need and inspiration for such a political unification of the sub-continent. It might be controversial to say that Buddha was the main force behind the first political unification of India, but when we see that few centuries later Ashoka did exactly the same, using the teachings of Buddha as the master glue or the value proposition, we understand the role of Buddha. Ashoka not only unified the entire Indian subcontinent politically but also created a large Asian Union comprising almost all the existing governments in South and South East Asia, enabling seamless trade and exchange of commodities, peoples and cultures across a very large area, something much more than the recent European Union.So, along with the spiritual unity, India was now united politically and administratively. The popular narrative that Ashoka had a sudden change of heart after the devastating Kalinga war and that he henceforth wanted to tread the path of Dhamma (dharma) might be more of a calculated PR stint. In reality, everything might have been as per Chanakya’s (the ace economist and master strategist of Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta Maurya) game plan of controlling the economies rather than territories. Using Buddha’s doctrines of peace and happiness was no doubt a much more effective way of doing so, rather than indulging in wars and incurring heavy economic losses. Perhaps Buddha Himself wanted the same – uniting people through spirituality rather than warfare. And it did work. It worked again two millennia later, with Gandhi’s non-violence.During Ashoka’s time India was the largesteconomy comprising almost 35% of the world GDP. (China’s GDP was around 25% and that of the Greeks little more than 10%). India’s dominance in the world economy remained intact for the next two millennia, always maintaining a staggering 25-30% share of the world GDP, till the beginning of the 18thcentury, when the British arrived. There’s indeed a reason behind this.Jawaharlal Nehru pointed out a very interesting thing in his Discovery of India, about India’s dominance over the past two millennia. Since Ashoka’s time, he said, irrespective of the power (Kings or Emperors) at the helm, there was an unwritten thumb rule across the entire subcontinent that no warfare should ever destroy the crop and economy. It’s not for no reason that battles were always fought at designated desolate places, away from localities and cultivable lands, so as to minimize the collateral damage. Also, no warring Kings ever destroyed the Pan-India trading infrastructure that had existed since Ashoka’s time. So even though there were innumerable kingdoms and kings and emperors over the past two millennia, and as many battles, but when it came to trade and commerce, the entire subcontinent always behaved as though it were a single unified and uninterrupted market place. In fact, the people often didn’t even know who their rulers were. The entire Indian subcontinent functioned very much like a country with a single federal system whose sanctity and robustness was maintained not by the rulers, but by its peoples and at the center was the economy.The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang (also written Xuanzang), who visited India in the seventh century (almost a millennium after Ashoka) during the reign of Harshavardhana, rightly wrote, “It (India) was anciently called Shin-tu (Sindhu), also Hien-tau (Hindu); but now, according to the right pronunciation, it is called In-tu (India)… The entire land is divided into seventy countries or so… Each country has diverse customs…” So India, according to him was a super country of seventy or so countries. Megasthenes too, a millennium before, had referred to the “entire land” by one name – Indica. And the Persian polymath Al-Biruni, four centuries later, wrote the book Taḥqīq mā li-l-hind min maqūlah maqbūlah fī al-ʿaql aw mardhūlah, Confirming (tahqiq) all Topics (maqul) of India (Hind), Acceptable (maqbul) and Unacceptable (mardhul), referring to India as Hind, in the 11th century. The Arabs still refer to India as Hind – the granularity of the provinces and languages and ethnicities are not visible from outside, as it has been over the past few millennia.In just 120 years, between 1700 and 1820, India’s GDP fell from 25% to 15% of the world GDP, and by 1947, when India was partitioned, it was at a mere 4%. So what exactly did the British do? They just broke the scaffolding which supported the Indian economy for millennia – the security of uninterrupted production and the safety of free trade across the entire subcontinent. They broke the federal structure of the subcontinent that functioned like an efficient and united country for millennia, and disintegrated it into isolated regions, cutting the seamless trade. The entire economy collapsed in no time. Suddenly the people of India were not allowed to produce and trade freely. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is the best chronicle of this devastation. People who had been cultivating their own food aplenty were suddenly forced to cultivate opium and indigo, and trade only with the British. Soon, for the first time, India saw hungry people, and famines.India’s independence in 1947 didn’t do much good. The truncated India was severely bereft of the entire trade network which was the lifeline of her economy for more than two millennia. The “Kabuliwala” (immortalized by Tagore in a very poignant eponymous short story), the Afghans, who were household names in Bengal disappeared soon, like the Kashmiri shawl not much later, from Bengal and elsewhere. Free movement of people and trade collapsed between the frontiers.

Moreover, the spiritual unity of India was broken forever. What became Pakistan is a very important
part of India’s cultural heritage and identity. The first urban Indian civilization in the Indus valley; Punjab, the place where the first book of the mankind – the Rig Veda – was written; Gandhara, one of the regions where Buddhism thrived for the longest in the subcontinent – all became Pakistan, which ironically went ahead to eradicate all the pre-Islamic identities and legacy. Thus, with the partition, not only was our economy crippled, a big part of our heritage was also left to die. More legacies would die if Kashmir or any other part of India is lost. We can’t let that happen. Let’s now turn our attention to Kashmir.Booker prize winner and Human rights activist, Arundhati Roy, while addressing a seminar titiled "Whither Kashmir? Freedom or enslavement?” and organized by Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) in Srinagar in 2010, said, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.” It’s a matter of conjecture as to what India she was referring to and what history she had dug into. Let’s do some simple fact check.
A verse from the Rig Veda, The Ode to the Rivers, (Book 10, Hymn 75, Verse 5) goes like this:

Shutudri stomam sachataa Parushni aa|  Asiknyaa Marudvridhe Vitastayaa Aarjikiye shrinuhya aa Sushomayaa ||

O Shutudri (Sutlej), O Parushni (Ravi), [you] favor this hymn [of mine]. With Asikni (Chenab) [and] with Vitastaa (Jhelum), O Marudvridhaa (the combined river of Chenab and Jhelum); with Sushomaa (Sohan) O Arjikiyaa (upper Indus), hear [my hymn].

All the major left tributaries of the Indus are enumerated in anti-clockwise manner, starting from Sutlej, barring Beas. It can be argued that the mere mention of Jhelum (Vitastaa) doesn’t mean that Kashmir was a part of the Rig Vedic India. But the fact that the ancient word Vitastaa is still preserved in Vyeth, the Kashmiri name for Jhelum, surely says something else. The very next verse talks about three rivers Trishtaamaa, Susartu and Sveti, which, from the order they are mentioned, could be very well the right tributaries of Indus in Kashmir, with a possibility that Sveti could be Gilgit. But much more striking, as the Harvard Indologist and Vedic scholar Michael Witzel has pointed out, is the fact that the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which gave the identity to India, her peoples and cultures, is very likely a loan word from the much older Burushaski language, remnants of which are still spoken in few isolated pockets of Kashmir. In the Burushaski, Shina and Dumaki languages of Kashmir “sinda” means river and that explains why there are multiple rivers in Kashmir with the name Sind (Sonmarg is on Sind).
We’ve seen earlier that the western travelers/historians always referred to India as a single country, despite the various countries within.

The Greek historian Hecataeus, in his description of India, referred to Kashmir as Kaspapyros (surely related to Kashmir’s old name Kashyapapura, the city of the Rig Vedic sage Kashyapa), in the sixth century BC.

Then, Hiuen Tsang in the sixth century AD talked in length about Kia-shi-mi-lo (Kashmir) as an Indian kingdom “enclosed by mountains… The neighboring states that have attacked it have never succeeded in subduing it. The capital of the country on the west side is bordered by a great river.”

Rajatarangini, the first Indian book of secular history written by Kalhana in the 12th century, is a chronicle of the history of Kashmir and India since the time of the Mahabharata war. The 102nd and 104th verses of its first book says, Ashoka, who has killed all his sins, shaanta-vrijina, embraced the doctrines of Jina (Buddha), prapanna jina-shaasanam, built the city of Srinagari.
So the discourses on Kashmir not being a part of India can rest for ever. Like any other part of India, it has been, and should remain an integral part of India. Now let’s look back and try to analyze why there has been so much fuss about Kashmir’s special status since 1947.
When India was partitioned, most of her peoples were never asked which part they wanted to be in – India or Pakistan. Bengal and the Punjab were attempted to be partitioned allocating the Muslim majority areas to Pakistan and retaining the rest in India. But that left out numerous regions on either sides with contrasting demographics – Hindu majority areas in Pakistan and Muslims majority in India. People of these regions were never asked whether they were fine with their fates – especially the hapless minorities who decided to stay back in Pakistan.
Moreover, there were some major anomalies, all of which favored Pakistan. The whole of Khulna district of Bengal with 50.7% Hindu population was awarded to (East) Pakistan. To decide which country they wanted to join, Sylhet, a part of Assam, was offered a referendum, which was thoroughly rigged in favor of Pakistan. When plebiscite was offered to the princely states of Junagarh, Hyderabad and Jammu & Kashmir, Jinnah insistedthat the decisions should be left to the rulers and not to the peoples, because he was more interested in Hyderabad, a Hindu majority princely state ruled by a Muslim, than J&K, exactly its opposite. Given this, Pakistan shouldn’t have had any problem when the Hindu king of J&K wanted to join India. Period.
So, from the very beginning Pakistan’s actions in matters of Kashmir were uncalled for. Their attacking Kashmir in 1947 in a bid to free it from India could be similar to India trying to free Khulna, Sylhet (in East Pakistan) and the North West Frontier Province (under Frontier Gandhi, they wanted to join India) from Pakistan, which very logically India never did. And for the millions of people who became victims of the partitions and who were not consulted before their fates had been decided by someone else, they learned to accept the eventuality and move on, building their lives from scratch. Extending the same logic to Kashmir, it would be ludicrous to even accept the argument that their accession to India was unjust. The accession, like any other part of India, should have been unconditional from the day one, just to maintain the parity with the rest.
The reality is, even the Kashmiris eventually learned to move on. Till the eighties there hasn’t been any disturbance. Not a single incident could be pointed out to vindicate that the Muslims in the valley were being subjugated by a Hindu majority India. On the contrary, the Kashmiri Pandits can’t remember since when they stopped celebrating any festival outdoor, fearing reactions from their Muslim “neighbors”. There was of course this dream of the two sides of Kashmir (J&K and POK) uniting someday, like many, who had to leave their homes in East Bengal and settle in India, still living with the utopia of a reunited Bengal. But that didn’t lead to any violence or terrorism, till Pakistan, in the eighties, started indoctrinating the youths in the valley, first with communism and revolution, with inspiration from Guevara, Castro, Nietzsche, Chomsky et al, and then slowly with radical Islamization.
Two elections in the eighties were rigged in Kashmir, but all elections in Bengal and Bihar have been rigged till the nineties. So, that was no justification for resorting to violence and terrorism, but it was very smartly exploited to begin with the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus and Sikhs in the valley.

Over six months, starting with the winter of 1989, the entire Pandit population was terrified with rampant killings and rapes, threatened with dire consequences and finally forced to leave, with the masjids announcing openly: Yetiy banega Pakistan, batav rosti batanivy saan, This will be Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women; Raliv, Galiv, ya Tschaliv, Merge, Die or Flee. All the while, during this short period of six months, the Indian government kept silent, when chits were being pasted on the doors of the houses of the Kashmiri Pandits daily, announcing who should leave next.

The present militarization of the valley was only after this.
The truth is that the issue has never been a fight for Kashmiriyat. It was always, like Pakistan, to do away with everything else than Islam, totally obliterate all the non-Islamic identities that have thrived for millennia and try to create, futilely though, an Islamic identity. It’s nothing but the popular sloganIqbal had coined: Pakistan ka matlab kya la illaha illalah, which translates word by word to “Pakistan’s meaning is there is no god but Allah”. This obsession with carving out an Islamic identity, disowning the millennia old unalienable Indian history, heritage and connections is the root cause of Pakistan’s identity crisis, which explains why they are a failed state. Totally contrast to this is how the few other non-Arab Islamic countries like Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia have so well preserved their non-Islamic rich cultural heritages.
The people who are spearheading all the “struggle” in the valley are least interested in Kashmiriyat. Most of them don’t even speak the language – they prefer Urdu, I’m told. During the Swadeshi movement, when the Indians wanted to boycott everything British, they didn’t slyly send their kids to Britain for education – they created their own institutions like Jadavpur University in Calcutta and Banaras Hindu University. On the contrary none of the separatists’ kids study in the valley. It’s also not about their hatred for India. Otherwise so many Kashmiris wouldn’t have had business interests across India, pointed out a Kashmiri Pandit friend of mine. A Chechen separatist, she added, would rarely enter into any business with Russia. A little fact check will reveal that nothing of Kashmiriyat has been preserved in POK, but still no Kashmiri separatist or activist ever talks about that.Moreover, I myself figured out during my trip to the valley in 2017 that the minority Shias are not at all antagonized to India. Nor are the Hanzis, the boatpeople who are not part of the mainstream Islamic communities. Both these communities have been marginalized. Pehle Kafir (Hindus and Sikhs), phir Shia, phir Hanzi, that has been the agenda and the clarion call. The fact that the Shia majority Gilgit-Balistan in POK today has a totally different demographics should say it all.
It could be argued that India should have honored the special status given to Kashmir (in the form of Article 370) and promised as a part of the accession pact. But then, India did honor the commitment in spirit as the demographics in the valley didn’t change at all over the years (apart from the 100% exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, for which of course the Indian government was not responsible) whereas that in POK did drastically. And as to honoring the commitment in letter, it’s up to the Supreme Court to judge if the abrogation of Article 370 really violated anything.
So practically, the entire issue about Kashmir is a Sunni Wahabi narrative perpetuated forcefully by a few with vested interests and supported by Pakistan. That’s the root cause of everything. It’s also perhaps, as pointed out to me by a Kashmiri friend of mine, a hidden agenda fueled by the racial supremacy of the ruling class of Pakistan, who didn’t want to share the power with the dark skinned and Bengali-speaking Sheikh Mujbur Rahman (he would soon become the first Prime Minister of Bangladesh) even though he had got a massive majority in the 1970 general elections in Pakistan, just because they felt he was racially inferior.
India has to put an end to all these. India needs to be united, not because she has been such all along, but because, that’s how she can survive longer, as a strong economy and a prosperous and free place.
The need of the hour is to gain the confidence of the indoctrinated Kashmiris and convince them that it’s for mutual benefit that we all stay together.

Why is there so much fuss about Hindi?

From time to time the diatribe against the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi speaking people of India has become a sort of fashion, or rather a political weapon, to be flashed in public in order to flaunt nothing but a form of hollow chauvinism – it could be termed anything like provincial, regional, linguistic, ethnic, etc. – and mislead the innocent people with a fake sense of psychological safety against an imperial or federal onslaught. For reasons better known than often told, Hindi has been seen as a symbol of imposition and a threat to the pluralistic identities of India.

But strangely, the same threat is not felt for English, which, warns the prominent French linguist Claude Hagege, “may eventually kill most other languages". That itself says a lot about all these protests. These are just selfish acts of politics “concerned with the self-interest of a pugnacious nationalism”, to use Tagore’s apt words. I dragged Tagore into this because his views about “nationalism” are perhaps the most practical and relevant ones, even today. The “nationalism” he has referred to would be very clear from what he has to say about “nation”.

“We have no word for Nation in our language,” he clarifies. “When we borrow this word from other people, it never fits us… Not for us, is this mad orgy of midnight, with lighted torches…”
Orgy of midnight, with lighted torches? Did the poet have a premonition of all the candle-lit vigils at the India Gate?

We will come back to Tagore. For now, let’s talk about something more recent. The moment the draft of the National Education Policy 2019 was made public, “lighted torches” came out in the night, accusing of, the same thing – imposition of Hindi.

I actually went through the draft.

It says, “Because research now clearly shows that children pick up languages extremely quickly between the ages of 2 and 8, and moreover that multilingualism has great cognitive benefits to students, children will now be immersed in three languages early on, starting from the Foundational Stage onwards.”

It then goes on elaborating the Three Language Formula: “[It] will need to be implemented in its spirit throughout the country, promoting multilingual communicative abilities for a multilingual country. However, it must be better implemented in certain States, particularly Hindi Speaking States; for purposes of national integration, schools in Hindi speaking areas should also offer and teach Indian languages from other parts of India. This would help raise the status of all Indian languages…”

What’s offensive in this? I don’t see any.

Just in case people think that the draft came from some arbitrary people, it must be reminded that the chairman of the committee is none other than K. Kasturirangan, former Chairman of ISRO. Few members are Vasudha Kamat, former Vice-Chancellor of the SNDT Women's University, Bombay, Manjul Bhargava, R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at the Princeton University, USA, Mazhar Asif Member, Professor at the Centre for Persian and Central Asian Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and others. I don’t think these people could be categorized into any genre of arbitrariness.

In case people have second thoughts about the benefits of multilingualism, let’s consider these.

Brainscape, committed to improving how the world studies, using the latest cognitive science research, has cited many benefits of being multilingual. Multilingual people, they say, tend to be more effective communicators. Multilingualism can even delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by an average of five years! Multilingual people better perform on tasks that require high-level thought, multitasking, and sustained attention. Perhaps this is why they are often seen as more intelligent than peers with similar innate intelligence, education, and background. They tend to solve complex problems in more creative ways than their monolingual peers, no matter what kind of problem is being solved. They are faster learners, more likely to make rational decisions, keen observers of the world around them, and more skilled at identifying and correctly analyzing the sub-context of a situation and interpreting the social environment.

An article in The Guardian says, multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages.

To the question whether we should raise our children to be multilingual, The British Academy says, “My answer is an unconditional yes.”

In addition to facilitating cross-cultural communication, a paper says, multilingualism enables children as young as seven months to better adjust to environmental changes and seniors to experience less cognitive decline.

So I believe the question why three languages should be taught from early days is answered quite well. Let’s move on to the most important thing – the explosive topic of learning Hindi for non-Hindi speaking people.

Let’s rewind a bit. In 1918 Gandhi wrote a letter to Tagore asking if Hindi could be the “possible national language for inter-provincial intercourse in India”. Tagore’s answer was very interesting. “Of course Hindi is the only possible national language for interprovincial intercourse in India,” he asserted. “But… I think we cannot enforce it for a long time to come. In the first place, it is truly a foreign language for the Madras people, and in the second, most of [us] will find it extremely difficult to express [ourselves] adequately in this language for no fault of [our] own. So, Hindi will have to remain optional in our national proceedings until a new generation… fully alive to its importance, pave the way towards its general use by constant practice as a voluntary acceptance of a national obligation.”

Almost 20 years later, in 1937, Tagore wrote to Gandhi, “It is imperative … to organize an all-India movement to foster and spread the growth of a language which is potentially capable of being adopted as a common medium of communication between the different provinces… However, I hope that the language which is to claim allegiance as the lingua franca will prove and maintain its complete freedom from any communal bias…”

Intentionally I didn’t cite any or Gandhi’s words in favor of a lingua franca for India, because I felt, Tagore’s views are more universal in many aspects, and hence shouldn’t be colored either with left or right. Interestingly, Gandhi, who went a long way fighting for Hindi to be made as National Language (which hasn’t been ever implemented), and Tagore, both were non-Hindi speakers. But still they felt the need of a lingua franca, which has more relevance to trade and commerce than anything else. If the provinces were to stay in isolation, then there wouldn’t be the need for any lingua franca. But then, no province can grow in isolation. Unless there’s exchange of money and mind (thoughts), no race, province, nation can ever grow. And the first step for such an exchange is a common language, a lingua franca.

Neither Gandhi nor Tagore could be accused of anti-colonialism in not choosing English as the lingua franca. Whoever thinks that as an option is surely not a practical person. It’s ludicrous to think that a mason from Bengal and working at a construction site in Gujarat would bargain in English with the local fisherman, or, a Central Government employee from Madras, transferred to Assam, would teach the local cook, in English, how to make good sambar. It’s a no brainer that, even now, more than hundred years after Tagore had written that letter to Gandhi in 1918, Hindi is still the most likely solution to Tagore’s lingua franca for cross communication between provinces.

Many centuries ago, even the Mughals had felt the need of a lingua franca, for better administration and trade across the vast country of many races and languages. They too chose the prevalent Hindustani language of the day as the lingua franca. Of course they introduced a lot of Persian and Arabic words of administrative and judicial use. Thus, the Sauraseni Prakrit language of the medieval India, the immediate ancestor of Hindi during the first millennium, got a little different flavor in the second millennium, which later took the name Urdu, perhaps coming from the word vardi, meaning uniform, implicating that the language was nothing but a lingua franca for the people in uniform – either in the army or government jobs. Like Gandhi and Tagore, wisdom prevailed among the Mughals – they didn’t try to make Persian, their preferred language, the lingua franca. Persian, like English, stayed the official language for education, art and literature, whereas the lingua franca was the native Hindustani-Urdu.

More than two millennia ago, Ashoka too had a lingua franca –  a form of the Magadhi Prakrit language (forefather of Bengali) spoken in Magadha, comprising present day Bihar and Bengal, Ashoka’s native. It might be relevant to note that in all of Kalidas’ Sanskrit dramas, the dialogues of the common people – the artisans, peasants, fishermen, even thieves – were always in Magadhi Prakrit, wherever they would be from. The only plausible reason for this could be that, Magadhi Prakrit was indeed the lingua franca of the common people across the country.

Ashoka’s rock edicts, few of which have survived till date across the Indian subcontinent, from Kandahar in Afghanistan to Bangladesh, from Delhi to Karnataka, had local variants of the Magadhi Prakrit, depending of the location, very much like the present day lingua franca, Hindi, which is spoken in different variants in different parts of India. The caricature and type cast of the Hindi spoken by the Bengalis and the South Indians, as immortalized in Bollywood by Asit Sen/Keshto Mukherjee and Mehmood respectively, says all about lingua franca – it’s more of a sort of an assortment of a number of mutually intelligible creoles rather than any uniform grammatically correct language. You like it or not, Hindi has already acquired that stature and no other language can replace that, how much ever “mad orgy of midnight, with lighted torches” you do!

Going further back, even during the times of the Indus Valley Civilization, in the second and third millennia BC, the entire Central Asia, the melting pot of civilizations, races, cultures and languages, extending into parts of northwestern India, is believed to have had a lingua franca – the Burushaski language, vestiges of which now exist only in a few villages in Kashmir. Quite interestingly, the word Sindhu, the eponymous river which lent the names and identities to India, Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan, and even Indonesia (literally meaning Indian Islands), and the far off Indians of the Americas and the West Indies, is of Burushaski origin – it has survived as a linguistic fossil of the once grand language and the lingua franca of the most important locus in the annals of human civilization.

Lingua franca is the foundation for growth and prosperity, without which, the people survive in isolation, without any interaction and exchange of mind and money. Bangalore reaped the benefit of exchange, as it was never averse to the lingua franca, Hindi, and hence attracted labor and talent pool from all across India, thus boosting the growth of the city. From a sleepy pensioner’s paradise even thirty years back, it’s now the forth richest city in India (with respect to overall contribution to GDP, after Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta), much ahead of Madras, which is still averse to Hindi. Not many people would feel comfortable relocating to Madras. But no one would have a second thought about Bangalore. Almost the entire construction industry in Bangalore is supported by laborers from Bihar, Bengal and Orissa, as is the new age IT, ITES and BT industries by people from all across India.

Despite all the hullabaloo about “Bombay for Marathas”, Bombay is still the most cosmopolitan city in India, attracting people from all walks of life – Bollywood is the biggest example. Bombay’s like a miniature India, and not surprisingly, the lingua franca is Hindi. No wonder it’s the richest city in India. Calcutta too, till very recently when the CM started talking about the Hindi speaking outsiders, was never averse to Hindi and outsiders from any part of India. That corroborates its position as the third richest city in India.

It’s not for nothing that the Tamil speaking Shiv Nadar, co-founder and present Chairman of the USD 8.5 billion HCL, famously said that Hindi shaped his career. He even asked students in Tamil Nadu to learn Hindi. Knowing Hindi immediately breaks many social barriers. In one moment, everyone becomes a member of a single large fraternity, irrespective of the backgrounds, castes, creeds. I realized this the best the moment I landed in Kharagpur, at the IIT. The initial discomfort in communicating in Hindi was overcome soon and I slowly started speaking a heavily accented Bong version of Hindi – not much different from how Bollywood depicts. Everyone at the IIT knew English, but it was only in Hindi that we could share the camaraderie and bonhomie which remained with us forever. The same level of jokes and jibes and fun and frolic is unthinkable in English, not because it’s incapable of the same level of humor, but because it perhaps lacks the mitti ki khushboo, the smell of the Indian soil which only a highly agile and extremely fluid variant of Hindi (or Hinglish, whatever you may call) has.

It’s quite clear that anyone who would be averse to learning the lingua franca would do more harm to the community or fraternity than any good. Relevant are Tagore’s words, again. “Swaraj is not our objective,” he says, in criticism to the overt “nationalism” during the pre-independence era. “Our fight is a spiritual fight, it is for Man. We are to emancipate Man from the meshes that he himself has woven round him — these organizations of National Egoism.” Language chauvinism is just another organization of egoism, nothing else, and the protectionism of the language in the name of nationalism is nothing but the “meshes … woven around”. Tagore adds, “The butterfly will have to be persuaded that the freedom of the sky is of higher value than the shelter of the cocoon.” Any sort of protectionism is nothing but sad attempts at keeping people in cocoons.

The very thought that a language would be threatened by Hindi is nothing but demeaning that language, trying to protect the language in a cocoon.

That’s bondage.

That’s like breaking the world “into fragments by narrow domestic walls”.

Not Islamophobia, it was the Hindutvaphobia of the opposition which attempted futilely to divide the country

Just after the results of the General Election 2019 were out, all hell broke loose among a section of people and media, who had expected very badly an anti-BJP government to come to power. Their hatred for BJP and Modi is so great that they were fine even with the directionless and narrative less Congress and the motley group of corrupt politicians like Lallu, Mayawati, Mulayam and many more, all of whom have dismal records when it comes to human rights, safety and development, forget corruption.
Someone said, “India is a full blown fascist country. Its transformation to fascism is now complete. Majority of Indians that voted this fascist political outfit are fascists. Once we recognize these basic facts, we can begin considering appropriate strategic responses to India and Indians…”
Someone else made a clarion call, “Those friends who are still sane, still believe in love and solidarity, like my friends in Calcutta, shall we walk the street tomorrow, in a walk where we talk about togetherness, sing about love, standing with our neighbors who speak to different Gods? This day is so disheartening, scary, unnerving!”
A major media house in the west scared the hell out of everyone. “Intoxicating voters,” it cried, “with the seductive passion of vengeance, and grandiose fantasies of power and domination, Mr. Modi has deftly escaped public scrutiny of his record of raw wisdom… He triumphantly reaped one of the biggest electoral harvests of the post-truth age, giving us more reason to fear the future…”
Fascism might be an understatement. What had been the narrative of a section of people, obsessed with liberalism and secularism, was actually a myth about Hindutvaphobia, a fear of a mysterious demonic entity that would devour the whole country and regress her to the stone ages of violence and darkness. It was as though, a group of illiterate and uncouth people from the hinterlands of India, without any basic wisdom and knowledge of Indian culture and civilization, of what all India stands for – things like pluralism, inclusiveness, etc. – have suddenly occupied the hallowed seats of power, of course through deceit and magic, and want to unleash their frenzied dark energies into the society and take full control over the lives and ways of the country’s elite and intellectuals, who have taken to themselves the grandiose task of maintaining the secular fabric of the country and upholding all the values and righteousness they have been custodian of, since God knows when.
Rarely has there been such vicious attacks, by a section of the media and intelligentsia, on the people in power, purely because the latter doesn’t align with the ideologies and thoughts of the former. And lo, the former are the ones who talk about liberalism and tolerance, where as they come about as the most intolerant to anyone who wouldn’t belong to their fraternity. Not only upon the BJP, the ire of the former very soon fell upon everyone who voted them back to power, again. So, the 38% of the Indian electorate became “fascists” and gullible of being “intoxicated” and “seduced by passion of vengeance”.
Overnight, the Modi haters came up with theories of massive consolidation of the Hindu votes against the myth of Islamophobia, allegedly purported by the BJP. In doing so, they totally ignored the real reasons behind Modi’s stupendous win. Rather, I would say, they were so blind in their own vision that they couldn’t see the realities on ground.
In the 2019 General Election, BJP has got around 38% vote share and 303 or 53% of the total seats, against Congress’ 20% vote share and 52 or 9% seats. In fact, in the seats where BJP contested, its vote share was as high as 46%.
With 37.6% vote share in rural constituencies, BJP has improved its performance in non-urban areas by close to 7%. In the seats it contested in rural areas, its vote share was close to 46%, compared to Congress’ 23%. This is totally in contradiction to the stories of rural distress, propagated so much by the opposition. I don’t imply here that there was no rural distress at all, but I do have reasons to say that the rural electorate did see some value in getting BJP or rather Modi back to power, if not we accept the ridiculous proposition, put forward by many, that Indians don’t know what they have done.
BJP has got 42% votes from the least (quartile) educated and around 40% from the least prosperous people in India, improving its tally with the latter by almost 30%.
It has improved its vote share in the SC and ST constituencies by 6-7%. It has got 11% more votes from areas with significant Dalit population. More people from the Adivasi dominated areas have voted for BJP than they did in 2014.
Interestingly, BJP has increased its vote share by close to 10% in areas with 20-40% Muslim population. Overall, around 11% Muslims have voted for BJP in 2019, compared to 8% in 2014, which is a close to 40% improvement. For instance, the vote share of BJP has increased by 5-10% in the Muslim dominating Shivajinagar, Chamarajpet and Shanthinagar assembly constituencies in Bangalore, compared to 2014.
Close to 50% of the GenZ population (born after 1996), all first time voters, have opted for BJP.So, BJP has been accepted over a large spectrum of electorate.
A little engagement with the masses would have made it very clear what the pulse of the nation was before the election. Few anecdotes would make things very clear.
One day, a month before the election, my wife had asked me if I knew anything about a scheme called Saubhagya. I vaguely remembered the name – one of the many schemes launched by Modi in the past five years. I asked her the context. She said that our maid, Kamala, had given her a lecture in the morning about many such schemes – she managed to remember only one name. What I figured out was that, Kamala was actually trying to “sell” Modi to my wife, because she had an inkling that the “rich” people, perhaps not among the beneficiaries of any of Modi’s schemes, might not bring him back at the helm of everything once more. She was worried that they, the “poor” people had lot to lose if Modi didn’t come back to power. Kamala is from a village in Karnataka, not far from Bangalore.
The next day I asked my driver, Sunil, whom he would vote for. He proudly told me that he hails from the same village as Aravind Limbavali, the BJP MLA from Mahadevpura, the assembly constituency we are part of. He pleaded me to vote for BJP. I asked him why he liked BJP so much. He requested me to come to his village and find it out myself. His village, he claimed excitedly, is not much different from the place we stay in Bangalore. Many roads there, he said, were better than Bangalore. Few days later he flashed his RuPay debit card. He also talked about the new LPG connection at his house. He was proud that he too had the privileges which had been merely aspirational to “them” in the past, privileges which only the “rich” in the cities had, but were now a reality even in his village.
Both Kamala and Sunil felt they were empowered.
Last year, I’d been to Delhi for some work and I’d taken a cab on rent for day. I have the habit of chit chatting with the cab drivers as I always get to know a lot of interesting facts and figures from them – the facts which are generally not published in the main stream media. I asked him what did he think about Yogi Adityanath’s government in UP, now that it was almost a year since he had come to power. He smiled sarcastically and sneered at me. “You, the educated lot,” he mocked, “you won’t understand.” That was rather rude, I felt. “The police have started working finally [in UP],” he said. “Isn’t that a badi baat, a big thing?” I remembered, some time ago another cab driver too had told me a similar thing about the Delhi cops. “Since Kejriwal becamethe CM,” he had told me, “we’re no longer harassed by the police. I have the number of my MLA – the son-of-a-bitch-police know very well that I can call him anytime…”For the lesser privileged, or rather the “poor”, I realized, the taming of the police was also a sort of empowerment – it gave them a sort of psychological safety.
After the 2019 General Election, when I was trying to figure out what magic had Modi done, I remembered Kamala and Sunil and the Delhi cab drivers. The empowerment came in various forms.
15 Million people have subscribed for the Atal Pension Yojana, a government co-contribution scheme to assure a monthly income up to INR 5000 after the age of 60, for all employees in unorganized sector. 
There are around 360 Million beneficiaries of the Jan Dhan Yojana, one of the earliest welfare schemes launched by Modi. It’s a massive financial inclusion scheme, which starts with a bank account, a RuPay debit card, an INR 5000 overdraft facility and an INR 1 Lakh accident insurance. The main usefulness of this scheme is actually the immediate transfer of all benefits from the government directly to the account holders, by-passing any middleman. More than USD 100 Billion worth of benefits have been already transferred till date directly to the account holders. 
Close to 60 Million have subscribed to the Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojona, an insurance scheme for all account holders, with a premium of roughly INR 1 per day, and a life coverage of INR 2 Lakh.
1.5 Lakh Km of roads have been constructed in villages across India, under the Gram Sadak Yojana. Commuting to and from a village to the nearest big hospital or school or workplace at a town closely is no longer a tyranny of fate.
Non-Corporate Small Business Sector (NCSBS), comprising small manufacturing units, shopkeepers, fruits and vegetable vendors, truck and taxi operators, artisans, street vendors and many others, is perhaps one of the largest disaggregated business ecosystems in the world, sustaining around 500 million lives in India. The Mudra Yojana, aimed at extending, among others, financial support, in the form of refinance, to this sector, has sanctioned 180 Million loans, amounting to about USD 130 Billion.
Under the Awas Yojana, aiming at providing a pucca house with basic amenities to all houseless householder and those households living in kutcha and dilapidated house, financial assistance up to INR 1.5 Lakh per house has been provided for the construction of more than 15 Million houses.
As per the Fasal Bima Yojana, aiming at supporting sustainable production in agriculture sector by providing financial aid to farmers suffering crop loss/damage due to unforeseen events, among others, the farmers have to pay only 1.5-5% of the sum insured as the premium, with the government paying more than double the amount. The calculator available at the official website of the scheme gives an idea of the premiums. For example, the farmer’s contribution to the premium for insuring 1000 hectares of land for cotton cultivation in the kharif season in Latur district of Maharashtra would be INR 2.15 Lakh, with government chipping in INR 4.73 Lakh, for a sum insured of INR 4.3 Crore. Close to 150 Million insurance covers have been registered under this scheme till date.
More than 25 Million households have been electrified under the Saubhagya scheme. More than 100 Million toilets have been constructed under Swachh Bharat. More than 70 Million LPG connections have been released under Ujjwala Yojana.
Even a pessimistic estimate would reveal that more than 200 Million households would have been benefited from one or more schemes launched by Modi. That’s more than 400 Million adults or around 40% of the total electorate. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that BJP got a vote share of around 38%.
Turning a blind eye to such magnanimous amount of welfare, and designating the 38% of the electorate as “fascist” people, who voted for BJP just because of Islamophobia, or because of their zeal for creating a Muslim-free society where Hindutva would rule the roost, is not just ludicrous, but also, I would say, racist, intolerant, parochial and above all, utterly stupid. It reminds me of the opening lines of a poem from Tagore’s Gitanjali – I’ve conceded defeat! Whenever I wanted to push you, I’ve only hurt myself. I would rather like to paraphrase it: You’ve been defeated. Whenever you’ve wanted to push [them], you’ve only hurt yourself. 
The vitriolic and venomous attack on Modi, calling him “chor” when not a single scam from his tenure could be proved till date, spreading the fear of Hindutva and indirectly painting the entire Hindu community as an intolerant fraternity who would kill all its Muslim neighbors the moment Modi would return to power, the repeated usage of the terms like “Hindu Terror” just to counter balance the rise of the Islamic Jihadi terrorism worldwide and more closely in Kashmir, supported by Pakistan, would have turned any Hindu, who perhaps was not a great fan of Modi, away from the Modi hating opposition. 
So actually, it was not Modi that has divided the country through any rhetoric of Islamophobia and consolidated the Hindu votes against his opponents, but it was rather the latter, who have united almost the whole country against their hypocrisy, against their demeaning of the Indians in the name of Hindutvaphobia, against their baseless propagating of the fear of an apocalypse should Modi come to power again.
Having said that, it doesn’t mean that the issues of mob violence against the cow traders, the communal barbs from the fringe elements of the BJP, the increase in unemployment, the increasing distress among the farmers in many parts of the country are all concocted. Modi has to surely tackle all these. But many of these were blown out of proportion for the sake of creating an air of Hindutvaphobia. Few fringe and stray incidents don’t skew the statistics of the overall crime and violence of any form, whether communal or not. Each crime needs to be investigated and the criminals punished, whether it’s communal or political or otherwise. 
It’s the collective wisdom of the Indian electorate that they chose wisely. Despite the ills and negatives – no one can be sacrosanct – they still felt they had some sort of psychological safety and a sense of empowerment in Modi’s tenure, whether it’s his schemes or the surgical strikes against anyone who raises against the country.

The Broken Amoretti - The Background Story

The Broken Amoretti, just released, is my third novel, after The Ekkos Clan (2013) and The Aryabhata Clan (2018). It's co-authored by Aparajita Dutta.

When I started writing seriously, and I was working on my first book The Ekkos Clan, the idea of writing a novel set in Kharagpur, or rather the IIT KGP, where I spent one of the most crucial four years of my life, would often pop up in my mind. I'd stayed in hostel for eight more years before setting my foot on the sprawling campus of IIT KGP in 1992. It's not that the previous hostel life is less important or less memorable to me. In fact, the first six years in hostel in a nondescript place called Purulia - one of the poorest and most barren districts of India, in the western frontier of West Bengal adjoining Jharkhand - played a very important role in my overall learning process. Had I not been to Purulia, I wouldn't have seen a totally contrasting part of the world I had known till then, known a particular disciplined way of life and acclimatized myself to a sort of austerity, all of which created a foundation universal enough to hold and sustain my future experiences from round the world.

When I landed up in KGP, the foundation had already been created, quite firmly I would say. But what made KGP stand out from the previous experiences was perhaps the sudden exposure to India - yes that's what I would like to call it. KGP is a crystallized India, and a part of the world too, to some extent. With the diversities in everything ranging from languages and cultures to ethnicity, social status, political connections, economic background and above all, intellect, KGP is like a vessel boiling a soup with an unending number of ingredients - it was up to me to acquire the taste of it, relish it and use it as a creative tonic. It was the wholesomeness of the experience that had far reaching consequences later, in life and work. Overall, it did have enough ingredients for writing.

Another thing that came to my mind, at the same time, was that writing a novel based on hostel life had already become quite cliched. Enough had been already written about it and there was a beeline of books, both popular and unpopular, in the market. So I was certain that I didn't want to write 'another' college romcom story. But whatever I did, it was also certain that I must write about some unique aspects of the KGP life which I knew would be quite exotic to anyone else.

As I was busy with The Ekkos Clan, I didn't get time to ponder over the KGP based novel. Once done with the first draft of The Ekkos Clan, in late 2010, and having nothing to do till I heard back from someone I'd given the book for a thorough critique, I again got back to my idea about the KGP novel. Though I wanted to expand The Ekkos Clan into a trilogy, I didn't want to immediately write the second installment of it. One thing that I had missed while writing The Ekkos Clan was the scope and space to explore relationships, as it was predominantly a thriller. I decided that I would next venture into a love story, which wouldn't be a run of the mill romance, but would delve deep into various forms of relationships.

The writing of The Ekkos Clan had already made me quite inquisitive about Indian culture, history and mythologies, and my interest in linguistics and the history and evolution of the Indo-European languages lead me to the Greek mythologies. I got intrigued with the fact that despite the wide range of relationships talked about in the Indian and the Greek mythologies, the oldest two in the world, there's a certain relationship which is almost conspicuous by its absence or oblique reference and veiled narration. When it comes to unconventional relationships, the Greek mythologies might be among the most vociferous ones. There too, I didn't find much about it. I became curious. Why was is it so? That apart, I wanted to create a story around, not only that particular relationship, but also all unconventional ones, which are often tabooed in most societies and cultures. I felt all these relationships, which have been silenced across the world for long, should get a voice.

The LGBTQ and "queer" activism has of course given a much needed voice to many people, who still  experience social stigma in may cultures and countries. I wanted to expand the term "queer" to encompass not only the relationships widely discussed in the LGBTQ circles, but also other unconventional ones which too are discussed in hushed voices or totally brushed under the carpets citing religious, cultural or even medical reasons. I strongly felt I should weave a story around relationships which can't be confined to any conventional boundaries.

A line of Gulzar keep on haunting me -

haath se choon ke isse rishton ka ilzaam na do,
sirf ehsas hain yeh, ruh se mehsoos karo,
pyaar ko pyaar hi rahne do, koi naam na do. 

Don't touch it with your hands and accuse it of relationships,
It's only an aura, feel it with your soul -
Let the love be just love, don't give it a name.

I think that's the essence of the story I wanted to weave - love without a name, love that can't be touched, love that can be only felt with your soul. It's not about what is legitimate of what's not. It's all about what your heart yearns for, it's all about what you believe in, it's all about what comprises your consciousness, what gives you your existence, meaning in life.

When I was convinced about the theme of the book, I felt there couldn't be a better place than KGP for the backdrop of my novel. After all, KGP has the atmosphere of universality that's needed to nurture such a grandiose concept.

This is what I wrote in the acknowledgement about KGP:

The IIT life, and of course the place called Prembajar, which adjoins the campus at one end, left so much a mark in my mind that I couldn’t have not written about it, especially when I decided to take up writing in a serious way. Prembajar is not an autobiography or even a story inspired by real incidents. Nevertheless, many characters and incidents would have camouflaged into the narration so well that I myself wouldn’t be able to sieve through the layers of obscurities and identify the real ones.

I started thinking about the book in late 2010 and I started writing it in early 2011. Without any other apt name for the book, I called it Prembajar. In between writing Prembajar I had to also rework the various drafts of The Ekkos Clan, based on the feedback from my editors. Finally I completed the first draft of Prembajar in October 2013, few months after The Ekkos Clan had been released in July 2013.

As the seed thought of Prembajar had come from the Indian and the Greek mythologies, something which had attracted a lot of some academic researches for better analysis and understanding, I felt, I needed an academic side to Prembajar too. It was at this point, immediately after the completion of the first draft of Prembajar in late 2013, that I felt I would need a co-author, from a comparative literature background, who could bring in greater authenticity and make everything about the book appear correct by construction, which, I've no qualms in accepting, I knew I alone wouldn't be able to do.

It could be argued that it's after all a fiction, so why should it be so authentic? And if it's meant to be very authentic then where's the room for creativity and where's the creative license? There's of course a very fine line that an author, I believe, must tread very carefully. Authenticity, I feel, is not an impediment for creativity. Rather, it's the fuel for creativity, the main driving force. Where the scientific inquiry ends, starts the realm of creativity. It's just a tool to extrapolate what's authentic. The believability of the extrapolation or the creative license is a direct function of the authenticity of the facts and figures it draws heavily on.

So I embarked on a task of getting a co-author who would make Prembajar look as authentic as possible.

Luckily I found Aparajita, who was at that time doing her masters in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. After reading the draft of Prembajar and after a series of long calls between Bangalore and Calcutta she was bought into the project. Thus, in 2014, began the the first rewriting of Prembajar. I soon realized that Aparajita's involvement was adding certain finer nuances and subtleties to the women characters - in their dresses, mannerisms, body languages, reactions, dialogues and above all in their development as characters in the novel - which had been totally missing earlier. Perhaps a woman can better create another woman. As Prembajar turned out to be a women centric novel, it was indeed a great decision to have Aparajita in the project as a co-author.

So, it's indeed a long journey, starting in late 2010. Prembajar, rechristened The Broken Amoretti before publication, is finally getting released in 2019, almost after eight and a half years later.

Few things that we, as authors, kept in mind all along are:

Though the book is centered around a very unusual theme, a particular aspect of LGBTQ, it shouldn't sound like activism.It should delve really deep into different shades of relationships, which might be apparently taboo in most cultures, but still beautiful, natural and evocative.The book should be the voice of the many people who have fostered, silently, unusual relationships throughout their lives, don't think like everyone else in the world, but still believe strongly in pure love.The book, though set against the backdrop of the IIT Kharagpur campus, should be universal enough to alleviate it from being another college romcom.The book should create new standard in conventional romcom novels, breaking the norms and going deeper into the gloss candy college romance.
All these are very lofty things and we attempted each of these to the best of our capabilities. How much we've been successful, only time will tell.

There's also a parallel sub-story in the book about the cut throat tech-world of the Bay Area, where law suites are the norm of the day and companies thrive by killing competitions through unscrupulous means.

Partition of Bengal - The Real Story

Refugee is much more than just a ‘crisis’, as it’s generally relegated to in popular narratives in media or intellectual discourses. There’s a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and there are the United Nation’s 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Refugee Protocol. It’s not that the world is not all ears to the wails of the refugees, but perhaps only a refugee knows the real pain of being a refugee. No convention or protocol can ever do justice to a refugee. Few lines from a popular poem by the Bengali poet Krishna Chandra Majumdar might be apt: Always pleasure loving, someone seldom feels the agony of distress. How will he know how painful the poison could be, if he has never been bitten by a scorpion?

The Bengali word for refugee is udbastu, which loosely translates to homeless in English. The word “bastu” or “vastu” in Sanskrit derives from the root “vas” – akin to the English “was” –, which signifies not only a dwelling, but also existence. So “ud-vastu” would mean someone without existence, not just homeless, and that’s perhaps the word which conveys the real meaning of refugee, only to some extent though. There might not be ever a complete remedy for a refugee’s real agony and trauma, but still, if she got someone who could empathize with her, listen to her stories, make her feel that she’s no longer alone in the new world, that would surely act as a soothing balm, calm her down a bit. The biggest enemy of a refugee is not the perpetrators who has raped her or uprooted her from her home. Her biggest enemy is perhaps the feeling of loneliness, the loss of her self-confidence and trust on others. The only way anyone can help a refugee is by gaining her trust, reviving her confidence in herself. And hearing her stories, feeling her pains is perhaps the best way to let her know that that someone is there for her, that she’s not alone any more.

The voluminous narratives about the Jews in the popular culture, art, literature and movies over the past hundred years perhaps created the most effective support system for them, while they struggled to cope up with their bereavements, uncertainties and fear for the unknown in newer lands. The very fact that the whole world has wept for them gave them a sort of psychological security, even though they might not have got any real support from anyone in their lonely struggles to create their worlds anew, from scratch, bit by bit. The most unfortunate thing about the seven to eight million Hindus of East Bengal, who became refugees after the partition of India in 1947, and the many thousand more who wanted to flee East Pakistan and then Bangladesh later, there was no one even to empathize with them, because their very existence remains unacknowledged till this day. It is, as though, they never existed.

Whenever anyone talks about or refers to the partition of India, it’s always the Punjab side of the story – it’s seldom the Bengal side. There’s a total lacuna in the awareness, and also information, about the Bengal side of the narrative, except for the extensive oral traditions, which have survived even after a few generations among the East Bengali Hindus worldwide. I myself grew up with a staple dose of stories from the hallowed homeland of my family in East Bengal. Even though I never visited East Bengal, now Bangladesh, I still have a vivid idea of our home and village, over there, the rivers, the vast green fields, the floods, the flea markets, the village fares, the crops, the festivals, and of course the horrific conditions under which my father’s family had to suddenly flee their homes, leaving behind everything. The sad part is that, these stories were never heard outside Bengal. Not only that, there has been always a concerted effort at various levels to brush the Bengal side of the partition narrative under the carpet. This particular aspect needs to be talked about.

Let’s rewind a bit and see what exactly had happened in 1947, when India was trifurcated into three moth eaten parts – with India at the center and the disjoint West and East Pakistan at the two sides. The idea was to carve a Muslim majority Pakistan out of the undivided Indian subcontinent. The original Muslim League demand was for a Pakistan comprising the whole of the five Muslim majority provinces, the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the west and Bengal to the east, and also, curiously enough, Assam, a Hindu majority province, adjoining Bengal in the northeast. But, given that Punjab and Bengal had considerable proportions of non-Muslims – mainly Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab and Hindus in Bengal – and the serious concerns looming ahead about their wellbeing in the totalitarian Muslim regime, the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, in the interest of the non-Muslims in these two provinces, convinced the British government to partition the Punjab and Bengal and retain the non-Muslim majority portions in India.

Accordingly, the Punjab and Bengal provinces were partitioned. The western part of the Punjab, comprising the contiguous Muslim majority districts, became a part of Pakistan, retaining the eastern part in India. A similar formula was applied for Bengal. The Muslim majority East Bengal, designated presently as East Pakistan, was attached as an appendage to Pakistan, separated from the western part by more than 1000 miles of Indian landmass, which retained the Hindu majority West Bengal.
Figure 1: Partition of India - 1947
The extraordinary misfortune of the Hindus in Bengal started with the boundary itself, of the partitioned province. Some facts and figures here would make things clearer.
Oscar Spate, an eminent geographer and an unofficial advisor to the Muslim League, especially on the matter of the desired boundary of the Pakistan side of the Punjab, said in the paper The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal, published in December 1947 in The Geographical Journal, "I favor the Muslim case in the Punjab … and in Bengal my leaning is towards the other side." [1] In the same paper he elaborated why he said so.
The proposed boundary in the Punjab left 3.5 to 4.5 million minorities on either side. Western Punjab had a population of 15.8 million, of whom 11.85 or close to 75% were Muslim, and the rest 25% predominantly Hindu and Sikh minorities. East Punjab had a population of 12.6 million, of whom 4.4 million or roughly 35% were Muslim minorities. Presently, both sides have only around 3% minorities. Almost the entire minority population changed sides soon, amidst the fast deteriorating atmosphere of insecurities and brutal violence of unthinkable magnitude inflicted upon the minorities on either side. Enough has been written about this violence and the Punjabi, Hindi and English literature have a significant volume of poignant narratives of the horrors of this chapter of the partition.
The boundary of the partitioned Bengal was unduly favorable to the Muslim side. For example, whole of Khulna district with 49.3% Muslim population was awarded to Pakistan, for reasons even Spate couldn’t figure out. West Bengal had a population of 21.2 million, of whom only 5.3 million or roughly 25% were Muslim minorities, whereas East Bengal had 39.1 million people, of whom a staggering 11.4 million or roughly 30% were predominantly Hindu minorities. Presently only 8% of East Bengal, now Bangladesh, is Hindu, whereas West Bengal is still 27% Muslim, compared to 25% at the time of partition.  Figure 2: Displaced People & Migrations after Partition
By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than 15 million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. [2]
Anything between seven to eight million of the 11.4 million Hindus were forced to flee East Bengal or East Pakistan and seek refuge in West Bengal and other parts of India, over the years, in a staggered way, during which there was formidable resistance even from the newly formed India government in accepting them, or even acknowledging their status as displaced people, forget settling them respectfully. On the contrary, as pointed out by a Bangladeshi writer in an article published in the New York Times during the seventieth anniversary of the partition of India, “only 700,000 moved to East Bengal… Bengali Muslims suffered less violence than other groups. For many of them the move was voluntary, indeed opportunistic… [in the] hope of a better future, rather than the mere search for a safe haven.” [3] We will try to figure out the plausible reasons behind this later. For now, let’s put the numbers in perspective. Figure 3: Bengal Partition and other major Refugee Crises in the World
The World War II created something between 11 to 20 million homeless people, displaced from their original homeland. [4] Indian partition created 15 million, [2] out of which only the Hindus from East Bengal (“Bengal 1947” in Figure 3) comprise a staggering seven to eight million. What’s interesting is though the fact that the latter gets almost no space in the entire narrative about Indian partition both in India and elsewhere, as if, they never went through anything called partition, whereas they might be the second largest displaced community in the world, only after the Jews. Again, let’s take some examples here, to understand what I mean.
There were a number of articles in the Indian and western media in August 2017, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the partition of India. One in the Washington Post, 70 years later, survivors recall the horrors of India-Pakistan partition, [5] doesn’t mention anything about the Bengal partition, even as a passing comment. Another in The Guardian, ‘Everything changed’: readers’ stories of India’s partition, [6] and one in Daily Mail, The children of Partition remember the bloodshed and heartbreak 70-years after India-Pakistan split, [7] also have no reference to Bengal. Even India Today, in an article published in its August issue in 2017, True-life tales of families separated during Partition, [8] gives Bengal a total miss.
Not only in the media, the art and literature too give the Bengal partition a near total miss. A list of the 25 best books about Indian partition, compiled by Penguin in August 2017, [9] includes the likes of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ismat Chughtai’s Lifting the Veil – a collection of his Urdu writings, Nisid Hazari’s Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, Kamleshwar’s Hindi novel Kitne Pakistan (How many Pakistans?), Krishna Baldev Vaid’s autobiographical Hindi novel Guzra Hua Zamana, translated into English as The Broken Mirror, three translations of the Urdu works of Sadat Hasan Manto, Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi novel Tamas and Khuswant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, among others, most of which deal only with the Punjab side of the partition. The obscure The Train to India by Maloy Krishna Dhar is the only one in the list which deals with the Bengal side of the partition in a similar way.
Given the prolific Bengali literature and the epoch creating works by some of the finest writers of our times who have lived through the partition, it’s indeed very unusual why none of them wrote anything on the horrors of the partition. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s three volume magnum opus Shei Samay (Those Times), Pratham Alo (The First Light) and Purba Paschim (East & West), about the history and evolution of Bengal, the Bengalis and the Bengali culture and geopolitics over the past two centuries, spans through the period of the partition of Bengal in 1947 and the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, but surreptitiously bypasses the horrors of the partition, thus depriving the Bengalis and the Bengali literature of the partition narrative so poignantly created by the likes of Krishna Baldev Vaid, Bhisham Sahni, Khushwant Singh, Amrita Pritam Singh and Sadat Hasan Manto in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. 
In the review of Krishna Baldev Vaid’s Broken Mirror in India Today, [10] the reviewer points out, “Nearly every Punjabi writer, from Bhisham Sahani to Amrita Pritam, has at least one opus about the horrors of Partition. It is the Indian genre of civil war writing, a geopolitical literature which is no doubt the compulsive muse of any aspiring writer of that particular cultural experience.” It’s indeed a big exception that not a single contemporary Bengali writer found the Bengal partition an experience moving enough to be chronicled. The victims of the Bengal partition, predominantly the Hindus of East Bengal, are deprived here too.
The prolific Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s partition trilogy Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star, 1960), Subarnarekha (The Golden line, 1962) and Komol Gandhar (E-flat, 1961) are among the best works in Bengali touching upon the problems created by partition. 
But here too, Ghatak bypasses the horrors, violence and genocide during the partition and rather deals with the agony and trauma of the refugees, their insecurities, nostalgia for the homeland they had to leave and their struggle to sustain their existence in the alien land they are trying to make their homes. So technically, his works are refugee narratives, not partition sagas. Even more correctly, as pointed out by Anustup Basu, faculty of English, Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), at a panel on Borderland Narratives of the Bengal Partition, organized by UIUC in April 2019, Ghatak’s trilogy, and many other movies in the 50s and 60s in both Hindi and Bengali were “filled with different kinds of loneliness.” In Basu’s words, they were “melodramas of loneliness. That of negotiating loneliness in a strange and alienating city.” [16]
In this context, Basu invokes an apt line from Rahi Masoom Reza’s memorable 1966 novel Adha Gaon (Half Village). In rough English translation, it goes like this: “In short, with independence, several kinds of loneliness had been born.” Basu also refers to Bhaskar Sarkar’s book on the Partition and Indian Cinema, Mourning the Nation, where the author says that “in the first few decades after independence, there was very little cinema made, either in Bombay or Bengal, that directly addressed the Partition”. Sarkar forwards a Freudian explanation for this – a culture needs some time to absorb, work through trauma before it can start talking about it. 
Looks like, the Hindi cinema overcame the trauma and the loneliness of partition, but the Bengali didn’t. Or is it that, the intellectual and over sensitive Bengali film makers pretended to have never overcome the trauma, and just kept silent?
Now, let’s delve into why the Bengal partition has been totally neglected in all spheres – politics and arts. We need to again do a rewind.
The Government of India Act 1935 gave a good amount of autonomy to the 11 provinces of British India and paved way for the first Provincial Election in 1937. Congress got majority and formed governments in eight of the 11 provinces. The secular Unionist Party representing the interests of the feudal class of the Punjab and supported by the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, formed the government in the Punjab. Congress with 54 seats, was the single largest party in Bengal, but didn’t get a majority. AIML, All India Muslim League, led by Jinnah, later the first President of Pakistan, failed to create government in any province. But it got 85% of the total Muslim votes across all the provinces, vindicating its stand and claim that it was the only party representing the interests of the Muslims. This implied that the Congress was not the party of the Muslims, as claimed by Jinnah. This also implied that the Congress, in contrast, was the party of the Hindus – notably, apart from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, there was no other prominent Muslim leader in Congress either. This was not acceptable to the Congress, which, under the idealistic Gandhi, couldn’t swallow the Hindu tag. [11]
Perhaps that was the beginning of designating anything associated only with the Hindus as ‘communal’. Now, to shed its ‘communal’ tag, the Congress went all out to woo the Muslims to its sides, and started a mass contact program. That was perhaps the beginning of the legacy of Muslim appeasement in India, just for gaining some political mileage, something that later acquired dangerous proportions with more dangerous consequences in Indian politics.
This did more damage than good, as the Muslims became suspicious of Congress’ intention and agenda. To top it up, Jinnah raked up enough fear among the Muslims against their fate in a majoritarian Hindu regime under Congress. So neither did the Muslims get attracted to the Congress, nor was the latter ready to be seen as a Hindu party. Such was the zeal to remain ‘secular’, that the Congress didn’t want to form a coalition government in Bengal even with Fazlul Faq’s Krishak Praja Party (Peasant’s Party), which had 36 seats, one less than the League. It was as though, entering into a coalition with a ‘Muslim’ Party would have branded Congress as a counter ‘Hindu’ party. In doing so, as Tathagata Roy points out in My People Uprooted: The Exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh, [12] [13] the Congress lost a golden chance of keeping at bay the League hardliners like Suhrawardy or Nazimuddin, who later became Prime Ministers of Bengal and inflicted irreversible damages to the social and political structure of Bengal. We’ll come to that soon. Fazlul Haq, who didn’t have good relations with the League, felt betrayed by the Congress, and went ahead reluctantly to form the government in Bengal with the League, which remained in power till the last day of the undivided Bengal.
In the next provincial election, in 1946, the League formed governments in Bengal and Sind, and the Congress in the rest of India. In the Punjab the Congress entered into a coalition with the Unionist party and formed the government. League’s Suhrawardy became the Prime Minister of Bengal.As a part of the process to handing over India to the Indians, the Cabinet Mission came to India early 1946, for setting up an Interim Government to form the Constituent Assembly, which would be creating the constitution of the free India.  In its “16 May” statement, the Mission proposed a three tier structure, where the “Provinces” would be at the bottom, Hindu and Muslim “Groups” of provinces would be in the middle and the “Indian Union” at the top. It was proposed that the five Muslim majority provinces – the Punjab, Bengal, Sind, Baluchistan, NWFP – and, curiously again, the Hindu majority Assam, could merge into two Muslim-majority “Groups” in the Union.Jinnah accepted 16 May. Congress didn't – they waited for the Interim Government to be formed and then play the cards.
In the subsequent “16 June” statement, the Mission announced the Interim Government, with no Muslim member from the Congress side. Understandably, Gandhi was vehemently against an all Hindu Congress team. The Clause 8 of 16 June said that if the statement was not acceptable to any party, then the Viceroy would unilaterally proceed with the formation of an Interim Government, which would be as representative as possible of only those willing to accept 16 May.Jinnah thought Congress would reject 16 June and expected to form a new government without the Congress. But at the last moment, defying Gandhi, the Congress accepted 16 May, evoking protests from Jinnah, who insisted the Viceroy shouldn’t accept Congress’ late acceptance of 16 May, to which the Viceroy didn’t relent.
Jinnah declared Direct Action Day on 16th August 1946 – “Direct Action” to achieve Pakistan. Rajmohan Gandhi, in his magnum opus Mohandas, [11] quoted Jinnah as saying, “Today we bid goodbye to constitutional methods.” What ensued was mayhem in the streets of Calcutta, killing thousands of Hindus. On 20th August the British owned The Statesman reported, “The origin of the appalling carnage – we believe the worst communal riot in India’s history – was a political demonstration by the Muslim League.” The Great Calcutta Killing, as the daily reported it as, unleashed the chain reaction of communal riots in India, something which would attain more sinister forms in the next hundred years. The Suhrawardy government in Bengal did literally nothing to stop the killings in Calcutta. That was the beginning of the Hindu genocide in Bengal, something which would be very soon brushed under the carpet. The Great Calcutta Killing is the mother of all communal riots in India, setting off an unending fission chain reaction of killings and destructions. 
Every action has a reaction, and the reaction another retaliatory action, which again triggers a reaction, creating a sort of an avalanche. The Hindu killings in Calcutta on the Direct Action Day immediately triggered Muslim killings in Calcutta and elsewhere, which in turn triggered horrific riots in Noakhali in East Bengal in October, unleashing another round of Hindu genocide, which led to the Bihar killings of the Muslims, which again had catastrophic impact on the ongoing Noakhali riots. The Great Calcutta Killings left 7000 to 10000 dead, both Hindus and Muslims. In the Noakhali riots more than 5000 Hindus were killed, villages after villages were burned, innumerable Hindu women were raped and many were forcefully converted to Islam. In Bihar 2000 to 3000 Muslims were killed. The Noakhali riots were so horrific that Gandhi had to camp there for months, to get things under control. [14]
By end of 1946, it was clear that the League wouldn’t allow the riots to stop till the demand for Pakistan was met. 
When the partition finally happened in 1947, East Pakistan had a staggering 11.4 million Hindus, who by now, had realized that they wouldn’t be safe, for sure, in what had already become East Pakistan. Unlike Punjab, here it was not possible for such a huge population to flee East Bengal overnight. As they trickled into India slowly, over the years, carrying with them never heard of horrific stories of one sided Hindu genocide of massive proportions, Nehru, then the Prime Minister, came up with an ill-conceived idea, much to the protests of people like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the founder of the organization which eventually evolved into the present Bharatiya Janata Party. [12] 
To prevent the Hindu exodus from East Bengal, Nehru entered into a pact with the government of East Pakistan to help create favorable conditions for the post 1950 Hindu refugees to go back to their original homes in East Bengal. It’s really surprising that such a plan was never implemented in the Punjab. 
The only reason for such an action could be the same old fetish for a ‘secular’ garb, at any cost, something which we had come across a decade ago when the Congress didn’t want to enter into a coalition with a Muslim party, lest it got tagged as a counter Hindu party. Accepting the disproportionately large number of Hindus from East Bengal would destabilize the Hindu-Muslim parity in the share of violence inflicted by each side. It would expose the uncomfortable truth that in Bengal the violence was inflicted predominantly by the Muslims against the Hindus. The very fact that only 700,000 Muslims migrated to East Bengal from the west, against the eight million Hindus who would eventually move into India over the years, is proof enough that the violence in Bengal was one sided, against the Hindus. In Punjab though, it maintained the much sought after parity, which would make both the Muslims and the non-Muslims equally devil. Any disparity in this regard would be uncomfortable for the idea of secularism. The Bengal side of the partition didn’t fit into a particular kind of narrative of Hindu-Muslim equality, which is rather more impractical and utopian than idealistic. The disparity also had another danger – the retaliation. The moment the rest of India would come to know of the magnitude of the atrocities against the Hindus in East Bengal, there ought to be retaliation and chain reactions of communal violence. It might not be an over statement, if it’s said that India owes its secularism to the Hindus of East Bengal, who never got to tell their stories to the world.
Proponents of secularism (or should we call them Hindu-Muslim parity seekers?) often try to underplay the one sided nature of the violence against the Hindus in East Bengal by highlighting sporadic cases of Muslim killings and violence against them in West Bengal during the partition. There’s no denying the fact that there was indeed some amount of violence against the Muslims too, but that didn’t create an atmosphere of mass exodus of the Muslims from West Bengal to East Pakistan. The present demographics in West Bengal corroborate the same. The proportion of the Muslims in West Bengal during partition was 25% [1] and now it’s actually more, 27%, whereas the proportion of Hindus in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) has come down from 30% [1] during partition to 8% now.
Figure 4: Comparison of Demographics in the Punjab and Bengal - 1947 & Now
Nehru, very smartly, tackled everything with a single master stroke, by giving an impression to the rest of India and the world that things in East Bengal were so favorable to the Hindu minorities that they were returning to their “home”. Much to Nehru’s relief came the Bengali intelligentsia, the writers and the poets, most of whom had left leanings, and felt the same about the Hindu-Muslim parity. For them too, the acknowledgement of the plight of the Hindus in East Pakistan would conflict with their utopian idea of Hindu-Muslim equality.  So, no one uttered a single word, and a big part of the narrative of the Bengal partition was consciously brushed under the carpet. Not surprisingly, India didn’t sign the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and subsequently, the Bengal partition escaped the attention of the world. 
Under Pakistan, the condition of the Hindus in East Bengal deteriorated drastically. They were always looked at with suspicion, as though they were all Indian agents. When the people of East Bengal, irrespective of religion, protested against the imposition of Urdu on them by the federal government, the Hindus were again at the receiving end of the Pakistan Army’s wrath, as they thought the Hindus, with their India leanings, were instigating, influencing and corrupting the Muslims of East Bengal. Even a theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar, in Kashmir, lead to killings of Hindus in 1963. Hindu genocide, on any pretext, continued for years, and it culminated in 1971, during the Bangladesh war of liberation, when around 2.5 million Hindus were killed by the Pakistan Army. [15] Compare that with the five to six million Jews killed in Holocaust. [14]
Figure 5: Hindu Genocide by Pakistan Army in 1971 & other Genocides in the recent past

The Hindu genocide in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, since the Bengal Partition in 1947, might need a little more background for a better understanding. Dr. Hans Hock, a faculty of Linguistics & Sanskrit and an Emeritus Professor at UIUC, summarized it quite well in his talk Banglatā, Islam, and Language, at the panel on Borderland Narratives of the Bengal Partition. Dr. Hock said, “there is and has been a dual identity for many Bengali Muslims, especially in East Bengal, a tension between what may be called Banglatā and Islam.” [16] Banglatā, or the Bengali ethnic and linguistic identity of the Muslims of East Bengal or East Pakistan, often superseded their Islamic religious identity. For the Hindus though, there was never any confusion with regards to the identity – they were just Bengalis. Right after the creation of Pakistan, Banglatā posed a severe threat to the very idea of Pakistan, which very strictly centered around an exclusive Islamic identity. Any other identity was not at all acceptable. 
Immediately after 1947, Hock said in his talk, the government of East Pakistan proceeded to remove Bangla from its currency and postal stamps. The minister of Education, Fazlur Rahman, started the procedure of making Urdu the single official state language. Students protested in December 1947 and March 1948. They were joined by numerous East Bengal intellectuals, both Muslim and Hindu. Jinnah condemned the Bengali language movement as an effort to divide Pakistan. He said, “The State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State Language, no Nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the State Language is concerned, Pakistan’s language shall be Urdu.” 
This subsequently led to the violent suppression of the Bhasha Andolan, the Bengali Language Movement, in East Pakistan by the Pakistan Army on 21st February 1952 – the day commemorated now as the Mother Language Day worldwide. Tensions continued, and then, in 1971, “Operation Searchlight” by the Pakistan Army against the Bengali intelligentsia and cultural institutions, as well as the Hindu minorities, lead to some 10 million fleeing to India, and some three million being killed, of which a massive 2.5 million were Hindus. Interestingly, the Urdu-speaking Biharis, who had moved to East Pakistan from the Indian state of Bihar after 1947, played a major supporting role in the genocide. Finally, with intervention from India, Bangladesh was declared independent in December 1971, at the end of a very decisive war between India and Pakistan, where the latter had to swallow and very inglorious defeat.
It was expected that Bangladesh, the country which was created on linguistic lines, would turn out to be secular. But, sadly enough, “atrocities [against the Hindus] recurred numerous times after 1971, driven by Islamist groups. At the same time, many Bangladeshi intellectuals protested against these events, including the well-known writer Taslima Nasrin [she wrote the controversial book Lajja, Shame], who had to go into exile in 1994 and, [ironically], met with opposition in India as well.”Though the Banglatā, Hock referred to, does play a crucial role in the identity of the Muslims in Bangladesh, but there have been numerous instances when the frenzy Islamic identity overtook the ethnic and linguistic identity, ever since the Muslim League declared the “Direct Action” in 1946.Unlike the population migration in the Punjab, which happened in one shot, the Hindus left in East Bengal, and then Bangladesh, have been trickling into India continuously, over the years, till this day, being constantly under the threat of violence and genocide. They were always unwanted and never accepted properly, or rather legally, by Indian government. 
The very tenet of the partition of India was to carve out a safe “home” for the Muslims. This simply implies, by contrast, that the rest of India should provide safety to the non-Muslims of the sub-continent, because otherwise there wouldn’t be any “home” for them. So, providing sanctuary to the Hindus of East Bengal and Bangladesh was the moral obligation for India. Here too, the same obsession for a particular form of secularism played a big role. It was as though, accepting the Hindus facing persecution in Bangladesh would be tantamount to being partisan to the Hindus, and hence being communal. 
The complete denial of the plight of the Hindus in Bangladesh, and more shockingly, the banning of Taslima Tasrin’s books about the same in secular India, seems to be in continuation of the leftist zeal of finding a Hindu-Muslim equality, something which has been in vogue for a long time, as we’ve seen earlier. That’s the reason why one of the biggest genocides in modern human history – that of the Hindus in East Pakistan and Bangladesh – has been thoughtfully and very consciously sunk into oblivion. It is as though, till there’s an instance of an equally massive Muslim genocide by the Hindus, talking about the Hindu genocide in East Pakistan and Bangladesh would disrupt the much desired Hindu Muslim parity. Secularism is “the principle of separation of the state from religious institutions”. So, going by that definition, the very act of the state (whether India or West Bengal) of controlling (read erasing) the narrative (read plight) of one particular religious community (read Hindus), is nothing but the state itself acting like an institution with vested religious interests. Hence, this overzealous attempt of trying to be secular actually makes the state as communal as it could be. Then, there’s no difference between Pakistan, which has very consciously tried to eradicate its non-Islamic past, and West Bengal or India, which, has also very consciously tried to eradicate an un-Hindu past (of the Hindu genocide in East Pakistan and Bangladesh). A similar attempt is never taken, in the name of secularity, when sporadic contrary incident happens. Even a military action against Muslim terrorists in Kashmir is painted in communal colors, as the subjugation of the minority Muslims under a Hindu majority state.
Something even more curious is the case of creating the myth of Hindu Terror. The CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury has recently said that Hindu mythologies like Ramayana and Mahabharata prove that "even Hindus can be violent". [17] In January 2013, the then Congress Home Minister of India, Sushil Shinde, used the term "Hindu Terror" in an official statement. In August 2010 too, the then Congress Home Minister of India, Chidambaram, used the term "Saffron Terrorism" in an official statement. [18] Secularism has really come down to creating "parities". If there's terrorism perpetrated by Islamist radicals like the ISIS, there must be a “Hindu Terror” too, just for the sake of parity.
It’s important to delve into the real narrative of the Bengal side of partition, not with an agenda to create communal divide, but to know the truth. Suppressing facts to serve a particular agenda, to align everything to one particular narrative, is not secularism – it’s as totalitarian and majoritarian as being extremely communal.  
Selected References[1] The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal, O. H. K. Spate, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 110, No. 4/6 (Oct. - Dec., 1947), pp. 201-218[2] The Great Divide, The violent legacy of Indian Partition, William Dalrymple, Jun 22, 2015[3] Why Do Bangladeshis Seem Indifferent to Partition? K. Anis Ahmed, Aug 16, 2017[4] List of largest refugee crises, Wikipedia[5] 70 years later, survivors recall the horrors of India-Pakistan partition, Vidhi Doshi and Nisar Mehdi, August 14, 2017[6] ‘Everything changed’: readers’ stories of India’s partition, Anna Leach and Guardian readers @avleachy, Mon 14 Aug 2017 15.26 BST[7] The children of Partition remember the bloodshed and heartbreak 70-years after India-Pakistan split, Mailonline India and Associated Press, Aug 2017[8] True-life tales of families separated during Partition[9] 25 Must Reads On the 70th Anniversary of Partition[10] Book review: Krishna Baldev Vaid's Broken Mirror, Tackling Partition horrors, Ravi Shankar, October 31, 1994[11] Mohandas, Rajmohan Gandhi[12] My People Uprooted: The Exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh, Tathagata Roy, 2015[13] Some Aspects of the Bengal Partition, Chhanda Chatterjee, June 30, 2017[14] Wikipedia[15] Hindu Genocide in East Pakistan, Shrinandan Vyas[16] Transcript of “Borderland Narratives of the Bengal Partition”, April 25 2019, Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign[17] Hindus are violent, Ramayana & Mahabharata are proof of that: Sitaram Yechury[18] 'Hindu terror' politics had its genesis a decade ago
Others1.       https://thewire.in/history/partition-....       http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?t....       http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Partition_of_Bengal,_19474.       http://theconversation.com/how-the-pa....       https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea....       https://web.stanford.edu/group/SITE/a....       http://www.asiaportal.info/ethnic-cle....       https://www.unhcr.org/3ebf9bab0.pdf9.       https://www.un.org/en/holocaustrememb....   https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-gl....   https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/411112.   https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/indepth....   https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/....   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artis....   https://amp.scroll.in/article/847113/...

Borderland Narrative of the Partition of Bengal - Professor Hans Hock @ UIUC, 25 April 2019

Event Date: Thursday, April 25, 2019
Time: 4:00 pm–5:00 pm

Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

Co-sponsored by the India Studies Fund at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)















































Banglatā, Islam, and language.
In this presentation I take a somewhat broader historical view, trying to contextualize the relationship between East Pakistan/East Bengal/Bangladesh with West Bengal, with special focus on language as a marker of identity.
In addition, I invite you to join me in entertaining the idea that there is and has been a dual identity for many Bengali Muslims, especially in East Bengal, a tension between what may be called Banglatā and Islam.
1905: Curzon partitions Bengal (reunification in 1911)
Initial reaction by Muslim intellectuals is highly negativeThe Central Mohammedan Association of Calcutta condemned the proposed partition of Bengal at a meeting held in February, 1904. Most of the speakers at the said meeting were very important Muslim leaders of the time. They were Mir Motahar Hussain, Zamindar of Barisal; Seraj-uI-IsIam Chaudhary of Chittagong, member Bengal Legislative Council; and Abdul Hamid, Editor of the ‘Muslim Chronicle’.
Soon after, the local population of East Bengal realizes that there are economic benefits, and they support the division.
Subsequent Hindu reactions lead to the view among Muslims that the National Congress serves Hindu interests; this makes the Muslim League more attractive.
Bangla vs. Urdu (first take)
Late 19th century: Social activists such as the Muslim feminist Roquia Sakhawat Hussain were choosing to write in Bangla to reach out to the people and develop it as a modern literary language.1937 Lucknow Session of the Muslim League: Bengali delegates petition that Bangla to be recognized as a language of Indian Muslims. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and most non-Bengali delegates reject this petition and argue that only Urdu can be the national language of India’s Muslims. This marginalizes not only Bengali Muslims but also Muslims from other areas, such as Malayalam-speaking Muslims of Kerala. Similarities to the attempts to impose Hindi as national language of India (and to Bengali and South Indian resistance)
1947 vs. 1971 — Partition of India vs. Partition of Pakistan.
20 June 1947, Bengal Legislative Assembly, in three separate votes, agrees on the partition of Bengal, with even a 58:21 majority among the non-Muslim-area members.
Partition and “population exchanges” were accompanied by a large amount of violence and atrocities, but the violence was not as extensive and ferocious as that in the west.
The Bangladesh war of liberation, which ended in 1971, engendered a much higher level of violence. The (West) Pakistan army killed some 3 million Bengalis, of whom about 2.5 million were Hindus. Moreover, there was widespread destruction of Hindu businesses and religious sites.
Atrocities recurred numerous times after 1971, driven by Islamist groups. At the same time, many Bangladeshi intellectuals protested against these events, including the well-known writer Taslima Nasrin (Lajja ‘shame’), who had to go into exile in 1994 and, sadly, met with opposition in India as well.
Banglatā vs. Urdu Nationalism and the partition of Pakistan.
Right after the 1947 Partition, the government of Pakistan proceeds to remove Bangla from from its currency and postal stamps.
The minister of Education, Fazlur Rahman, starts the procedure of making Urdu the single official state language.
Student protests in December 1947 and March 1948. They are joined by numerous East Bengal intellectuals, both Muslim and Hindu, including Professor Nurul Huq Bhuiyan, Dhirendranath Datta (member of the Constituent Assembly), and the legislators Shamsul Huq, Prem Hari Burman, Bhupendra Kumar Datta, and Sris Chandra Chattopadhyaya.
Dhaka, 21 and 24 March 1948.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah condemns the Bengali language movement as a “Fifth-column” effort to divide Pakistan.
19th-century kind of arguments in favor of “one nation – one language (– one religion)’

‘But let me make it very clear to you that the State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State Language, no Nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the State Language is concerned, Pakistan’s language shall be Urdu.’

Subsequent developments
The Pakistani government wavers between rejection and accommodation of request for Bangla recognition
21 February 1952 – violent suppression of protests in East Pakistan
“Ekushey Februyāri” Bhāṣā Andolan; later adopted in West Bengal; UN “International Mother Language Day” (1999, 2008)
Official settlement of the “language issue” in 1956
But tensions continue, both economic and cultural (with Bangla language being an essential identifier of culture)
1971: “Operation Searchlight” by the Pakistani army against Bengali intelligentsia and cultural institutions, as well as the Hindu minority – some 10 million flee to India, some 3 million are killedUrdu-speaking Mohajirs (originally from Bihar) play a major supporting role
Declaration of Bangladeshi independence (with Indian military support in December 1971)Recognition by the UN in 1972
Bangla becomes the official language of Bangladesh (with English playing a highly reduced role, but …)
Banglatā’s linguistic consequences
Urdu of Mohajirs marginalized
Non-Indo-Aryan “tribal” languages marginalized: Khasi, Santali (Austro-Asiatic), Kurukh (Dravidian), Koch, Garo, Mizo … (Tibeto-Burman)
Regional, often very different varieties marginalized: Bishnupriya Manipuri, Chakma, Chittagonian, Sylheti
These are especially vulnerable, since they are considered “Bangla”
“One country – One language” redux ?

Borderland Narrative of the Partition of Bengal - Koeli Moitra Goel & Anustup Basu

Event Date: Thursday, April 25, 2019

Time: 4:00 pm–5:00 pm

Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

Co-sponsored by the India Studies Fund at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)









Koeli Moitra Goel

Borders and partitions have troubled histories of divisive politics in which neighboring communities walled off from each other continue to be shaken up by tremors of such divisions long after the actual event. This panel examines community experiences related to India’s Partition in 1947. In the aftermath of the British Raj’s decision to leave behind a divided territory in South Asia, the subcontinent was wracked by violent communal aggressions.

The history of western India becoming West Pakistan and Indian Punjab has been privileged in official Partition stories, academic research and popular culture. The eastern borderland of a broken, fragmented Bengal has largely been overlooked in mainstream discourses. Our panel hopes to contribute towards highlighting experiences of the communities along the Eastern borders of the newly crafted Republic of India from 1947.

As the original capital of the British Empire and later Bengali capital, Calcutta developed as a cosmopolitan center where art, cinema, and literature, as well as business and trade flourished. Bengal saw great prosperity during colonial rule, but it also underwent violent communal strife when the Partition forced Muslims out of a largely Hindu West Bengal and Hindus from a mainly Muslim East Pakistan. However, over the course of the next half century, a common language (Bengali) became a central platform of identity, superseding individual or class interests, and spurred the self-determination of Bangladesh and its independence from Pakistan.

Partition is a process which continues to shape social relations, political agendas, government policies, cultural histories, and most importantly ordinary lives in India and Bangladesh. Postcolonial interventions are called for: How can we best understand the violence when the Radcliffe Line was drawn? What legacies were lost as millions were forced to leave home and hearth and move to unfamiliar land on different sides of this arbitrary border simply based on their religious affiliations?
From personal perspectives to broader public memory, these stories form the inspiration for this panel. This panel will explore a fairly uncharted terrain of entangled identities, stratified citizenships, homes lost, and lives uprooted.

Anustup Basu

I will begin with two illustrations. Anecdotes if you will. I remembered them just before coming here. So forgive me if the details are a bit vague.

The first is an actual incident described in the historian Gyanendra Pandey’s book Remembering Partition. This was taking place about two years after 1947. Some people had put up a public notice in the dorms of the Aligarh Muslim University inviting applicants to join the Pakistan Army. It was candid and, as we would perhaps call it, naïve. The people who did it were incredulous when they were told that they could not do such a thing. 

Unimaginable in our times. What this tells us is that, even after that apocalyptic violence of the Partition and the greatest mass migration in the history of humanity, many were unsure about exactly what the Partition had done in terms of dividing a land and a people. What were the legal and political consequences of that division?

My second illustration is from Sunil Gangyopadhyay’s magnum opus Purbo-Paschim. It is a wide canvas story of a refugee family in Kolkata. There we see a theme of popular imagination and hope. In the novel people among the destitute community believe that they will eventually be able to return to lost ancestral villages. The Partition will be undone and the country – the two Bengals at least -- will be united in 1957.

1. What exactly does the Partition mean socially? Culturally, politically?
2. How permanent is this arrangement?
3. How is the pain to be absorbed in the long run? 

With this Preface I come to certain themes in Hindi and Bengali cinema of the 1950s. That is, the period of settlement. That of coming to terms with the permanence and legacy of the Partition.
Bhaskar Sarkar has written an excellent book on the Partition and Indian cinema. It is called Mourning the Nation. One of the major things that Sarkar says is that in the first few decades after INDEPENDENCE, there was very little cinema made, either in Bombay or Bengal, that directly addressed the Partition. Was about the Partition.

That is true and there are two reasons for that.
1. Censorship: Chances are, your film could get banned. Nastik (1954). A traumatized refugee in Bombay who turns to atheism and crime on seeing social hypocrisy and cruelty. Nastik was banned by censors on the grounds that it may hurt the sentiments of the Hindu community.
2. Sarkar forwards a Freudian explanation. A culture needs some time to absorb, work through trauma before it can start talking about it.

So there were very few films made on the Partition. There were examples like Manmohan Desai’s Chalia starring Nutan and Raj Kapoor, or Kidar Sharma’s Hamari Yaad Ayegi. In Bengal there were mainstream films like the Uttam Suchitra romances Bipasha or Shobar Opore. Apart from the famous Partition trilogy directed by Ritwik Ghatak.

These very different kinds of films, including non-serious ones, like the 1959 feature Milan, where Partition causes the lovers to separate, till they are reunited by an ingenious German Shepherd.
But, given that thousands of films were made across the 50s and early 60s, the number was strikingly small. The rest was a voluble silence.

But for me, the real question is not whether or to what extent Partition appeared in films. The question is, whether films could remain the same after Partition.
Let me invoke a memorable line from Rahi Masoom Reza’s memorable 1966 novel Adha Gaon. In rough English translation, it goes like this: “In short with independence several kinds of loneliness had been born.”

So this is the only point I would like to make today. After 1947, cinema, both in Bombay, as well as Bengal, was filled with different kinds of loneliness. Both these traditions, in different ways, became melodramas of loneliness. That of negotiating loneliness in a strange and alienating city.

Both Bengali and Hindi cinema in the 40s were dominated by the family melodrama – the social’ as it was called. Ergo, the usual run of the mill film usually featured drama and intrigue within the parameters of the feudal extended family. This template remained, but the screen of the fifties also became filled with lonely protagonists. Vagabonds, (Awaras), pickpockets, petty criminals, destitute people who arrived in the big city with nothing. No family or community or even caste identity. They lived in the pavements, slept on park benches or under street lights. Most of the time, these historical orphans came without biographical backgrounds. Yet often they would show markers of respectable upbringing and education. It was as if they carried the baggage of an unspecified historical devastation and uprooting. They had come from lost villages. Connoisseurs of Hindi cinema would recall the protagonist in Raj Kapoor’s classic Shri 420. A vagabond arrives in the big bad city with no money, but a BA degree (big deal in those times) and also without an identifiable past or clan identity.

We see culturally different, but equally noticeable forms of loneliness in Bengali film melodrama of the 50s, especially in the template massively popularized by the matinee idols Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. They gave expression to a new conjugal desire and yearning. It was that of a woman and a man, both often working, both often without distinguished family backgrounds, legacies etc., and both often coming from absent or dysfunctional families trying to struggle and find a place in the city teeming with refugees, the hungry, and the unemployed. This, unlike the couples of the old, was a distinctively nuclear couple. This nuclear desire is expressed best in the signature song sequences in these films, often set in utopian spaces – gardens in the moonlight, empty houses, picnic spots, nooks of nature -- that the otherwise bursting metropolis actually does not have anymore. 

I am afraid I will not be able to say a lot about Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema. This evening would be too small a time frame for that. It is in his cinema that we see the essence of the different kinds of loneliness. He depicts the present in the light of the past in each of its trilogies, but in a cinema of the imperfect tense. Loneliness is caused because selves and their memories themselves are partitioned. In his cinema, the Partition assumes the form of a primal division. Not just of the land and the population, but an entire civilization, linguistic universe and culture are ripped apart.

There might thus be very little Partition in both Hindi and Bengali cinema of the fifties and sixties. But Partition perpetually haunts cinema. It populates the screen with phantom figures weighed down by a primal loss. Different figures. Different stories. Different destinies. And different kinds of loneliness. 

Borderland Narratives of the Partition of Bengal - Transcript of Sudipto's lecture @ UIUC, 25 April 2019

Event Date: Thursday, April 25, 2019

Time: 4:00 pm–5:00 pm

Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

Co-sponsored by the India Studies Fund at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)






We have already heard about the background of the Partition of Bengal [from Professor Hans Hock’s lecture]. I would like to give a little more perspective because, I believe, the Partition of Bengal was not [done] in isolation – it was [a] part of the Indian partition.

My family is a victim of the partition of the eastern side. My father was only seven years old and my uncle was 14 years old. And… one fine morning, not in 47 but in 1948 – my father’s family didn’t move immediately, like most Hindu families. So, one fine morning, my grandmother – she just woke up, and she told my uncle, who was 14 years old, to take my father and my younger aunt, who was just five years old. What happened was something like this: A14-year-old boy – he becomes the guardian of a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl. And they took almost 35 days to come from Barishal [to Calcutta]. Barishal is one of the divisions in Bangladesh which adjoins the Sundarbans and which is one of the southern [most] districts of Bangladesh.

I never went to Bangladesh like most of the second-generation Bengalis whose parents have moved [to India]. I never went to Bangladesh and I never saw all the horrors and all the violence myself. But what happened is this.

When I was growing up, I had one of my very old aunts who used to stay with us – she was a widow – and she used to babysit me when I was very young. My father and mother both were working. And a 70 plus year old lady, who had moved out of Bangladesh almost 35 years back – it was in the seventies – and [yet] her entire world was around Bangladesh. She had been staying in India for the last more-than-thirty years. She never got a chance to go back to her homeland but all she could talk about was all Bangladesh, which was East Bengal. And I grew up hearing only stories of not only partition but also various other things, like the village fairs, about some very insignificant things which nobody might even remember. But that old aunt – she used to again and again tell all the stories. And [as] for a five-six-year-old child, who should be treated with more of fairy tales… and all these things, and… I grew up with the fairy tales of Bangladesh.

And then she died in 82-83… and life moved on. And [then], somewhere in the 2007 or 2008, when I thought that I would take up writing, I figured out that the stories that I have heard about the partition, and also about Bangladesh – those are actually a treasure trove to me. And another very interesting thing which I figured out [was] that there was absolutely nothing available about the Bengal side of the partition. When we talk about the Indian partition it’s always the Punjab side. Whether it’s in the movies, whether it’s in the literature or whether it’s in the… the common psyche of Indians. None of my friends and colleagues even knew that Bengal was also partitioned. Because, with movies, Hindi movies, and also the Punjabi writings, which were already getting translated – like, Amrita Pritam Singh is one the fantastic Punjabi writers, and we have Bhisham Sahni, and then we have Krishna Baldev Vaid – there was [a] huge amount of literature available in Punjabi and also in English – Khushwant Singh had written a fantastic book called Train to Pakistan. So, what made me curious is, why is it so that two states were partitioned at the same time but somehow the narrative of Bengal has been totally forgotten? Nobody knows about it. I searched in goggle. Absolutely… absolutely no material.

And at this juncture I would like to refer to one of the very distinguished guests, who’s here in the audience – Mr. Rajmohan Gandhi. I read one of his books, Mohandas. And… while I was thinking [of] writing about Bengal partition, [I found] his book has one chapter about the Noakhali riots and I believe that was one of the very few materials which I got about what exactly happened in Bangladesh. So that’s where I wanted to figure out what was different in Bengal that it never got the attention.

And… [this is] just to put some perspective to the magnanimity and to the enormity of the issue. This, you see, is the undivided Bengal, which comprises both West Bengal and the present Bangladesh. The current Punjab in Pakistan is little different, but so is in India. The Indian Punjab has been broken into three states, Punjab Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. This is how India was partitioned.

And if you see the numbers – the idea of partition was to create a safe home for the Muslims, which [is what] the Muslim League used to say – the partition of Punjab was, I would say, sort of realistically done, where each side has almost four million of minorities. The Indian Punjab had around four million Muslims and the Pakistan side [of] Punjab had around four million non-Muslims, which included Sikhs and Hindus. So, the population exchange was very similar. Four million from here to there and four million from there to here.

But in the Bengal side, almost eight million, sort of, non-Muslims were there in Bangladesh, and of course West Bengal had a huge population of non-Hindus, Muslims.


But, very interestingly, only seven hundred thousand Muslims from West Bengal moved to East Bengal. Very recently, I read an article written by a Bangladeshi journalist in [the] New York Times – it was published during the seventy years of Indian independence – and there also, he mentions the same figures, that only 700K Muslims travelled from West Bengal to East Bengal, and that also, not due to violence. They moved because of better opportunities, because they felt that a Muslim majority country might have more opportunities for them.
And, if you see, this eight million, who moved from East Bengal to West Bengal – they didn’t move in one shot. Because eight million people can’t move in one shot. It’s like twice the [size of] population transfer that happened in the Punjab. They trickled into West Bengal over a very long time, starting from 1947 till 1971, when Bangladesh was liberated. And my own family moved towards the end of 1948.

So even if you see, by sheer number, it’s double the size of Punjab partition. And also, it’s a very one-sided affair. It’s not population exchange. And here, then again, what sort of makes me even more curious [is], if you compare the refugee crisis, that happened over the last 100 years: World War Two created around 11 to 20 million [refugees] so I took 15 million as the median number; Bangladesh [Liberation] 1971 created around 10 million, and the 47 [Bengal] partition created around 8 million refugees. So that’s among the highest in the world, and that makes the Bengalis of East Bengal, who moved to West Bengal, the second most… second largest displaced community in the world, if you go by these numbers.

 I was curious… somehow, why such a big thing totally escaped the sympathy, empathy or the attention of the rest of the world. So again, another interesting thing, which Professor Hans [Hock] has also pointed out, that another level of violence happened during the 1971 [Bangladesh Liberation] thing. But that was not between the two sides of Bengal. It was mainly between [East] Bengal and [the] Pakistan [Army], which again created another huge round of refugees [and a major Hindu genocide of massive proportions].
But interestingly, in West Bengal – and I’m very proud of it, that I’m a native of West Bengal – the population percentage of Muslims didn’t reduce in [independent] India. Somehow, India managed to maintain its secular fabric. West Bengal had around 25% Muslims in [19]47 and now its 27%. So… I would like to request the Western Academicia to do some research, [as to] why is it so that such a big event, and such a big refugee problem, such a big displacement in the world, which the Bengal partition created – why was that totally forgotten?


I don’t have any clear answer for that. But I believe I would request some academic research to figure [that] out. At least for [the next generations of the] refugees, like us – okay, I’m not a refugee [par say], but I think the only solace for a refugee is to see other people sympathizing them, to see [a] lot of literature written about them. The Jews – one of the best consolations for them is the huge amount of literature, films, movies created on them. So, they realized, “Fine, I’m not alone.” There are millions of sympathizers for them. But the Bengalis of the Bengal partition – we don’t even have that solace. Nobody writes about us. Nobody talks about us. Thank you.