So now, not only in Malda but all through West Bengal, ‘joy bangla’ is the name for conjunctivitis.” “No, they are all infected with conjunctivitis – it is highly infectious and spreading rapidly in the camps. “So what?!” I retaliated, “They are all infected with the love for their country – that’s why they are saying ‘Joy Bangla’! Isn’t that good!” “Don’t get close to them – don’t you see they have all got ‘joy bangla’?” “Don’t!” Shyamal Da and Subhash drew me aside. Was it the spiteful army goons or was it the guerrillas fighting back? “How wonderful it would be to meet some of them!” the romantic in me spoke aloud to the red-eyed men and women who had greeted me with ‘Joy Bangla!’ I was therefore thrilled to hear the boom-boom-boom periodically rupturing the hazy horizon in the distant.
This was May of 1971 and, even in the apolitical clime of the tinsel town in Bombay, we knew that the Pakistani President Yahya Khan was hounding supporters of the Awami League leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. For, the rectangular brick and stone structure with three aisles, eleven arched openings, and so-many-times-that domes, built sometime in the 16 th century and now in the care of Archeological Survey of India, was teeming with barely-clad men women and kids who were fleeing on a daily(or hourly?)-basis the gola-barood of the Razakars – the paramilitary force General Tikka Khan had unleashed in the eastern wing of Pakistan. I was soon to face history-in-the-making. And here, in the 12-gate mosque of Baroduari, they were singing paeans to the Shahs and Sens and Pals of a medieval Bengal! Pandua Malda Gaur Courtesy: Creative Commons All these are relics of the historical capitals that hark back to a glorious Bengal long past and - for most Indians – lost in oblivion.
My Mama’s son, Shyamal, and his friend, Subhash, had graciously taken upon them the onus of taking us around Gaur, Pandua and Adina. I had just finished my school finals in ‘Bombai’ and was enjoying the long summer break with my school friend Swapna, my paternal didi, Tandra, and my maternal didi, Nanda. I was sixteen-going-on-seventeen and - en route to Darjeeling - I was visiting Malda, my ‘Mamabari’ where my mother lived until she was married at sixteen-just-turned-seventeen. Ratnottama Sengupta recaptures a time when as a teenager she witnessed a war that was fought to retain a culture At the border of the two Bengals: Photo Courtesy: Ratnottama Sengupta