NOAKHALI - The Past is Present

It's difficult to imagine past horrors today, says SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI, but the reality that almost defeated Gandhi--and his mission--has not faded away.

It's a little joke between them. Sometimes, when Jharna Dhara Chaudhury receives visitors curious about the past at the Gandhi Ashram in Jayag, a small village deep inside Noakhali, she packs them off to see Pirjada Syed Golam Hakkani Hussaini. His father, she says by way of introduction, Golam Sarawar Hussaini, an MLA from Noakhali for the Muslim League in the undivided Bengal Assembly, was the man who started it all off. The slaughter that began with the killing of the Hindu landed gentry in one of the worst affected areas of Bengal in October 1946. It was the sordid second chapter to a sordid first chapter in communal violence that was scripted in August of that year with a burst of mayhem that some history books still call, capital letters blaring, The Great Calcutta Killing.

"Ask him about his father," she urges, this five-ft-nothing lady who was all of 10 when Gandhi came here that November by way of Calcutta to cool the fires long after a way of life had burnt to ashes. Retaliatory riots sparking off in Bihar even as he wound his way to Noakhali.

"Jharnadi has sent you, has she?" chuckles Hakkani saheb. "She's always trying to get me into trouble." I have made my way to his vast estate in Shampur village, an hour over dirt tracks turned to slush with rain, snaking through impossibly green fields of paddy, in a part of Bangladesh so conservative that many women in burqa sometimes still carry an umbrella to prevent strangers from looking at them. "I wasn't even born then, but in 1952," drawls the hereditary pir who not too many years ago was better known as a theatre personality in Dhaka, often sunning himself by the pool of the local Sheraton. "I have inherited a pirhood, but not my father's politics."

Noakhali was the sordid second chapter to a

sordid first chapter scripted in August 1946 in Calcutta.

"The past is a fact," he carries on in a rush, sitting in a room where Gandhi spent some hours those many years ago, come to make peace with a politician. "It was a moment of anger. A lot of people were not even clear about why they were doing what they were doing. But I believe it was good Gandhi came. Things cooled down after that."

For a while, perhaps for the first time in his life, Gandhi himself was ready to give up. There is no record of exactly how many people died in Noakhali and in adjoining Tipperah district (now the state of Tripura, and some districts in Bangladesh) -- estimates range from 500 (League sources) to 50,000 (other sources). Jharnadi, who now runs the Gandhi Ashram, relates it bluntly -- "More Muslims died in Calcutta, more Hindus died in Noakhali" -- but violence caught up with the ageing Mahatma like nothing else.

Even before he reached Noakhali, he had written to Nehru: "My inner voice tells me 'You may not live to be a witness to this senseless slaughter. If people refuse to see what is clear as daylight and pay no heed to what you say, does it not mean that your day is over?'" At practically every point of his whistle-stop journey into Bengal's darker side -- at Kushtia, Srirampur, Dattapara, and a string of places where he collectively spent more than a month -- the man who found his way out of numerous problems with fasting and steadfastness gave in to feelings of helplessness. "Oldest friendships had snapped," he wrote in a dispatch. "Truth and ahimsa by which I swear and which have to my knowledge sustained me for 60 years, seem to fail to show the attributes I ascribe to them." His chronicler at the time, Nirmal Kumar Bose, wrote later of seeing the Mahatma mutter to himself: "Main kya karun? (What can I do?)"

It was a lifetime ago. Yet, wandering through the old Noakhali district, now broken up into three, the past can still come alive; but it's surreal, clashing as it does with a slice of today's Bangladesh -- Hakkani saheb is never far away -- itself created from blood of tens of thousands of innocent Muslims. In places where some of the worst atrocities happened, Karpara, Dattapara, Ramganj, Haimchar, there are remnants of buildings, many with still wary people living in them.

In Baruipara, Mohamad Lakiutullah, a farmer who has lived in the house of the local zamindar since the family fled in 1946, clams up when I ask questions. The irrelevance of asking them these many years later strikes me when his son, Mohamad Shahabuddin, a Forest Department officer in Chittagong, starts discussing Malthus with me. Mrinal Krishna Majumdar of Dattapara, among a handful of Hindus who remained in Noakhali after 1946, still hasn't recovered from the horrors he has seen. But his son, Jiban, is building his electronic item repairs shop and a house, next to the destroyed one his father refuses to leave.

I get an earful from Mahbub-ur-Rahman, a former professor, now 85, who claims to have argued with Gandhi about unity and disunity. "I told him, if Pakistan was being created for Pakistanis, then Muslims staying in India wouldn't be safe or united. And if Muslims were so strong that they got the British to create a country for them, then how could they be weak in India?" Prolonged cackle. "Gandhi had no answer." Do you have an answer for why it happened? I ask. Wasn't it easy for landless Muslim peasantry to get totally incensed with wealthy Hindu landlords? "Yes, it was easy. But the riots were not consequential, they were created." As everywhere. In Dattapara, at the site of one of the largest refugee camps in Noakhali -- now a girls school -- I discuss Bangladesh's independence struggle with H.B.M. Shamshul Basher, a 24-year-old sociology graduate with no interest in a past beyond 1971. We're in a teashop, the walls crowded with revealing posters of local female stars: Samira, Saabnoor and Mou. A tape recorder blasts the Bengali version of Macarena from the latest remix album by Sylvia Khan and 'Jewel' Mahmud, Explosion. "The past is over," Basher tells me. "I want a job. That's all that matters."

This is now. Noakhali lives as much off the land as some of its people once killed for, but also on remittances from the Gulf. The moderate Muslim government in Dhaka worries about the conservative bastion of Noakhali. The need to own a satellite telephone stands out as much as a school to practice swordcraft.

And Gandhi? He couldn't have asked for more. Muslim children attend a school run by the ashram's trust, Muslim farmers buy fish seed from its hatchery, the trust provides tubewells and toilets. A Bangladesh flag flies in front of the ashram, and after singing Raghupati raghav raja ram every morning and evening, the indefatigable Jharnadi leads her small band of ashramites to intone: Bismillah-i-rahman-e-rahim. The past? I don't think so.

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