Andrew Whitehead
Indian Express
On the outskirts of the once mainly Hindu village of Jayag is a zamindar's house,
ringed by fish ponds and patrolled by monitor lizards so large that the hens
squawk in alarm at their approach. The house is now an ashram - the centre of
social development programmes, of handicrafts, and community schemes. Every
morning and evening, people gather for a prayer meeting in a room which still
contains mementoes of Gandhi's visit here in January 1947. It's a living memorial
to the most remarkable of Gandhi's partition peace missions.
Jayag lies in Noakhali district of southern Bangladesh. That name, Noakhali, holds
a sombre place in the annals of India's disintegration. When the Calcutta tinder
box exploded in August 1946 the sparks alighted on this poor, remote region which
exported labour to the provincial capital. From Noakhali, the flames spread to
Bihar and on to the killing fields of Punjab.
The toll in Noakhali was modest compared to the barbarity of the Great Calcutta
Killing, and the Hindu backlash which followed in Bihar. But the communal
bitterness, the rapes, the migration of capital and the forced conversions made a
deep impact across India. The frenzy unleashed by the Muslim League's Direct
Action Day in Calcutta was proving to be not an aberration, but part of a pattern.
Jharna Chowdhury, the one-woman Gandhian dynamo who now runs the ashram, was nine
years old and living a Noakhali village when the rioters surrounded her home. It
was mid-October 1946. "In the morning at around nine o'clock, hundreds of people
came to our house with flaming torches. They were shouting 'Allah-oh-Akbar'. We
fled and hid in a nearby garden. Then they set the house on fire. There were so
many attackers. But I remember that among them, I saw people from my own village,
people whom I knew."
The large Hindu minority in Noakhali at that time included most of the big
landlords, the lawyers and moneylenders, the Government babus and the businessmen.
There is little doubt that the economic marginalisation of local Muslims was the
root cause of the riot. And local politicians triggered the violence.
Talking today to the elderly in Noakhali's villages and bazaars, Hindus and
Muslims alike - Hindus make up close on 10 per cent of the population here, as
across Bangladesh - one name crops up repeatedly. Ghulam Sarwar was an elected
member of the provincial assembly, a member of a much revered Muslim religious
family, and a mesmerising figure.
By all accounts it was this pir whose fiery speeches about the pogrom of Muslims
in Calcutta encouraged local villagers to take revenge.
Chandra Pal, now 74 and still living in Noakhali, hurried home from Mymensingh
when he heard news that Hindu homes had been ransacked. "My parents' house had
been attacked and looted, but luckily, lives were spared. But our neighbours'
houses, the big zamindars' houses, and those of the big business families - those
houses had been looted like anything, people had been massacred, and their women
taken away. That happened on a massive scale. It seemed the rioters wanted
vengeance against those with money and power."
"Many people jumped into ponds to save themselves," recalls M. K. Majumdar, a
retired school teacher. "They tried to hide under the water hyacinths. But the
attackers killed them with fishing spears. The rioters were very organised.
There was the Ghulam Sarwar group, then there was the Hashmi group. And another
group of rioters, the Akbar Fauj, came up to our house and tried to loot it. They
were given some money and went away."
For weeks, Hindu men were forced to offer namaz and adopt Muslim names. Some had
beef stuffed into their mouths. There were attempts to marry off eligible Hindu
women to Muslim grooms. Ashoka Gupta, whose husband was then a judge serving in
Chittagong, was among the first outsiders to reach Noakhali to provide relief -
she remembers above all the fate of one village woman. "Every night she was being
carried away by the same group of men. Her husband said: I am so helpless, please
help me. I went to the police station, but I was not able to help her at all."
Gupta was at Chandpur when Gandhi arrived in Noakhali by boat. "We rowed along in
a small boat to that steamship and we were allowed to board. And we attended
Gandhi's prayers. Later, Gandhi told us all: 'I understand that you a want to
work, but have you thought of what caused this? Have you come only to help the
Hindus? I'm going to the interior, and I'll find out what was the real cause and
how I'll be able to help."'
Gandhi visited dozens of villages in his four months in the area. The trouble had
largely burnt itself out by the time he arrived in early November. But there's no
doubt that his calming presence and message, the concern he showed for both
communities, and the sight of India's foremost leader, barefoot, negotiating the
narrow bamboo bridges, had an immense impact.
Abdul Rauf took me to the spot just outside his small hamlet where he watched
Gandhi pass by more than half a century ago. "I was standing right here," he said
with a sense of pride. "Gandhi came from that direction, from the north. I
remember he was wearing two pieces of khadi cloth, and there was a watch at his
waist. He took support from the shoulders of two women. All the Muslims were
pleased to see him, and respected him."
But Raufs own testimony suggests that not all in Noakhali welcomed the Mahatma.
Goats were provided to keep Gandhi supplied with milk. "In another nearby
village," he says, with a giggle, "local Muslims stole that goat. And ate it!"
Some of Gandhi's disciples stayed behind in Jayag after the Mahatma left. They were the nucleus of the Gandhi ashram and for decades endured the suspicion and worse of first the East Pakistani and then the Bangladeshi authorities.
Jharna Chowdhury, dressed in white khadi and irrepressibly cheerful, says things
are much better now. The ashram's programmes are encouraged by officials. But
many of the local Hindus admit to some lingering sense of apprehension - how
justified or otherwise, it's impossible to say.
One man showed me round the ruins of a Hindu mandir in the market town of
Dattapara, pulled down in retaliation to the Ayodhya demolition. "It looks like
one crime has given way to ten other crimes," he bemoaned. "As the days are going
by, worse and worse things are happening. There's nobody to protest, nobody to
resist such things."
Fifty years after Gandhi's peace mission, Noakhali is still not at ease.
(Andrew Whitehead has made a BBC Radio series on partition)
20 May 1997
