Noakhali's Darkest Hour

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

Qut Noakhali Or Die, Gandhi Warns Hindus

QUIT NOAKHALI OR DIE, GANDHI WARNS HINDUS
----------------------
New Delhi, April 7 (AP)

New York Times--April 8, 1947, Tuesday----Page 23, 148 words

Mohandas K. Gandhi, who has been attempting to insure communal peace in the Bengal and Bihar areas, said today religious strife in the troubled Noakhali section of bengal seemed to call for Hindus to leave or perish "in the flames of fanaticism."

Meanwhile, a one-day strike of workers throughout Bombay Province appeared likely to be called by the Provincial Trade Union Congress to express sympathy with the two-week-old strike of 8,500 transport workers in the city of Bombay.

Mr. Gandhi halted his walking tour of Bengal and Bihar at the invitation of the new Viceroy, Viscount Mountbatten, for discussions on departure of the British from India by June, 1948. Today he released telegrams from COngress party workers in noakhali, which is predominantly Moslem, in which they described attempts to burn Hindus alive.

http://www.eastbengal.org/april8_1947.pdf

(Source : The New York Times)

Refugees Tell of Terror in Bengal As Hindu-Moslem Rioting Goes On

Refugees Testify to Bengal Terror


Special to The New York Times
Calcutta, India, Oct. 18 (London Times dispatch)--

Unofficial reports reaching Calcutta indicate that acts of violence are continuing on an alarming scale in the districts of Noakhali and Tippera. This is despite the local Government's assurance that the communal situation in eastern Bengal had shown some improvement during the last twenty-four hours.

Hundreds of refugees have reached Calcutta from these districts and they have a grim picture of the happenings there during the last eight days.

They say that a hundred villages have been burned by hooligans, that hundreds of persons have been butchered or maimed and destitute. They report that both districts are infernos of communal fury, and that unless the Government urgently dispatches more troops and police whole minority populations will be wiped out.

[In new Delhi Mohandas K. Gandhi repeated his declaration to Indian women that they should commit suicide rather than submit to dishonor.]

Both Noakhali and Tipperah are predominantly Moslem areas. The total population there is just over 8,000,000 and of these only 2,000,000 are Hindus.

The latest reports show that the scenes of the disturbances since yesterday have been moving from Noakhali into Tippera and that they are concentrating in the Chandpur subdivision of that district.

The capital town, Chandpur, is a large railway and river junction toward which refugees are fleeing in an attempt to escape into western Bengal. But most of the roads and the river exits are being guarded by armed rowdies and a large population of the evacuees has cut into the jungles and swamps to avoid molestation.

Thus far police and military action in the affected areas has been confined to about six firings. The casualties from this source are about twenty killed and an equal number injured.

The total casualties from the riots will perhaps never be known. Official sources [Moslem in Bengal] remain silent over this point but unofficial reports variously estimate the totals between 5,000 and 6,000 killed and 1,500 to 2,000 injured. It is reported that a further 50,000 to 60,000 have been forcibly converted ot another faith or abducted.

There is grave public anxiety in Calcutta over the inadequacy of the police and military forces dispatched to the stricken areas by the Bengal Government. So far only two companies of troops are known to have been sent to an area covering several hundred square miles. During the August Calcutta riots had at their disposal about 45,000 troops to protect the city.

Food is another urgent problem. With both railway and river communications seriously dislocated and trade completely at a standstill in most parts of Noakhali and Tippera, thousands face starvation. Local leaders have made urgent representations to the Government to fly food to the starving villages. They have also telegraphed to the Governor of Bengal and the Chief Minister, who at present at the hill resort of Darjeeling, jointly to visit the affected areas.

The Secretary of the Bengal Hindu Mahasabha party has just received from the Governor's private secretary a message that the Governor proposed to visit Noakhali soon.

Gandhi Advises Suicide

New Delhi, India, Oct. 18 (AP)-
Mohandas K Gandhi, "spiritual leader" of the Hindu-led Congress party, again today advised women in eastern Bengal to take their own lives rather than submit to dishonor. In Bombay the provincial Congress party chief called for halting of all business activity as a demonstration of sympathy for riot victims.

Mr. Gandhi said he felt a "call" to go to the trouble areas as soon as the situation in new Delhi permitted. He said that at his request Acharya Kripalani, newly elected president of the Congress party, and Sarat Chandra Bose, recently retired member of the interim Government, had gone to investigate the riot reports.

He was most emphatic in his instructions to women, insisting it was "not an idle idea" and he meant every word he said.

Last night he advised women to suffocate themselves by holding their breath, but he said tonight that he had been told by physicians that suicide by that means was impossible.

"The only way known to medicine for instant self immolation is strong poisonous doses," he siad he was told. He added: "If this is so I would advise every one running the risk of dishonor to take poison before submission to dishonor."

http://www.eastbengal.org/oct19_1946.pdf

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.

http://www.indiatodaygroup.com/itoday/18081997/noakhali.html

Noakhali Noakhali by Shantanu Singha is on the the Web

http://www.eastbengal.org/noakhali.pdf

Noakhali, the pivotal point of the Indian Partition of 1947 has become a forgotten point in Indian History.

Please click the link above to read the story of Nokhali.

http://www.eastbengal.org/noakhali.pdf

Rioting Sweeps Eastern Bengal (Albequerque Journal)

Gandhi Urges (Hindu) Women Save Honor by Suicide

CALCUTTA October 18, 1946

An Indian relief official declarted tonight that Hindu-Moslem rioting had spread over 300 square miles of dominantly Moslem districts in eastern Bengal, affecting "not less than 100,00" people and (Hindu) refugees were fleeing from the trouble zone.

In New Delhi Mohandas K Gandhi, spiritual leader of the Hindu-led Congress party, advised (Hindu) women in eastern Bengal to take their own lives rather than submit to dishonor, and in Bombay the provincial Congress chief called for halting of all business authority as a demonstration of sympath for riot victims.

Gandhi said he felt a "call" to go to the trouble areas as soon as the situation in new Delhi permitted.

Bengal government officials (who are Moslems) insisted that casualties estimated at 5000 by the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, were not as heavy as reported.

Source: Albequerque Journal: October 19, 1946

Congress President Acharya Kripalani's 'Message to Bengal'

-----
Acharya Kripalani - President of the Congress Party, after his tour of
Noakhali wrote: "A MESSAGE TO BENGAL"

"I am clearly of the opinion that whatever the Government, Provincial or Central, may or may not do, every Bengalee(Hindu), male or female, has to defend himself or herself by whatever means he or she can think of. In this connection, I could keep before every Bengalee(Hindu) the example of Shri Rajendra Lal Roy and his family who defied a mob for full two days and fell fighting. Even as a believer in the absolute non-violence, I hold that the resistance offered by Shri Rajendra Lal Roy and his family, was the nearest approach to non-violence. "