Their feet: They tirelessly bear the burden of this world roiled even though they are.
 

Earlier this month I was in Dhaka to attend a one on one photography workshop with an extremely talented Bangladeshi photographer G M B Aakash. As I was set to leave for Dhaka a student of mine remarked, “Comrade, tussi abroad challe ho” (Comrade, you are going abroad)? Nothing could have been more tragic for me than to feel like being ‘abroad’ in Bangladesh. I told my student friend – “I would just like to feel like being at home in Dhaka; like an overdue homecoming.”

My affliction here does not owe to any reason endogenous to me; it is simply for the reason that we are the same people either across our western border or the eastern border, united by a shared history extending over thousands of years. The borders are only 75 years old and it is my firm belief that if people across the sub-continent could have their way, the borders, as a barrier to the free intermingling of people, would disappear sooner than later.

I need to admit here that Bangladesh did not disappoint me even the slightest. Upon arrival as the immigration official at the airport saw my passport a smile crossed his face. “Welcome to Bangladesh Sir. You are from JNU! It’s a great university; at least the greatest in South Asia and you are in a great profession.” This was no coincidence, for on my return another officer at the immigration said much the same thing.

But this was not the first time that I earned plaudits from a Bangladeshi in Bangladesh for simply being part of JNU. There is a small village ‘Dawki’ on Indo-Bangladesh border in south-east Meghalaya where the Umngot river forms a lake on the Indian side before flowing across the border into Bangladesh. It is a picnic spot where the common people seemed to have sway over the paramilitary Border Guards right on the border, both in India and Bangladesh.  I had been to the place in December 2017.

A rather modest nylon rope, stretched across the river to mark the border, seemed to bear the audacity of dividing thousands of years of our shared history into India and Bangladesh. But the people were equally intent, quite spontaneously rather than by particular design, to mitigate the ‘audacity of the rope.’ Even as the hawkers on either side did brisk business by selling snacks to customers from either side, selfies were being clicked by picnickers from the two countries on either side of the ‘rope’, inside each other’s country.

It is there that I met a group of Bangladeshi students and some lawyers practicing in the Bangladesh Supreme Court. Mere mention of being a professor at JNU earned me generous plaudits instantly along with an invite for a selfie in Bangladesh. The ‘rope’ was only a hapless witness to the will of the people.

I would let the plaudits rest here.

Before my arrival in Bangladesh, Aakash had asked me to come prepared with a wish list of what I would like to photograph. ‘People’ is all that I had in my mind. I told him that my interest was in the genre of photography where people would speak through my photographs, and so it was. We went almost exclusively to working class areas and among the workers during the workshop. They welcomed me with generous smiles and rarely declined a pose for the camera. Moreover, that I was from India elicited a measure of excitement and a lot of respect on their part – something, I believe, we in India need to learn from.

What follows are some of the impressions I have carried back with me. I just wish that these manage to nudge our opinions a little.

(The author is Assistant Professor, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University-JNU)

[All photographs by Dr Vikas Bajpai during a recent photography workshop with  Bangladeshi photographer G M B Aakash.] 

And the hands that can hold up the sky, even though bonded into slavery of circumstances they are.

 

Marching on.

 

What might not shake on earth if only these limbs were to begin marching for their own salvation? Unfortunately, their oppressors, at least for now, seem to realize this truth far better than the bearers of this potential.

Laborious pillars.

 

Burden off loaded to begin another round and the process goes on for at least eight hours a day.

 

Life rolls on and there seems no escape.
 

An abiding picture of dignity: She is Anara Begom at Karwan Bazaar wholesale vegetable market, Dhaka.

Anara Begom’s husband was killed in Rawalpindi at the time of Bangladesh liberation war. She raised her children single handedly, and now that they are all married, she is left alone to fend for herself as her offspring can themselves manage only a hand to mouth existence.

We found Anara Begom tucked in a corner of Karwan Bazar sitting with an assortment of around a dozen pieces of vegetables on a mat waiting for a customer. All of her capital was worth no more than 10 to 15 takas, or so was her expectation. But who would buy this, one might wonder? As it was to be found, at Karwan Bazar there are layers within layers. There are big wholesale traders, who supply the big and small retailers. In the transaction some vegetables fall off the sacks, or those that have started rotting in parts are discarded. Such vegetables are collected by people like Anara, washed, their decayed portions removed, and then sold to other poor people like her, of which there isn’t a dearth. Anara Begom thus manages to ward off the indignity of having to beg.

As she steals a nap her mate keeps a strict vigil.

Stealing a smile from the shadows of life; a headload worker, Karwan Bazar wholesale vegetable market, Dhaka.

Ferrying a headload of goods as he does at Karwan Bazaar, life is a day to day grim struggle for this worker.

Royal bath: This worker enjoys a refreshing bath after the day’s hard work at Gabtoli cattle market in Dhaka.

The man and his machine: As I stood angling for this shot, I was incidentally reminded of Ritwik Ghatak’s 1958 film ‘Ajaantrik.’

All in a day’s toil.
 

All in a day’s toil.

Bangladesh is a land of mighty rivers. River Buri Ganga is the lifeline of Dhaka and the port at Gatboli is the busiest commercial port of the city handling major trade. Naturally then it is teeming with workers loading and unloading the ships. Nothing would exemplify better the adage – ‘living by the sweat of the brow only to get browbeaten’ as these workers do.

Lunch break at Gabtoli.

Worries galore.

Maimoona manages her tiny ‘dhaba’ (food stall) to provide cheapest possible food for the laborers at Gabtoli.

The angry young man – Who will channelize his anger?

Rahimul and

Khaleeda ferry coal from the ships ……..

Each basket of coal they ferry carries around 40 kg of coal which is to be offloaded at the depot that is around 100 meters from the ship. Each round trip earns them 3 takas and the count of the trips is kept by plastic tokens handed to them after each trip. Just calculate how many trips they would be making to earn a daily wage between 500 to 800 takas. It’s a sheer feat. Isn’t it humbling that they still managed a smile to make a great photograph. Notice the kohl in Khaleeda’s eyes.

The proletarian Rambo.

You would have heard of descriptions like ‘Colgate smile’, ‘Binaca smile’ and ‘Cibaca smile’ for flashy smiles. His smile was twice as glorious as all three of them put together.

A genial Hercules.

Bilal Hossein was tall and muscular with broad shoulders on which rests the weight of many responsibilities. He said that he toils hard so that his children can get all the education they need. I intervened just in time to prevent him from wiping out the beads of sweat on his countenance. The results are what they are. After the photograph was taken, Aakash asked the tea shop owner on site to open two one liter bottles of seven up for Bilal and his compatriots to quench their thirst.

As dusk cast its deep shadow over Gabtoli it was time to bid adieu.

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It was 31 October, 1984. The time may have been around 11 am. I was taking my second term exams for class XI in a room on the ground floor of the science block of the Delhi Public School, R K Puram, New Delhi. Unfortunately, mine was the first seat very close by to the only entrance and the exit for the room. ‘Unfortunately’ because  this made seeking the help and guidance of fellow examinees in this ordeal a rather adventurous proposition. Nevertheless, I focussed on the question paper intently, trying to make sense of what was expected of me.

A while after the examination had taken off, the teacher invigilating in our room and other teachers in the adjacent rooms flocked together at the door of our room for a conference of sorts, each having a cup of tea in their hands which had been duly served by that time. Barely a minute or so into their hushed conference, I over heard one of the teachers remark – ‘madam ko to goliyan lag rahin hain’ (madam is being riddled with bullets). I was a bit startled as to what that could mean; but then, I had a task at hand and got immersed in it before long.

The exam was over by 1 pm, and after the answer sheets had been submitted, all students were instructed to remain seated. A while later the teacher announced that the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s condition was not well and that she has had to be taken to hospital. Since the situation could get tense, we were all instructed to go straight to our homes from the school. It took no time for me to figure out who the ‘madam’ was and that the Prime Minister was not ‘ill’, but that she had been ‘riddled with bullets.’ By evening the picture became clearer as details were made public by the All India Radio and Doordarshan, then the only sources of audio-visual media.  The picture had also turned ominous and soon metamorphosed into a full scale orgy of death and mayhem.

We lived in Sarvodaya Enclave, a colony in South Delhi, adjacent to the Mother’s International School on Aurobindo Marg, bang opposite to the southern periphery of IIT Delhi campus. The week following 31 October, 1984 is among the worst in my living memory. It was full of tension and strain in the family, especially for me and my brother who is about a year and a half younger to me. Even though the trigger had been provided by the mayhem outside, the reasons for this tension were internal to the family and are directly attributable to the duel between the two brothers on one side and our father on the other. My sister, who was still younger, and my mother largely remained bystanders to this duel.

I wouldn’t say that my father; our feudal lord, is particularly communal in his attitude, but yes, he is a man who generally abides by ‘conventions’; and talking of conventions, it’s been my long-standing impression that there exists a fair degree of permissiveness, systematically perpetrated from the top, in our society to communal attitudes even in the best of our “secular” times. A permissiveness that readily lends itself to whipping up a frenzy depending upon the convenience of political actors of various hues, and other segments of the ruling classes. To say so is not to brand Indians as particularly communal; after all, people following great faiths have lived together in the subcontinent, mostly in peace, for more than a millennium. It is just that communalism like other fault lines of caste, regionalism and ethnicity, apart from class, in our society are of existential importance for the ‘Great Indian Democracy.’ It is this environment of permissiveness which now confronted the two school boys living with their happy family in a two room rented accommodation on the first floor of C 160, Sarvodaya Enclave, New Delhi – 17.

As is pathognomonic of such situations, all kinds of rumours went floating around in the city in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Our colony was no exception. There were rumours of an impending attack on the colony by armed hordes of Sikhs, even though there was no colony around ours which harboured Sikhs in numbers to conjure up such ‘hordes’; rumours of water supply being poisoned in some colonies, and what not. Night vigils were promptly mounted in every block of the colony, and all young boys were drafted for the purpose. My brother and I firmly refused to lend our services.

I do not remember correctly if it was on 31 October, or the day after; it was dinner time. Dinner time in our house also used to be TV watching time, and TV watching for most part meant watching only the news, and strictly so. Our feudal lordship had ordained so. The only exception to this routine was the Sunday movie telecast at Doordarshan, or when a kind neighbourhood auntiji would drop in with her munna-munni with the request to watch ‘Chitrahaar’ (the programme of Hindi film songs initially telecast once a week, and later the frequency was increased to twice a week). But the news was a must for us. Our father always liked his children to be abreast with current affairs.

That evening Kothari uncle, a very close family friend who later became the director of IIT Delhi, came visiting us. He would come over often with his old black coloured Atlas cycle in the tow; and we always loved his visits for he brought with him an ethereal light-heartedness which we felt we were much in need of to break the feudal regime. So, around dinner time, my father, Kothari uncle, my sister, my brother and I – the retinue sat together watching the English news on Doordarshan.  My mother was readying the dinner in the kitchen.
Hearing the news all through that week had been an ordeal; news from the audio-visual and the print media, and that which came by word of mouth. It consistently fuelled the tension that hung heavy and low in the air; amply aided by the frustration and helplessness in face of an adversity.

Though not recalling the exact details now, but I distinctly remember that the news reader on the television screen announced – ‘Today, the terrorists blew up a railway line near – so and so – village in – so and so – district of Punjab.’ I do not recall if there was any accompanying loss of lives on this count or not. No sooner was the news reader finished with this news, my father hurled a loud curse at the ‘Sardars’ for what he perceived were crimes committed by them. The ease with which the act of a Sardar, or for that matter a Muslim, or a Christian gets transposed to all Sardars, all Muslims and all Christians is amazing, while the majority community can happily play the victim.

My father’s stigmatization of ‘Sardars’ was notwithstanding the fact that among one of his good friends in the colony was Sardar Amarjeet Singh, the big fat rotund zamindar from Jandiala Guru in Amritsar district of Punjab, whose English tastes edged on to the royalty. He was after all an aluminous of Colvin Taluqdars’ college (a colonial era college built by the British for the education of the children of the British colonial officers, and those of the native feudal gentry) in Lucknow. Lucknow happens to be our native place. Sardar Amarjeet Singh would occasionally come over to have drinks with his Bajpai Saab and reminisce about his days in Lucknow over and over again. We had aptly named his imposing persona – Mughal-e-Azam. Auntiji, his wife, was accordingly named Jodha Bai who was a tall, fair, beautiful and slim, but a theth (typical) Sikhni. Jodha Bai aunty spoke nothing but rustic Punjabi, and my mother spoke nothing but Hindi, often tinged with Awadhi, the dialect spoken in our part of UP; and yet the two could spend hours talking to each other about God knows what.

This communal ‘permissiveness’ is also a strange sentiment which allows people to be friends at one plane and enemies at another, all at the same time. Fortunately for the ‘royal family’, they were away and safe in Jandiala Guru when an old tree had fallen to shake the earth in Delhi.
No sooner had my father hurled his loud curse, my mother called out from the kitchen – “what happened now?” The answer it seems was so straight forward that it hardly mandated any application of mind. He answered back – “Sardaron ne ek aur patri uda di” (the Sikhs have blown apart another railway track). This proved to be the proverbial last straw which brought forth an amazing truculence on the part of my brother who retorted, with aggression writ large on his face – “How dare you talk like that. Just because mummy does not understand English, you think you can tell her anything. What they said on television was that ‘terrorists had blown up the railway line in Punjab and not the Sikhs.”

His fierceness took everyone aback. Every attempt to admonish; to threaten with consequences, met with an even more defiant retort until he was asked to get out of the room. He obliged at last.

I had been weighing the situation quietly, though with alarm, and by implication was seen to have encouraged my brother’s contumacious irreverence. Kothari uncle also seemed to share the opinion. My father tried to succeed where he had failed with my brother. He admonished – “Bikkoo (my calling name at home) – why did you keep listening? You ought to have stopped him as an elder brother. Is that the way to behave with elders? He even disrespected Kothari sahib. Is this the worth of all my efforts to educate you three in good public schools?” He said much more, and I waited until he had had it to his heart’s content. Kothari uncle too fortified the counselling part of the admonition.

I conceded that Nikkoo (my brother’s pet  name) could have been more restrained in his expression, but also insisted that the more important point here was not the manner of his speaking, as much it was, what he was trying to convey. I am sure I must have done quite some advocacy of what my brother and I had been feeling about the situation as it obtained then

The fallen tree was consigned to the holy pyre; the shaking of earth, and the murderous orgy it ignited ebbed over a week’s time. In the same week more than three thousand innocent Sikh men, women and children (the weeds, as against the tree, some might say), were relieved from their earthly abode in Delhi alone, by marauding mobs led by prominent leaders of the then ruling party, the Congress. The country wide toll was around eight thousand dead. The newly anointed scion of the ruling party, Rajiv Gandhi, who passed off the cataclysmic events as only the expected ‘shaking of the earth when an old tree falls’ was beatified as the new Prime Minister of the country. He in turn baptised leaders of the anti-Sikh pogrom of his party as ministers in his cabinet among them Jagdish Tytler and H K L Bhagat being the most prominent. Others were elected as members of parliament and legislative assemblies.

The communal carnage of 1984, it seems was not enough to rouse the society to annihilate this Frankenstein of communalism. In the onward march of the ‘Great Indian Democracy’ baseline communal permissiveness has continued to be harnessed religiously to yield handsome dividends for one party or the other of the ruling classes and thereby securing the monopoly of the oppressors on political power. The then BJP president Lal Krishna Advani took out the ‘Ram Rath Yatra’in September – October 1990 and then went on preside over the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 in the presence of other important leaders of the party and the Hindu communal brigade. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the notable exception, but not for the reasons of equanimity or any detachment from the Ram temple. Having incited the karsevaks to ‘level the ground’ in his speech delivered in Lucknow just a day before the demolition, he made a strategic retreat to Delhi in order to be able to enact a charade of ‘unfortunate’ event and offer a facsimile of an apology over the demolition.

Riots followed in Mumbai, Delhi and many other places in wake of the demolition; once again thousands lost their lives. In my living memory, I would call that period of the early 1990s as the first phase of Hindu chauvinist resurgence.

In order to give myself time to prepare for the post-graduate medical entrance examination, I had resigned as a junior resident doctor from Delhi’s Guru Teg Bahadur (GTB) Hospital and University College of Medical Sciences situated in Dilshad Garden in East Delhi, just before the riots broke out. Riots had affected many areas with substantial Muslim population around our medical college – Seelampur, Jafarabad, Nand Nagri and other localities. I do not remember the exact date now, but it was a late afternoon on one of the days in December 1992. I received a phone call from one of my dearest friends and batch mate Nishith, who was then serving as casualty medical officer at GTB hospital. That particular day seemed to have witnessed a particular surge in casualties due to riots. Nishith’s voice was shaking. He narrated:
“Yaar Bajpai, main tujhe bata nahin saktaki casualty mein kya scene hai is waqt. Police gaadiyon mein lashen bhar-bhar ke laa rahi hai, aur kuch log itne badtameez hain ki main bata nahin sakta. Jab stretcher par laashen aa rahin thi to kuch interns pooch rahe thae ki ka…..a (a cuss word used for Muslims) hai kya?” (My dear friend Bajpai, I cannot tell you what is the scene like in casualty right now. The police are ferrying loads full of dead bodies in vehicles; and some people here are despicable beyond words. When dead bodies were being ferried in on stretchers, some interns asked are these k—a?)

Even though Nishith and I are fully capable of running into each other with as much ferocity as it would take to tear each other apart in an argument on a pet political or ideological issue, but Nishith is a person filled with pristine humanity to his core; a quality that enables him to reverberate with the joy and sorrow of the people around him with utmost sensitivity. He captured the poignancy of the situation for me when he described the plight of a policeman who was sitting in the casualty with two small Muslim children, a boy and a girl, sitting on his either thigh, wailing and weeping, overcome by fear as they were. The children had been orphaned, with both parents having been consumed by the wild fire of hate that raged outside. I do not remember what Nishith told about the mother, but as the policeman with the custody of the kids uncovered the face of the father’s corpse lying on the stretcher, he couldn’t bear the sight, rushed out of the casualty main gate and vomited. The man’s skull had been blown to smithereens.
I am an emotionally labile person. Even as Nishith had begun with the first words of horror, my eyes had welled up and they soon broke down into a torrent. I couldn’t even keep the receiver of the phone in place and my condition deteriorated to that of frank ululation which had my parents worried.

But this time around, there was some leeway to vanquish the grief, at least in part. I had recently come in contact with a group of progressive doctors and scientists, mainly based out of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, who worked in an organization called ‘Delhi Medicos and Scientists Forum’ (DMSF). DMSF had been taking up campaigns on various social and political issues alongside the professional issues of doctors and scientists. I had had a chance to be part of some of these campaigns.

DMSF obtained curfew passes to provide medical relief in the riot affected areas around GTB hospital and a team of doctors, interns and medical students went to the affected localities to provide feasible relief, witnessing the lives broken and property destroyed. Tragedy was simply too huge, and the overt and covert wounds sustained too deep to lend themselves to the efforts of a motley group of doctors and medical students. This was realized on day one itself, and so it was decided to do the doable. DMSF teams went from house to house and along with providing the preliminary medical aid, collected the testimonies of the riot victims, all of which were ultimately compiled into a report on the riots. Except the extent of the violence, its method and pattern weren’t much different from that of the 1984 riots, except that the targeted religious minority community this time around were Muslims. One characteristic of such riots in India is that they are as much the result of ‘studied connivance’ of the supposedly ‘secular’ ruling class parties, as much they are a result of the industriousness of the ‘communal’ ones. The communal permissiveness snugs them all under its wings.

Our report went places; it was indeed well received. To top it all it was accorded due respectability by the union home ministry, under the Congress regime which set up an inquiry into the report.

The interns in the casualty of the GTB hospital weren’t the only ones who were swept off their feet in the fast blowing wind of communal frenzy. There was a very dear professor of ours in the department of Preventive and Social Medicine (PSM), whose lectures opened for us newer vistas of thinking in social role of medicine. He had helped validate many of my leftist ideas. He suddenly started talking of ‘cultural nationalism’ one day. I saw my role model of a teacher fall from the high pedestal. Bearing this can be much more difficult than what most might presume. It is not for nothing that ‘communalism’ is the weapon of choice for the oppressors; after all, it deprives us of our humanity as few other things do. Incidentally, it was this professor who had put me through to my comrades in DMSF. As I gather from a common acquaintance, I am a much despised anti-national to him now.

In the political environment as it obtained after Babri mosque’s demolition, Vajpayee emerged beatified, a saint of a politician, while Advani was the hawk. Then in 2002, Gujarat happened; another 2000 or so Muslim lives were lost; gory tales of rape and mass murder followed, enough to put any civilized society to shame except ours, the ‘Vishwa Guru’ (preacher to the world). In the aftermath of the carnage there emerged new saints and new hawks. The reigning deity attained a higher pedestal by preaching ‘Raj Dharma’ (duties of the ruler), as if that could atone for the sins of Gujarat, just as the ‘sorry’ after the 1992 demolition. The new hawk who rose from the ashes of Gujarat made the earlier one appear as a dove, nay, a ‘saint’; another beatification.

The Kandhamal riots of 2008 against Christians in Odisha remained ever so remote, at least for the glitterati in more happening parts of India. Thousands of tribal people were displaced from their homes, and among those who were killed was an Australian Christian Missionary Graham Staines and his two sons aged all of ten and six years.

More memories and future memories crowd my mind, but we shall put a full stop to memories here.

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

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