[Reader-list] posting from kolkata

[debjani sengupta]

I have now been in Kolkata over a month reading and collecting material on my project. It has been good but the weather has been hot and humid, though the mangoes this season, I am being assured, is superlative. For the last few days I have been walking around some of the refugee colonies in Kolkata, particularly Bijoygarh and Bapuji nagar, talking to people and getting to see, rather imagine, the colony as it was thirty years ago. It is not easy. Very few of the old tin roofed bamboo houses remain standing. In their place a quiet revolution has transformed those hutments to three storied two storied houses, narrow, with a mean look but obviously going some place else. 
  My guide was Anjan Chakraborty whose father was the principal of Bijoygarh College, one of the first educational institutions to be started by the refugees from East Bengal. Anjan babu loves Bijoygarh with a passion. He spent his early years in the colony and still lives there. His family now runs Shishutirtha, a primary school for the locality children.
  Anjanbabu was lucid about those first days when the colony began. He is now more than 65 years old and some of the reminiscences are family tales, some his own experience. He remembers the early struggles of the uprooted people to build a cultural life of their own, how they organized a shishumela where Ritwik Ghatak had once been invited as chief guest, the colony's fight for water and roads and the fight against poverty and hopelessness. Bijoygarh had earlier been a military camp during the second World War. The abandoned army barracks had first housed the families and in 1949, when the refugees continued to come, the marshy areas were taken over. The Jadavpur Refugee Committee began to organise the people to take over these lands and slowly the bamboo structures came up. Those were hard days but there was a distinct sense of community, of fellow feeling and a sense of purpose in each life. It was that or going under. 
  Anjan Chakraborty still considers himself an East Bengali first and a Calcuttan later. When I asked him whether Kolkata had been good to him, he shook his head positively.' This is where I live now. My East Bengal is no longer alive, except in my memory and in the memories of my contemporaries.'
  I met some of them. That part comes later.

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