AMALENDU BANERJEE
A City mixing memory and desire
LIBERATION at last-reality and not the illusion of about two and a half decades-for the city of Dacca, the heart that pumps blood into the political and emotional organism of a new nation. Dacca is not the city of Cavafy which pursues one with anguish and frustration. Flushed with victory, it may well look back wistfully on its streets through the centuries.
Little light has been thrown on the misty beginnings of Dacca in the Hindu period and no wonder for the scholars adoring Hindu courts did not much care for historical records. Legend has it that not far away Ballal Sen still survives. The history of Dacca required flesh as the Muslims streamed into the fertile land from their rocky fastnesses up West and according to some Bengala which appeared in the travelogs of Europeans who came in the 16th and 17th centuries is another name for Dacca.
By the time Great Moghuls were on the throne in Delhi, Dacca was well set on its road to glory. Akbar prepared the ground for the imperial writ to run in the remote province by defeating and killing the Pathan king Dayud Khan in 1576. Jahangir consolldated the conquest and Islam Khan whom he appointed Subadar of Bengal in 1608 transferred the provincial capital from Rajmahal to Dacca which was temporarily renamed Jahangirnagar. The Idea behind this shift seemed to contain the Portuguese, Ahom and Mug raiders.
The city however fell out of favor for a while when Shah Jahan’s second son Shah Suja engaged in his somewhat sluggish operations in the struggle for succession with his headquarters at Rajmahal. But the pending swung in favor of Dacca again soon enough.
In 1664 Shayesta Khan came with gubernatorial powers and the warm affection of the harem charmed circle. Dacca was the gainer having reached the summit of its historical magnificence. His long governance created a sense of stability which lasted till Murshid kuli Khan found a seat of power more to his liking.
The decline and fall of the Mughal empire had its repercussions on the fortune of Dacca as well which also had the bitter experience of being harried by the Mugs twice or three times. The administration of the city in these days was vested in Nawab Nazims who continued to cling to titular honor even after the British triumph at Plassey and the take-over of the Diwani by the East India Company. The last of them died without an heir in 1843 and all his property was put to sale.
The economic life in the area in early days revolved around the House of Basacks who carried on for centuries. As the city grew under the Mughals – take it or leave it, according to the Tarikh-Dhaka it had at one stage a population of nine lakhs – the productives pace quickened.
But the magic word is muslin- Muslin Dacca’s gold-earning contribution to the vanity Fair of European society. Whether or not references to this item of finery in Pliny or Periplus of the Eritrean Sea provide a clue to the origins of its manufacture or information about the dark age of the area in the Hindu period, its fame spread far and wide when trade links between the nascent capitalism of Europe and the glittering Orient were strongly forged. How the gossamer thin clothmade its way to Europe, via Musaliputtam which is reputed to have given it its name or through Turkey, may be disputed but by the 17th century it was widely associated with the bon ton of Europe, Tavarnier described how a 30 yard long piece of muslim could be carried in a small cocoanut shell. And what can be a greater tribute to the fitness of the texture of the material than the popular story that the puritanical Aurangzeb told one of his daughters off right and proper when she appeared before him draped in muslim seven times over.
Art was efficiently harassed to make money. Muslin was worth a good deal more than its weight in gold. Around 1750 Dacca is said to have earned over fts 25 lakhs through its exports of this commodity abroad – an astronomical figure by the standards of the time. No wonder the British merchants with their eyes on drab mass production in Lancashire could not stomach this sort of native effrontery. How the old art was killed is a murky episode in the annals of British benevolence. The tradition of textile manufacture however persisted in the form of mills of which the district had a good many in the British period.
The crafty British elevated Dacca in 1905 by making it the capital of an artificially created province of East Bengal. The design was sinister enough – to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims and cripple the Indian national movement which was gathering strength. Thank God, the blow was not telling enough to last. By this time of course the center of gravity in eastern India had shifted to the British-built city of Calcutta. But Dacca also moved apace taking the rough and the smooth. She produced patriots galore who lined the bank of the BuriGanga to boo Bampfyld Fuller and also a craven-hearted boot-licker like the then Nawab of Dacca.
Throughout the first half of this century Dacca presented a picture of light and shadows. But the political pulse of the city kept on beating loud and fast. Nationalism swept along. Wave after wave after wave. Terrorism and the Anushilan group. The blast of World War I. Gandhiji, Dacca, took an inspired dip whenever the call came. The district, if not the city, gave the country a great leader – Deshbandhu Chittaranjan.
But there were dark moments too. Mohammed Ali Jinnah had cast his unholy spell. The canker of communalism caused riots and set the stage for a tragedy of which Bengalis had had a foretaste under Curzon. Came partition and truncated Independence in 1947. Dacca became the capital of East Pakistan but on the ashes of the historical fact of the Bengali identity.
Still the light had not gone out of the city of the lush green University campus in Ramna. The red corpuscles of student life, invigorated for decades by great teachers like Satyen Bose, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Sushill De, Suren Das Gupta, Dr. Shahidulla and a host of others, could not be tamed. Nor could the love of the Bengali language and literature. The movement that the Dacca students began produced world echoes with Mujibur’s great 7th of March speech, again in Ramna. Meanwhile, political events of great pitch and momentum had occurred in Pakistan weakening Dacca’s links with Islamabad. The heroic struggle for identity which followed has now reached fruition. Bangladesh is born and its flag flies in Dacca, the city out of bondage.
Reference: Hindustan Standard, 17.12.1971