Representations and Erasures
"Memory does not make films. It makes photographs." (~Milan Kundera, " The Book of Laughter and Forgetting")
There are two events in August, both 81 years ago, that changed my life forever.
I don’t know for how long the flag whipped around at Gowalia Tank Maidan in south Mumbai (I’m sure if I hacked around I’d be able to find the number of minutes) on August 9, 1942. And how was it raised when it was an act against the King Emperor of India? A 33-year-old woman, Aruna Asaf Ali (she was born Aruna Ganguly), a Bengali Hindu from Punjab who’d married a Muslim man in 1928, beat the gauntlet of British security at the gathering and raised the Indian Congress flag launching what Gandhi termed: “Quit India”, the last massive push of civil disobedience for India to gain independence at war’s end. All the Congress leadership were in prison after the Bombay session issued the call, also known as “ Bharat Chhodo Andolan.” The British thought the flag hoisting was a nonevent when this woman did it by herself. Yes, there were police firings and people died and imprisoned. Aruna Asaf Ali disappeared “underground” till 1946.
Thanks for reading Amit’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Pledge your support
The culmination of the Quit India movement was the eventual independence of India. I was born three years after that transition. Free of colonial slights, a child of independent India.
A few weeks later, another Aruna and another Bengali, all of 21 years old showed up at a church, St. Mary’s in Bhowanipore, a section of south Kolkata, to marry a 25-year-old Bengali, Amal, on August 25, 1942. I imagine everyone who was there that cloudy day is now dead. I wish I had asked my parents for a lot of specifics about their wedding day. The 21-year-old bride had recently graduated from the university. She had a brother who was 11, two sisters aged 20 and 15, and a widowed mother.
The groom, though he showed up in touring car with running boards and whitewall tires, was essentially a man with a limited future. He had gone to the U.S. in 1939 to study at one of the universities, managed to get passage from Southampton to New York right after the European war exploded. His ship hit a fierce storm in the north Atlantic and was damaged and limped into New York harbor in October of that year. The 22-year-old had multiple fractures of his left leg when furniture careened off him during the storm. There was a class-action suit against the shipping company and Baba made out handsomely! That kept him in cars and his meticulous wardrobe while he worked for a pittance for his father at the school for the blind on what was then the outskirts of Calcutta. He was no slouch. He trained a troop of Boy Scouts who were all blind in the late 1930s. The first all-blind troop won the highest honors in competitive games in 1942---the Jackson Shield. Amal was the district scoutmaster at that time. Scouting in India, gained popularity as an off shoot of Gurusaday Dutt’s Bratachari movement of the early 1930s. The secular movement was to develop spiritual and physical well-being among Indians. It found a large following in eastern India as self-esteem was of national importance under the colonial boot. The week of his wedding, the government announced that he was getting a public service award for social work---the Kaiser-i-Hind (bronze).
Photo credit: Courtesy of author. All Rights Reserved.
Studio photographs with ethereal, gossamery backdrops taken in hot and humid rooms are part of our imagination nowadays. Above are my parents. I assume it was taken the day of their wedding. Damaged through the negligence of their children.
I rekindle the image because I know, as they couldn’t have, what lay ahead in the immediate luminosity of their wedding day.
Some of what awaited Aruna and Amal in the first five years of their life together is worth my remembering, as I often think that my life is inordinately full of struggle and strife. If only I thought of my parents.
Of course, 1942 was the middle of a world war. In February, Singapore fell. In March, Malaya and Burma were overrun by the Japanese. The Americans were at Guadalcanal and making amphibious landings in the southern Solomon Islands. And in Europe, the German 6th Army was crossing the Don and heading to Stalingrad. The Japanese saw Calcutta as a strategic Allied port and a “sitting duck” of a target. The British were so stretched in trying to supply troops in Burma that they left Calcutta almost defenseless.
In the winter of 1943, the Japanese not only bombed the port but also parts of the city. This was in the middle of Bengal Famine, which claimed at least 3 million lives. A totally avoidable situation but the British weren’t going to bail their colonials out. With the Burma and Malaya rice sources lost, they took the rice out of the market to ship to troops via Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Himalayan foothills. The resulting shortage and black marketeering had skeletal villagers begging house-to-house for rice water.
Through some foresight or because of civil defense pressure or both, Amal and Aruna and over 150 students, staff, kitchen help evacuated the blind school to Krishnagar in North Bengal, I think, in early 1943. There were no direct roads and you had to contend with ferries across tributaries and distributaries of the Padma and the Bhagirathi.
Sometime in 1943 (and I have no idea of the date), my oldest sister, Reena Archana, was born in a military hospital in Krishnagar. She died a few months later and is buried in an unmarked grave as the colonizers didn’t allow Indians in the military cemetery. My parents’ grief was crushing. They didn’t express anything when I was growing up, a decade later. There was no sign of Reena. I don’t know her birth or death dates; have no photographs. I just know her name.
And then, sometime (again I lack dates) in 1943-44, Ajit, my father’s only younger brother, over six-feet tall and a strong swimmer, I am told, sank to the bottom of one of the ponds on the blind school Behala campus, which had become part of the British fire and ambulance services. I think he was 22 or 23. How a strong swimmer, in a local pond, even with leg cramps, couldn’t make it to shore is a mystery that will remain so.
The marriage of Aruna Dutt and Amal Shah propelled lives that like galaxies tumbled through space for decades and continue to do so. My sister and my lives and all the wives, husbands, children, grandchildren are spiral arcs and clumps in that planetary vastness. Forever yoked.
We, humans, are an endangered species. Our memories are our strengths and our frailties.
“Better than any ritual
Is the worship achieved through wisdom:
Wisdom is the final goal
Of every action, Arjuna.”
(~Bhagavad Gita, stanza 4:32-36, Trans. Stephen Mitchell)
__________________________________________________________________________
Also available for purchase for $6.50 + $2.50 mailing
Venmo: @amit-shah-1950 with your name and address.
Very good juxtaposition. Too many people have forgotten Aruna Asaf Ali. Probably because people like her don't come around any more.