1. Spared by Fate, Bound by Duty
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| My grandparents, Taru and Mahesh Chandra Das, with my mum, Korobi. The pic's been colourised and edited to include only the three of them. |
My mum lost her father a few months before losing her maternal grandfather who had written encouraging letters while her father was unwell even though he was near the end himself.
Her paternal grandfather died long before she was born. He had been the sole survivor in his family after a black fever epidemic struck; a maternal uncle took him in as a baby. He grew up with seven cousins, his uncle's sons. Of them, I'm told one joined a bank, one emigrated to the US as a scientist, and one joined the ICS. I don't know of the others.
The child who survived the epidemic, my great-grandfather, went on to become a doctor but after a case didn't go as planned, he retrained as a vet. He apparently enjoyed acting in Shakespeare's plays, and got his clothes from Calcutta; stray details which have somehow lingered on long after his death in 1936.
When he passed on, his son, the man who would become my grandfather, was completing a degree after having been released from jail; he had been imprisoned for his involvement in the freedom struggle. Upon receiving the news, he assumed responsibility for his mother and younger siblings, and began working as a civil servant in Shillong where he would spend the rest of his life.
My grandfather, who died about a decade before I was born, seems to have been a drama-free, principled person who treated duty to family and friends as fiduciary trust. My primary connection to him is through a paraphrase of Rabi Thakur's ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear’. My mum taught me the verse as he had once taught it to her. Sadly, the original written copy is long lost, and the exact words he used have faded from both her memory and mine.
Amongst my mum's favourite lines are a few she once found quoted in her autograph book: "I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty. Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? Toil on, sad heart, courageously, And thou shalt find thy dream to be, A noonday light and truth to thee.” From what she's said of her father, it's not hard to see why those lines resonated with her.
I sometimes wonder about the transition from prisoner arrested by night and transported to Gauhati along the Brahmaputra to civil servant in what was then the capital of undivided Assam. As far as I know, he never spoke of it or of what he endured in captivity.
Patriotism was lived rather than performed: his was forged in resistance to the Raj and later fulfilled through a lifetime of quiet public service.
A photo of Gandhi ji hung prominently in my mum's childhood home. I seem to recall her saying that the glass shattered the year her father died.
2. Tools of War, Tales of Resistance
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| Left: A page of the agreements pertaining to Abhoyjan; Right: An edited photo of my grandfather colourised and with paper damage removed. |
So many of our personal histories are inextricably bound to colonialism and the fight for independence. Yet, to hear mainstream historical accounts tell the tale, one might imagine that the soldiers on the Eastern Theatre of World War II were, by and large, white men relying on nothing but scythes and grit. That is only part of the story. It wasn't just white men fighting on those fronts, nor were they relying solely on their own devices. There is more to the tale, though anecdotes remain fragmentary and often private.
I had heard family lore of my maternal great-grandfather having refused a title from the British but it was only when my mother dredged up old childhood memories a few years ago that I learnt more of his interactions with the British. An encounter with a white man who wasn't pleased about his use of an umbrella somehow left him determined to become a tea planter, a dream he realised in 1928 with what was to become his first garden.
The antagonism notwithstanding, I'm told he helped the British during the war, amongst other things by providing them with the equipment needed to clear jungles on the Eastern Front, the very tools that had cut through jungles to set up tea estates. This was on the understanding that they'd leave after the war. They didn't leave, and he turned his attention to focus on the freedom struggle.
A few years later, in 1949, he gave his daughter Taru's hand in marriage to a civil servant who had spent time in a British prison for his participation in the freedom movement. They exchanged photos prior to the wedding as was the custom. Sadly, I don't have a copy of my grandmother's: she wore an Assamese mekhala sador with a Maharashtrian khun blouse, the photographer having been given instructions to take the photograph from an angle that would make her look taller than she was. My grandfather wore a suit; his was taken in Shillong, where he had worked since the 1930s. The couple were to become my maternal grandparents.
Patriotism comes in many forms, sometimes through complicated stories, and sometimes it runs in the blood.
3. Freedom Woven, Legacy Remembered
After her husband, and her father passed on within months of each other, my grandmother briefly took to weaving with her mother's loom.
On a visit to Shillong in 1998, I asked her if I could have whatever was left of the loom. She didn't even wait till the next morning. To my horror, late that night I found her outside in heavy rain, about to head down a flight of mossy stairs to bring me a few items she had salvaged. After I intercepted her, we went back indoors and talked; it was one of the few conversations we ever shared.
Her instinct to brave the downpour was rooted in tradition; Assamese homes often dedicated a room to weaving. Solace aside, the art supported women's financial autonomy, and that of the broader community in consequence. “Every woman of Assam is a born weaver. No Assamese girl who does not weave can expect to become a wife. And she weaves fairy tales in cloth. Some of the old patterns that our host Mr. Phooken showed me were of matchless beauty. And as I saw these beautiful patterns, I could not help shedding a silent tear over India’s past glory and her lost art,” Gandhi ji, who promoted traditional weaves and yarns across India, had written in the 1920s on a visit to the state.
By then, the trees necessary to make Assam’s distinctive muga silk had often been lost to land cleared for tea gardens. As for patterns becoming less intricate: that was a decline that would stretch across the next century and beyond. The designs of my own childhood are now not easily available, and colours have changed from the traditional pastels (which were used on paat silk) to include deeper hues to cater to markets outside Assam.
When we talked, my grandmother told me of a time when Assamese weaving was in the doldrums and expanding its colour palette had been a strategy to help revive it. Her father, who had part-owned a bank, had apparently pitched in to help at the time; that was how she knew the details, and why, I suspect, decades later, upon learning my mother's identity, there were shops where the most exquisite weaves would immediately be brought out.
My mum favours paat silk although much Assamese weaving is eri, a wild silk which thrived independently of colonial commerce during the Raj. It could be cultivated at home in bamboo trays and it was unsuitable for use on the then-new mechanised looms. So, it remained largely untouched.
My own fascination with weaving (an art which I have never mastered) came not from looms but from books. As a child, I repeatedly borrowed The Chronicles of Prydain from someone I used to know, by strange coincidence, a grandson of the Mr. Phooken whom Gandhi ji had mentioned in his notes. What kept bringing me back to the series was a description in them of three sisters weaving fates, an unending textile…
My world has now changed but, still, it is interesting to see the way in which memories of weaving tie in with tales of family and freedom, both personal and political, amongst the Assamese.
4. Echoes of Empire, Foundations of Freedom
To my mum, her grandfather was a gentle, hardworking soul who didn't complain about raucous singing and let her plait his hair with multi-hued ribbons. To most others, I suspect he wasn't quite that.
He ran several businesses including an 'elephant palace' in an era before cars were common. In fact, of the first three cars which came to Assam, one apparently went to him. I'm told he supported the war effort in the Eastern Theatre, and later contributed to help establish Gauhati University. Not just the man of my mother's memories, it would seem; I never met him.
I know him mainly through the lens of a contemporary of his, born in August 1908, who I did meet as a child: Dr Robin Banerjee who lived about a 10-minute walk away from my great-grandfather’s home.
Dr Banerjee's father had been a magistrate with a transferable job so he was sent to study at Tagore’s Santiniketan, later moving on to Calcutta Medical College and then to Liverpool and to Edinburgh. He joined the Royal Navy in 1937, and worked alongside the Red Cross when Europe’s camps were finally liberated at the end of WW II; I seem to recall mention of Bergen-Belsen. His fiancée died days before the war ended (in an explosion in Burma, I believe; the Eastern front), and he never married.
By the early 1950s, Dr Banerjee found himself in Assam, ultimately becoming a noted environmentalist. I understand he worked six months each year as a doctor in tea gardens, devoting the rest of the year to conservation and to rendering medical services without charge unless he was sure patients were financially comfortable.
Uncle Robin's living room was full of dolls pinned up on a wall from floor to ceiling; I had to crane my neck to see all the way up, and, naturally, I thought his collection was wonderful. What I remember most though was his kindness and his generosity. Kindness, he said, is sometimes all that stands against a person's losing faith in humanity.
Both he and my great-grandfather seem to have approached life from different vantage points: one a doctor turned conservationist-cum-filmmaker, the other a businessman. Both of them had also seen humanity fail in war and through Empire, and found common ground, working towards a different world in a free country.
My great-grandfather was the first president of the Golaghat chamber of commerce and apparently helped establish the foundations of eco-tourism in the area; Kaziranga is near the town. In time, the one-horned rhino was brought firmly into public consciousness, an endeavour supported by Uncle Robin's award-winning documentaries, and, decades later, a new weaving style where the rhino was prominent came to be developed.
The two of them, Robin Banerjee and Sarbananda Dowerah, my great-grandfather, seem to have been cut from much the same cloth despite their differences; men from a generation that put duty first and matched it with kindness. I was born too late to have ever known one but am grateful to have met the other.