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SOCIETY – The diaspora men

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Newly arrived indentured labourers from India in Trinidad. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

In 1834, 36 impoverished men from Bihar and Bengal set sail for Mauritius to work as indentured labour. Over the next 80 years, more than two million people would travel to some 20 European colonies, the first of a global Indian diaspora, before indentured labour was abolished 100 years ago

When the British abolished slavery in 1834, they populated their plantations with indentured labour from India, launching the biggest international movement of workers after the notorious ‘middle passage’. In 80 years, more than two million Indian labourers were transported to about 20 British colonies before it was stopped in 1917 under intense pressure from Indian abolitionists. This year marks the centenary of the abolition of indentured labour.

Kalachand was on the verge of collapse when Champa, a fellow tribesman from the hills of Hazaribagh, came looking for him that fateful September evening in 1834. Champa too looked starved, but his eyes held a glint of excitement.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you since noon. Didn’t I tell you god is great? We are going to escape this wretched life,” he said.

Kalachand didn’t say a word in response. All he wanted was to eat something. He hadn’t had a proper meal for three days now.

Champa too, and many others, had not eaten the past few days, but he suddenly seemed to have found some energy. Standing on the slushy banks of the Hooghly, he pointed to the Kidderpore depot and said, “This will save us.”

All Kalachand could see was a long shed and some small sail-ships at a distance. “Are we going somewhere,” he asked. “Tapu,” said Champa.

“Come, let’s eat something, I am starving,” he said. “Money?” Kalachand asked. “Don’t worry, I have some,” he said. He didn’t tell Kalachand it was the same Ghulam Ali, who had promised road work in Calcutta for ₹5 a month, who was now promising a brighter future.

Back in his shanty in Howrah, Kalachand found Bachu, Chuniram, Budhu, Bhola, Chota Bandhu and other friends from Bihar, Burdwan and Bankura, preparing to leave. Champa had sold them the hope of a better life on a faraway island working in British-owned sugarcane plantations. They would have legal contracts, medical help, and plenty of money to save for the future. In five years, they could come back and start a new life.

New lives, new names

The next day, September 10, Kalachand and 35 others put their thumbprints on a paper for a contract with George Charles Arbuthnot of Hunter Arbuthnot & Company. It was read out to them by a magistrate at the Calcutta police headquarters. On the contract, their names were written in English exactly the way the white men pronounced them.

Kalachand became Callachand, Champa became Champah, Bachu became Bachoo, Chuniram became Chooneeram, and Chota Bandhu became Chota Bundhoo. Most of their names had “ee”, “oo” and “ah”. It would be repeated a few million times in the next 100 years, changing Indian names to strange-sounding new variations.

After a medical examination and a five-day wait in a barrack in Bhowanipore, the men were finally herded onto a boat on the Hooghly that took them to a medium-sized sail-ship called Atlas. They were led to the lower deck while the dock workers loaded a big cargo of rice. In a few hours, the ship was heading towards the Indian Ocean. Its destination: Mauritius, the once uninhabited island off the southeast coast of Africa, discovered by the Portuguese in the 14th century and colonised by the Dutch, the French, and finally the British.

The tiny land of forests and hills, originally occupied only by dodos, rats and locusts, now had a flourishing plantocracy that desperately needed cheap labour. The abolition of slavery that year was threatening the survival of the sugarcane plantations. The planters needed workers by the thousands or faced bankruptcy. The only source of cheap labour they could think of was India, poor, overpopulated, and with millions from oppressed castes.

For the 36 men cooped up in the Atlas, it was a desperate, uncertain voyage to escape poverty and oppression. What they didn’t realise was that they were making history by launching the biggest movement of labourers in the world after the ‘middle passage’, laying the foundation for a global Indian diaspora.

50 days later

Over the next eight decades, more than two million Indians would travel to about 20 European colonies. A large number would die in transit, many would return to India, but the majority would remain, building vibrant Indian communities and sometimes even changing forever the demographies and socio-cultural and political histories of the colonies.

After 48 arduous days at sea and two days aboard the ship just off the shore, Kalachand and the other men set foot in Port Louis and walked up 16 stone steps carved at the harbour before they were processed and sent to the sugarcane estates. In the following years, till the turn of the next century, about half a million more Indians would climb up this flight.

Those steps, like those at Ellis Island near Manhattan that millions of immigrants to America passed through, would go on to become an iconic symbol of the history of Mauritius, and the incredible story of indentured Indian labourers across the world.

Kalachand and the others were the uninformed first participants of a ‘Great Experiment’ that the British had come up with to substitute slave labour and safeguard their commercial interests. If slaves had been hunted down and sold to the British and other Europeans, the new scheme used a method called indenture, which in simple terms meant a written contract signed by a person to work for another person or company for a fixed tenure and sum of money.

Compared to “slave” labour, indenture was projected as “free” labour, even though the workers were bonded by contract for five years under harsh conditions. ‘Double-cut’, for instance, would dock two days’ pay for a day’s absence from work.

The workers could not easily move outside their estates. If caught without their ‘immigration ticket’, they were jailed for ‘vagrancy’. The colonisers wanted to appear morally right without losing profits, but what they had surreptitiously laid out was “a new system of slavery”, as Hugh Tinker would call it in his seminal book in 1974. (A New System of Slavery, Hugh Tinker, Oxford University Press, 1974)

They chose to stay

Although their contracts promised the workers a return passage to India after five years, a majority of them chose to stay back by obtaining a new indenture. Some did return to India, mostly empty-handed, but many went back with wives and children.

Following the Mauritian experiment, which in the next four years saw more than 24,000 Indians arriving in Port Louis (an average 500 people per month), ships carrying Indian ‘coolies’ from the ports of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay became a common maritime activity for the British.

Between 1838 and 1920, another half a million would go to the Caribbean islands and the Dutch-controlled Suriname (based on a convention on emigration signed between the governments of Netherlands and England in 1870.) By the turn of the 20th century, almost all the British colonies, from Sri Lanka to St. Kitts, had tens of thousands of Indian indentured labourers. A few thousand Indian men had been transported as slaves, lascars, artisans and labourers by European colonies during the slave-trade era, even before the ‘Great Experiment’. However, what makes the 1834 Atlas voyage historic and pioneering is that it was the first-ever lawful movement of indentured labourers in the world.

Although Kalachand and his 35 companions survived, many who arrived in subsequent trips, which had more people packed into small ships, didn’t. Infectious diseases, unsuitable food, and the stress of the journey killed them. Mortality often touched double figures.

But in the later years, with the introduction of faster ships, the mortality rates decreased even as the numbers of workers rose rapidly.

The early recruits endured slave-like working and living conditions, and many perished. The Mauritius Truth and Justice Commission in its 2011 report said: “The treatment meted out to the flow of Indian workers who came to Mauritius between 1834 and 1842 was very harsh. Their recruitment, transportation, housing and conditions of work left much to be desired. The condition of work was so appalling that the authorities decided to suspend further recruitment.”

Most of the early ones were tribal people (collectively called Dhangars) and from lower castes — they were the desperate ones who could be easily duped or even kidnapped. The same report shows the attitude of the planters towards the Dhangars: “They have no religion, no education, and, in their present state, no wants, beyond eating, drinking and sleeping; and to procure which, they are willing to labour.”

Tracing their footprints

Did Kalachand or any of the men who came with him die young? Probably yes, but they left no traceable footprints, melting into the sugarcane fields that seemed to have filled the entire island. With no women partners, they probably didn’t even leave any descendants. But some of the early ones did survive and lived long lives. Some, such as Harran, a Bihari from Calcutta, left a record of their life, including photographs, purely by chance. (Angaje, Volume 1, Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund, 2012.)

Harran reached Mauritius in December 1836, and did multiple indentures without ever going home. He rose through the ranks, finally becoming an overseer. He was booked for ‘vagrancy’ twice and was photographed by the Immigration Depot for the first time aged 76. His photo, available in the Indian Immigration Archives of Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius, shows a nattily dressed labour-hardened man with a white beard who looks to have done well for himself.

The stories of Harran and some others, available in the archives, throw light on the early migrants who survived the neo-slavery. The details of the later migrants, particularly those who came in the late 19th century, are well documented.

In the Caribbean islands, migrants fared better because they started travelling late. Munshi Rahman Khan, who became a sort of legend in Indian indenture history for his unique autobiography, was one such. (Autobiography of An Indian Indentured Labourer, Shipra Publications, India, 2005.) Hailing from a village in Hamirpur in the United Provinces, he was a schoolteacher. On a visit to watch the Ramlila in Kanpur, he was lured by the “sugary talk” of two agents into a job in Suriname as a sardar or supervisor at a salary of 12 annas or ₹24 a month, unheard of in India at the time.

He left Calcutta in 1898, finished his five-year indenture, but chose to stay on as an agriculturist while also working as a sardar in railroad construction. He got married and bought a plot near the capital of Paramaribo. By the time he migrated, the reforms in indenture laws and land ownership and the falling sugar prices gave him a different life experience. His memoir is a rich source of history.

Workers to owners

In 1870, the planters were forced by falling prices and labour shortage into land parcelling or grand morcellement — selling small plots on the fringes of their estates to labourers. Many labourers thus became small planters. By the 20th century, there were 40,000 Indian planters who accounted for about 30% of the estates. Their descendants went on to become prime ministers and presidents, ministers, writers, academicians, artists, and businessmen. Nearly 70% of Mauritians are of Indian origin, and they dominate the island’s politics. In Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname, Indians constitute 40%, 51% and 35%, respectively, of the population.

Where are the women?

Indenture history and literature is dominated by the stories of men. But the Mauritius Immigration Office records (1853) [New System of Slavery, Hug Tinker, p-70] show that a handful of women too travelled in the early years like Deeti in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. The very first woman immigrant to Mauritius, and possibly in indenture history, to be issued a number by the Mauritius immigration authorities was Rimoney from North Bihar in 1845. (Satyendra Peerthum, Le Mauricien, 3 November 2016) And what a story it is!

Rimoney, 30, was a widow with a 12-year-old son when she was recruited by an agent in Calcutta where she was struggling to make ends meet. She was literate and so got a job as shopkeeper in an estate while her son was enrolled as labourer. She worked for several years, and with her savings, bought some land to become a vegetable farmer who employed other immigrants and later expanded the business.

There were other women too who migrated under extraordinary situations despite the prevailing patriarchy in India. Gauitra Bahadur, an American journalist of Indian origin, explored the 1903 journey of her great-grandmother Sujaria from Majhi district in Bihar to Guiana, in the book Coolie Woman. Sujaria’s story is fascinating because she was single, pregnant and, above all, a Brahmin for whom crossing the seas was taboo.

By 1910, about 23% of the indentured Indians in Mauritius were women — sifting sugar, stirring the juice, maintaining the mills.

An imagined India

The most remarkable feature of the indenture phenomenon is the creation of a “coolie diaspora” more than a century before the present diaspora India prides itself on. Recruited mostly from the Bengal and Madras presidencies, and to some extent from the Bombay presidency, the labourers and their descendants preserved their culture and heritage in its original form and created an India of their imagination, from handed-down memories and later, from satellite TV and cinema. A poor Tamil woman selling flowers on a Durban street dreams of meeting Rajinikanth in his Chennai home. Women, including young urban girls, who’ve never seen India, wear salwar-kameez and bindis and perform Bharatanatyam.

Temples are prominent in the diaspora’s cultural heritage, whether in Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji or the Caribbean, and Shiva and Kali temples, and Amman, Subramanya and Venkateshwara temples dominate. Shivratri, Diwali, Thaipoosam and Kavadi are gala events, with some rituals likely to surprise even Indians for their adherence to detail.

In Mauritius, for instance, a huge crater-lake atop a secluded mountain has been made into their Ganga Talo, where they celebrate Shivratri with bells and incense and rituals, an astonishing recreation of a heritage that travelled with them when they left their homeland more than 100 years ago.

The 16 steps the emigrants climbed are now immortalised as the centrepiece of a Unesco World Heritage site called Aapravasi Ghat. The Ghat, the barracks and the immigration depot have been restored and converted into a living museum. In its cool interiors, exhibits and faces tell the story of the odyssey of generations of bonded labourers from a country more than 3,000 miles away, how they built a nation with their sweat and blood, and finally, how they owned it.

As Kalachand stood at the steps, Champa probably whispered to him that the tapu they had reached was Marich tapu, Mauritius, the centre of a new India they would soon build.

@pramodsarang is a journalist-turned-UN official-turned-online columnist who lives a semi-hermit life in Travancore and adores Sanjay Subrahmanyan.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society / by G. Pramod Kumar / October 28th, 2017

The House Where Nivedita Lived – Moumita Chaudhuri stops by at a forgotten address and tries to re-imagine a lost time

Leaders, Records, All

To all outward appearances, it is just another old house in north Calcutta – nondescript, ordinary. The same cannot be said about the address though: 16 A, Bosepara Lane of Bagbazar is the house where Sister Nivedita lived from 1898 to 1911, though few may be aware.

Inspired by her interactions with Swami Vivekananda, when the Irish social activist left her home in England for India, she was still Margaret Elizabeth Noble. It was in Calcutta in 1898, that she slipped into her Indian identity. This two-storey house was the most intimate witness of this spiritual metamorphosis. But all these years no one bothered about it.

This year being Nivedita’s 150th birth anniversary, the monastic and charitable organisation, Ramakrishna Sarada Mission, along with the Bengal government took on the task of renovating the house. Work is still on, but beginning October 23 – Nivedita’s birthday – the residence has been thrown open to the public for an indefinite but brief while. A full-fledged experiential museum is also in the works. But it will take time to ready it.

“It has taken us almost three years to renovate the house. It was in a precarious state when it was handed over to us – the windowpanes broken, the doors rotting, the rooms in a sorry state, the ceiling about to collapse,” says Pravrajika Aseshprana, the nun supervising the restoration project. She adds, “A lot of the original fittings have had to be thrown away. The wooden handrail of the stairs leading to the first floor, however, remains untouched. It has Sister’s touch on it.”

Upon arriving in Calcutta, Nivedita lived in one of the cottages in Belur in Howrah district, on the banks of the Hooghly. Vivekananda had had these built for some disciples from the West. The shift to Bosepara happened later.

BEYOND BRICK AND MORTAR: (From top) The renovated thakurdalan, the exact spot where the girls’ school was launched in 1898; restoration work underway at 16 A, Bosepara Lane.
Photographs by the writer

The physical shift was thought through by Vivekananda. It was in keeping with his larger world view about women’s education and nation-building and the role he thought Nivedita could play in this. In the 1956 book Sister Nivedita, Moni Bagchee writes: “It was to carry out this plan [provide for the nation efficient women in different spheres of life] that Nivedita was sent to Calcutta… Sarada Devi, the divine consort of Sri Ramakrishna, was then residing in Bagbazar with her community of ladies, mostly of devotional bent of mind. Swamiji wanted that Nivedita should live in company of these women…”

Nivedita was given a room in Sarada Devi’s house, but by her own admission, she couldn’t fit in. Bagchee quotes one of Nivedita’s letters from the time. “I imagined caste to be only a foolish prejudice – which must yield to knowledge – against some supposed uncleanliness of foreign habits and thus cheerfully assuming all the ignorance to be on her side, confidently forced myself upon this Indian lady’s hospitality.” Sensitive to the issue at hand, Vivekananda rented out for Nivedita a house in the same neighbourhood – 16 A, Bosepara Lane.

The second shift helped Nivedita bond better with Sarada Devi. It also helped her find her own equilibrium. In Sister Nivedita: The Dedicated by Uzelle Raymond, one comes across a description of the house by Nivedita herself. She writes: “My home is, in my eyes, charming. It is a rambling specimen of the true old Hindu style of building, with its courtyard a great well of coolness and, at night, a playground of merry breezes. Who would not love a house with such a courtyard, with its limited second story, and with its quaintly terraced roof built at five different levels? Here at dawn and sunset, or in the moonlight, one can feel alone with the whole universe .”

As one moves from the hall to the courtyard, and up the flight of stairs to the corner room on the first floor, one cannot help but imagine Nivedita inhabiting this space. Raymond’s book had described a “personal workroom” furnished with two large tables of white wood, a chair, a stool and a bookshelf laden with her Bible studies, Bowden’s The Imitation of Buddha, the Discourses of Epictetus, selections from Renan, biographies, a wide assortment of Emerson, Thoreau, Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Saladin. Raymond wrote: “On the wall hung her ivory crucifix and a single picture: the Annunciation, with the Virgin holding the broken lilies in her arms.” One wonders, was it here, or here, or there?

Nobody, of course, can say for sure which space was used for what. “We have had to guess and imagine from the descriptions we find in her books,” says Aseshprana.

The thing that leaps to the eye upon entering the house is the high-ceilinged thakurdalan to the right. Restoration work on this portion is complete. The walls are a lovely burnt orange, the floor gleaming with red tiles, wooden skirting in place with brackets for lights… This is the spot from where Nivedita launched a school for girls one Kali Puja day in 1898. It has now shifted to another address in the neighbourhood. Here she taught them – wives and child widows from orthodox, middle-class Hindu families – lessons in the arts and sciences. Deeply involved with India’s freedom struggle, she had designed a national flag. She taught her students to stitch the design on fine Murshidabad silk.

After the partition of Bengal in 1905, this house became the seat of many political and intellectual meetings. To the left of the entrance is the baithak khana, or parlour equivalent. Debanjan Sengupta, who is a Nivedita expert, tells The Telegraph that this is where the famous chaa paaner aashor or tea party happened. “This is where Rabindranatha Tagore and Vivekananda, Surendranath Banerjee, Sarala Devi, Balaram Bose and others met. This is where Swamiji discussed how to motivate people to embrace Hinduism once again, people who joined the Bramho Samaj.”

Nivedita had an intimate knowledge of armed struggle from her life in Ireland. She was aware of techniques of manufacturing explosives and the power of the Press. Alongside being a centre of women’s education and a den of Bengal’s intelligentsia, 16 A, Bosepara Lane became a repository of all these experiences too, and she drew on these to power the fight for freedom. From this house too was conceived, under her supervision, Jugantar, the first Bengali daily newspaper. This is where she brainstormed with freedom fighters. Writes Bagchee: “…during this time it [the house] was a volcano. It was from this tiny lane that Sister Nivedita planned and conducted the armed struggle like an experienced general…”

The project concerns the house, but the truth is, this entire lane is steeped in history – Nivedita’s and Bengal’s own – though few care to know. History needs makeovers from time to time to re-establish itself. So does, in a manner of speaking, herstory.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Moumita Chaudhrai / October 30th, 2017

Records broken on and off field at Salt Lake stadium

Records, All, Sports

Kolkata :

A record crowd at the Salt Lake stadium witnessed a record number of goals on Saturday. India took over as the most attended Fifa Under-17 World Cup venue ever, even as it witnessed 183 goals in the tournament, seven of which came in the final match between England and Spain, the highest ever in the history of a final in the tournament.

The stadium was packed to capacity on Saturday.

The stadium clocked an attendance of 66,684, just three short of the most that could be accommodated by the stadium. The players too acknowledged the support that the crowd showed. The tournament’s highest goal scorer, Rhian Brewster, wrapped the English flag around him and bowed to the spectators with folded hands after the end of the match.

As the final ended, the total number of spectators who turned up at the six host venues across the country stood at 13,47,143, beating the previous best of 12,31,000 recorded in the very first edition of the tournament in China in 1985. With two goals in the Brazil-Mali match and seven goals in the final, the tally of the tournament stood at 183 — 11 more than what was scored in the 2013 edition of the tournament in UAE. The final match tally of seven goals was also the highest, beating the previous record of five goals between Brazil and Ghana in 1997.

“This was like a dream come true. What a match and what an ambiance at the stadium. I am so glad that we could manage to get tickets to the game,” said Priyanka Agarwal, a banker who came for the match with her husband and son.

So enthralled was the crowd that almost none left even after England won the match 5-2. They stayed back for the next 30 minutes for the presentation ceremony where awards of Golden Boot, Golden Ball, Golden Gloves and the all important cup was handed over to the winners in the presence of chief minister Mamata Banerjee and India captain Sunil Chhetri.

While 56,432 spectators had come in for the first match between Brazil and Mali, the count shot up immediately at the start of the second and final match. Among the several noted expats, director of Mali Football Association Cheickna Demba was the toast of the crowd as he ran about along the stands, shouting “Mali! Mali!” to drum up support for the African players. The spectators, though largely Brazil supporters, were soon chanting in tune with Demba. Though the team lost 2-0 to Brazil, the Mali fan club won the hearts of Kolkatans in the stands.

Saturday had a different mix of spectators compared to other days — there were a lot of first-timers. Many were not even football fans, but were at the stadium to enjoy the essence of witnessing a mega sporting event . “We have never been to a stadium before. The atmosphere out here is just crazy. The stadium has made me a fan of the game and I will come back again,” said Army Hospital oncologist Shweta Sharma.

While Brazil garnered more support from the fans in the first match, the crowd support was evenly distributed between England and Spain in the final match. But as England ultimately won the game 5-2, the entire stadium started cheering for the team. “England are the new home team for Kolkata. This was their sixth match in Kolkata and I have seen them win all of them from difficult situations. Today they were at their best,” said Debabrata Mukherjee, a Spain fan who swears by Barcelona, but admitted to have ended up cheering for the English team on Saturday.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Kolkata News / by Dwaipayan Ghosh and Tamaghna Banerjee / TNN / October 29th, 2017

The Calcutta Chromosome

About Kolkata / West Bengal, Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Records, All, Travel

An empathetic look at a heartbreaking city

The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta Kushanava Choudhury (Bloomsbury Circus 241 pages; Rs 499)

Calcutta is personal. And the front flap blurb contains all the trigger words: immigrant, Princeton, British Raj, mosquitoes, hawkers, fish-sellers. Would this be another book balancing nostalgia with wide-eyed wonder? Or would it hit the road running in one more case of parachute authoring? Or, worse, would it be a supercilious outsider’s take on a city that is easy to love, easy to hate, but hard to know?

Calcutta, that most storied of cities, has been subjected to all kinds, right from Geoffrey Moorhouse’s 1971 work to Amit Chaudhuri’s Two Years in the City (2013). In recent years, it has been best served by Strangely Beloved: Writings on Calcutta (2014), a compilation of essays and excerpts that, by virtue of its format, held up special-interest mirrors to facets of the city, from the Eastern Calcutta wetlands to the soundscape that birthed India’s first rock band. The flipside is the academic undertone that robs the city of some of its joy, and the nostalgia shoehorn that depletes some immediacy.

Superficially, The Epic City has none of those problems: Kushanava Choudhury spent some of his childhood years in Calcutta and then comes back to work in the city as a reporter at The Statesman (peeve: the article is part of the masthead, so why lose it?) at the turn of the millennium as a fresh Ivy League graduate. “Like the revolutionaries of my parents’ generation, I wanted to change things…My best hope for making a difference was to work at a newspaper.” To translate those efforts to “make a difference” into a book would be a straight card into disaster zone. Where Choudhury scores emphatically is in twinning his heart, mind and soul — his own story — with the city’s to forge a work that is as gritty as the Beleghata canals, as wondrous as Kumortuli, as determinative as the Partition.

Groomed in the shoe-leather reporting The Statesman was once renowned for (the newspaper’s decline is an obvious parallel for the city), Choudhury lends depth to his observations with lightly worn erudition to produce one of the most readable accounts of a world city. Casual chats with relations, friends, colleagues merge seamlessly with purposeful conversations with trade unionists, little magazine archivists, impoverished scions of Calcutta’s oldest families, descendents of refugees, small publishers, idol sculptors. Underlying it all is an understanding of cultural crosscurrents — Satyajit Ray, of course, but more (and more powerfully) Ritwik Ghatak, Michael Madhusudan Dutt but also Mujtaba Ali — and an instinctive sense of history that burrows into unarticulated spaces, uncomfortable silences.

Cleverly constructed and utterly relevant as each of the 14 chapters of the book is in conveying Choudhury’s clear-eyed vision of the city, two, in my mind stand out. In ‘College Street’, the essay that opens the core section, the author uses a favourite trope for all city chroniclers to eviscerate one of its most fondly held myths: Of Calcutta as a centre of learning. Traipsing through the portals of little magazines and past “rainwater and dog shit” of university avenue, Choudhury trains his guns on the “notes business”, which finesses the education system to ensure intellectual stagnation more effectively than the much-reviled brain drain ever could.

The mood of The Epic City grows darker as it investigates the methodical de-industrialisation of Calcutta — the old factories in the southern reaches memorialised only as bus-stops such as Bengal Lamp and Usha — the rarely acknowledged Hindu-Muslim divide (including at The Statesman, as cosmopolitan as the city likes to think itself to be) and, in ‘Russian Dolls’, it culminates in a familial account of the run-up to Partition and its aftermath.

Weaving together the devastating sequence of the World War II in Europe, the Churchill-directed Bengal famine, the consequences of Direct Action Day with his own grandparents’ displacement from East Pakistan and pitching forward to the rise of the Communists and the Naxal rebellion to his father’s decision to migrate, Choudhury creates a stunning, tight fabric of continuum. Always empathetic, mostly sharp and frequently insightful, this is a heart-full work on a heartbreaking city, notwithstanding the gaping hole of the post-2011 Mamata Banerjee years. While it might even impress the resident Calcuttan, it is definitely recommended for anyone else ever touched by the city.

Sumana Mukherjee is a writer in Bengaluru

source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Lifestyle> Books / by Sumana Mukherjee / October 07th, 2017

Skin cancer hope from Calcutta-born biologist

NRI's / PIO's, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion
Aishwarya Kundu

New Delhi:

Cancer biologist Aishwarya Kundu has chemically tweaked a natural compound found in broccoli, cabbages and cauliflowers to design a novel molecule that shows promise as a treatment for skin cancer resistant to standard therapy.

The California-based researcher and her colleagues have shown through laboratory studies that their designer compound is about 20 times more potent in killing skin cancer cells than the parent compound extracted from the vegetables: indole-3 carbinol (I3C).

Scientists have known for nearly 30 years that broccoli and the other so-called cruciferous vegetables contain I3C, which has anti-cancer properties. Several research teams working independently have since the late 1980s shown that I3C suppresses breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer and leukaemia cells grown in laboratory petri dishes.

The compound, packaged into tablets, has even been sold as a “health supplement”.

“But the exact way it works in different kinds of cancers is not known. Nor are its direct targets known, without which a compound cannot be given the status of a drug,” said Kundu, who was born in Calcutta and studied at Calcutta Girls’ High School before moving to Manipal and then to the US for higher studies.

Kundu’s research at the University of California, Berkeley, is the first to establish that I3C can block two specific biological pathways -BRAF and PTEN – that drive the growth of skin cancer. While the current drugs against skin cancer target the BRAF pathway, I3C promises a second alternative route of attack.

The researchers have added a chemical structure to the I3C compound to create a novel molecule that shows the same anti-cancer effect at a concentration 20 times lower than the parent compound.

“This is a specially valuable aspect that the drug industry looks for – compounds that are effective at very low concentrations,” Kundu told The Telegraph over the phone. The novel molecule also blocks a third biological pathway: Wnt.

Skin cancer cells use the Wnt pathway as an “escape route” to develop resistance to the standard drugs. Most of these drugs target the BRAF pathway, which is the primary “driver” in 70 per cent of skin cancer patients.

“Since our novel compound blocks the Wnt escape route, we hope it will be more effective than BRAF blockers alone. It can be used in combination with BRAF blockers to curb the risk of resistance,” Kundu said.

“It may also hold out hope for the 30 per cent of patients who don’t carry the BRAF mutation in their tumours and, currently, have limited treatment options. This market alone runs into billions of dollars.”

The California researchers’ studies show that both I3C and the new compound can independently shrink skin tumours in mice. Kundu and her colleagues are now hoping to conduct the required animal studies before the new molecule can be assessed in human clinical trials.

If all goes well, Kundu speculates, human trials could start within two years.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> India / by G.S.Mudur / October 27th, 2017

‘Girija Devi’s demise an irreparable loss to Banaras Gharana’

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Leaders, Records, All
Even at 88 her scintillating voice could leave the audience spell bound

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Highlights

Girija Devi, fondly known as Appa ji, passed away in a hospital in Kolkata on Tuesday evening. She was 88.

She worked as a faculty member of the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata in the 1980s and of the Banaras Hindu University during the early 1990s

She was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2016
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Varanasi :

Demise of great vocalist and Thumri queen Girija Devi came as a big shocker to the music lovers of Varanasi, the birth place of the eminent singer. Girija Devi, fondly known as Appa ji, passed away in a hospital in Kolkata on Tuesday evening. She was 88.

“It is an irreparable loss to Indian music and Banaras Gharana of music. She was a guiding figure for us,” said noted Sarod player and Yash Bharati recipient Pt. Vikash Maharaj. “She was ailing for some time, and admitted to BM Birla Hospital in Kolkata in the morning. She left for the heavenly abode in the evening,” he said adding that she had been living in Kolkata with her daughter.

“No one can fill the gap. Even at 88 her scintillating voice could leave the audience spell bound. She was perhaps the last exponent of thumri, tappa, chaiti and khayal. I heard her singing in an award ceremony in New Delhi on August 27,” said Ashok Kapoor, founder of a cultural organization Kala Prakash working for the cause of Indian music.

Though settled in Kolkata, she regularly visited Varanasi. She was born in Varanasi in 1929. She took lessons in singing khayal and tappa from vocalist Sarju Prasad Misra in early childhood. She worked as a faculty member of the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata in the 1980s and of the Banaras Hindu University during the early 1990s. She was a prominent performer of purabi ang thumri style of Banaras gharana. She was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2016.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> India News / by Binay Singh / TNN / October 25th, 2017

Kolkata: A peek into Parsi tradition and culture at 4-day expo

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Records, All

Kolkata :

If you’ve always wondered what lies beyond the closely guarded boundary walls of a Parsi fire temple, especially because tradition has it that a non-Parsi is not allowed inside, your curiosity is going to be satisfied. A Parsi agyari (fire temple), as it is called by the community, will be re-created as part of a special four-day exhibition that the community in the city is organising to explain its history, traditions, lore and culture.

The exhibition, Threads of Continuity, is being organized between October 26 and 29 by The Calcutta Zoroastrian Community’s Religious and Charity Fund (a trust) – as part of its 150 years celebrations – in association with Parzor, a Delhi-based foundation that has been working with the support of the Unesco for the revival of Parsi culture and heritage. It’s being held at Olpadvala Memorial Hall.

There are about 650 Parsis in the city, a number that has dwindled from 2500 three decades ago. While on one hand the community rues that there has been a steady brain drain of Parsis from the city – thanks to the lack of business and career opportunities here – on the other, both the Parsi Club and the trust have tried to keep the community bonding strong by organizing cultural activities throughout the year. “But, we need to know more about our history that goes back to ancient Persia and the time when we as Zorastrians came under attack from the Muslim invaders/rulers of Persia. Facing persecution, we fled and reached the shores of Diu from where we entered Gujarat and chose to settle there after we were given shelter by the king…” said Cyrus Madan, a trustee.

“Most people do not know why non-Parsis are not allowed inside the fire temple, for that matter, many don’t know that we are not worshippers of fire. It’s just a medium through which we reach the God. We just want to de-mystify everything,” said Trista Madan, who is co-ordinating with Parzor.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Kolkata News / by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey / TNN / October 23rd, 2017

Malaria App

NRI's / PIO's, Records, All, Science & Technology, World Opinion

Two aspiring engineers have developed an app-based system to detect malaria in a blood sample in less than a minute.

The detection involves a multi-step process that starts with the collection of a person’s blood sample. The slide containing the blood sample has to be inserted into a foldscope – a small microscope made of folded paper and a microlens.

The foldscope was developed by Manu Prakash, who teaches bioengineering at Stanford University.

Prakash’s lab sent two prototypes to the Calcutta researchers. The foldscope then has to be fitted to a smartphone, whose camera helps magnify the sample. The magnified image is then transported to a server, where using an algorithm, malaria parasites, if any, are detected in less than a minute. The diagnosis is relayed back to the phone user and the findings archived.

Nilanjan Daw and Debapriya Paul, BTech final-year students of computer science and engineering at the Institute of Engineering and Management (IEM), Salt Lake, developed the system with the help of their teacher Nilanjana Dutta Roy and IIEST professor Arindam Biswas.

Picture by Anup Bhattacharya

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / Thursday – October 19th, 2017

Kolkata set with world class facilities for U17 World Cup

Records, All, Sports, World Opinion

Kolkata:

The stage is set for the 66,000-capacity Vivekananda Yuva Bharati Krirangan in Salt Lake to host 10 matches of the Fifa Under 17 World Cup in the city. The event kicks off in Kolkata with two matches on Sunday— the first between England and Chile and the second between Iraq and Mexico.

DGP Surajit Kar Purkayastha visited the stadium on Saturday afternoon along with senior officials to take a stock of the security, parking and other arrangements to ensure a hassle-free experience for spectators, including the foreigners who will turn up to witness the matches. Tickets for the matches on Sunday have already been sold out.

“The security inside and outside the stadium is perfectly in place and everything has been done in close coordination with Kolkata Police. There will be directional signs and a good number of police assistance booths for the spectators. All the departments under the state government have worked hand in hand to ensure the best of facilities inside and outside the stadium for the spectators,” Kar Purkayastha said.

Commissioner of Bidhannagar City Police Gyanwant Singh had said a few days back that the police have chalked out a detailed evacuation plan through which the entire stadium full to its capacity can be evacuated in eight minutes in case of any emergency. “We don’t want to take any risk in view of the global situation. So we have prepared for all crisis situations. The emergency evacuation plan we have formulated will ensure there is no stampede.”

Spectators would not be allowed to carry anything apart from their mobile phones while women could additionally carry a purse, but after it is checked.Water bottles, newspapers, bags, helmets or containers of any kind, including aerosol cans and spray, will not be allowed.

A total of 3,000 cops — including 35 officers of SP and ASP rank and 60 lower ranked officers — would be on duty. No goods vehicles will be allowed to ply from 7 am to 11.30 pm in the roads, lanes and areas under Kolkata airport, Baguihati, Lake Town, New Town, Rajarhat and the entire Bidhannagar area.

The doors of the stadium would be opened two hours prior to the start of the day’s first match and all spectators will be frisked. Tickets would also be scanned. There will be 110 door frame metal detectors as checking points, with 260 closed circuit TVs deployed at all nook and corner of the stadium to keep vigil.

There will be adequate parking arrangements and everybody is requested to park at the designated parking area. Bidhannagar City Police has provided a link in its website putting the details of the parking & traffic circulation plan along with do’s and don’t’s for facilitating the spectators.

source: http://www.millenniumpost.in / Millennium Post / Home> Kolkata / by Soumitra Nandi / October 07th, 2017

The touch of civility – Jeremy Raisman’s career in India

Historical Links / Pre-Independence, Records, All, World Opinion
Peterhoff, in Simla, where Jeremy Raisman stayed in India

Jeremy Raisman is not a name many recognize in India or Britain. But while a few British Jews might take pride in his achievements in the Indian Civil Service, the few Indians who know he presented five wartime budgets as finance member of the viceroy’s council may not remember him with affection.

He comes to mind because the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea library has mounted a display of Indian books to commemorate what the British now call “Partition”. A leading Queen’s Counsel who wonders if India’s judiciary maintains the same high standard as when Soli Sorabjee was attorney-general asks what I think of Partition. So does a benign peer who campaigns against caste discrimination among subcontinental immigrants in Britain. Also a revered academic who has authored erudite tomes on India and Pakistan. I stress the commemoration is of Independence, but Partition is what the avalanche of television talks and discussions calls it. TV imposes its thinking and terminology even on the learned and discerning. It prefers Partition. Why?

A journalist I first encountered during the staged drama of “Mujibnagar” offered a typically English explanation. “‘Partition’ makes us feel guilty,” he said. “We love that!” He finds the endless televised interviews with Hindus and Muslims who had lost all, especially their closest relatives, in the great upheavals of 1947 tiresome. “The one question they never ask is ‘So many of your relatives were killed but did you kill anyone?'” He says Saudi Arabia promised the infant Bangladesh a billion dollars or more to call itself an “Islamic republic”. Mujib refused. Now he fears India is on the brink of betraying the dream of its founding fathers and turning into a rabid Hindusthan.

The books displayed – Nehru’s letters, Gandhi’s thoughts, Mountbatten, Jinnah and even a tattered biography of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad – celebrate the empire’s guilty conscience. It would have been too much to expect The Undark Sky, subtitled “A Story of Four Poor Brothers”, by Jeremy’s nephew, Geoffrey Raisman, among them. India isn’t its main theme. Geoffrey was – I have just discovered he died in January – a distinguished neuroscientist who made it his mission to find a cure for paralysis caused by spinal chord injury. We met many years ago at a formal dinner at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was then working on The Undark Sky and later sent me a copy. He told me how his grandparents had fled Lithuania and settled down in a Leeds slum called Leylands. They were tailors with 11 children. Jeremy, born in 1892, was the third and most successful. John came fifth. Harry, Geoffrey’s father, was the sixth.

The family had never seen chocolate biscuits or butter and jam on bread until Jeremy won a scholarship to Oxford. Visiting Blenheim, the Duke of Marlborough’s grand palace that was Churchill’s ancestral home, Harry Raisman echoed another more famous Jew. “The history of England,” he declared, “the history of any country, is nothing more than an account of the bitter, continuous struggle of the common people against their rulers, the kings and queens, the dukes, barons, earls…” It isn’t for that radical explosion that The Undark Sky came to mind at the Kensington library’s exhibition but because of Jeremy Raisman’s Indian career. The boy who had once pointed to an elegant country house in Yorkshire and said “One day I’ll have a house like that” lived in Peterhoff, a Simla mansion burned down in 1981, whose ballroom could take two hundred dancing couples. It’s a house I went to see once for my mother had spent holidays there as a child when her uncle, S.R. Das, lived in it as law member.

J.R.D. Tata visited Peterhoff and beat everyone at ping-pong. Raisman backed Tata’s steel production. He also helped to conserve India’s sterling reserves. They amounted to a handsome £1,300 million or Rs 1,733 crore at the prevailing exchange rate, being mostly money an impoverished Britain, which had “to spend vast sums buying equipment from America… to sustain the war”, owed India. Churchill’s government expected India to pay even more for the war effort than the Indo-British agreement on sharing expenses stipulated. Some in London, including Maynard Keynes, wanted Britain’s debt reduced or cancelled. As India’s effective finance minister, Raisman objected to both. He wanted the agreement adhered to, and told the war cabinet in London on August 6, 1942 that being a belligerent “had already caused a heavy increase in India’s own expenditure”. It could not accept a larger defence liability. But his testimony was kept secret because it might set a precedent. Churchill didn’t want any Indian who succeeded Raisman “to claim the right to attend the war cabinet”.

Perhaps not so surprisingly in that pre-Islamist age when the Jew in question had cast himself in an imperial English mould, Sir Jeremy’s sympathies, personal and political, were with Muslim potentates like the Nizam, and the Nawabs of Bhopal and Chhatari. He didn’t like Gandhi. When he offered not to jail Gandhi in return for tacit cooperation and Gandhi replied he had to stick to his principles, Raisman grunted “Principles! With the bodyguards we provide to protect him, it costs the government of India millions to keep one man in poverty.” The Aga Khan’s palace wasn’t much of a prison!

Gandhi cropped up many years later when Mountbatten told Jeremy at a lunch in London, “In my opinion you were responsible for the death of Gandhi.” Asked why he thought that, Mountbatten replied Nehru had told him so. Raisman explained to Geoffrey, Harry and John, “After independence and the partition of the country, there was a financial crisis. The Reserve Bank of India was holding all the gold and currency reserves. The new Reserve Bank of Pakistan appealed to the British Government to intercede for them. I was asked to go out and advise. I refused, but in the end they insisted, and I agreed to go out, but only on the condition that I would give advice, but I would not enter into any discussion. I would give my opinion and that was that.” He advised that the gold reserves should be shared between India and Pakistan. “It was only fair. Both countries had paid taxes. They were entitled to it. Without reserves, the national banks couldn’t function. It was only common justice.”

According to Mountbatten, Nehru refused. “What!” he exclaimed “Give them the money! They’ll only use it to buy arms to murder our people with.” Hence the appeal to Gandhi. “Gandhi’s influence was tremendous. People worshiped him like a god. Well, Gandhi at once backed my decision. He agreed it was only natural justice, and with that, of course, it was agreed to transfer the gold and currency reserves. They included the sterling balances I had fought so hard for at the war cabinet…”

Jeremy had called on Nehru on the morning of Gandhi’s assassination. Nehru told him, “You know the old man’s being very difficult and causing me a lot of worry because there’s a lot of opposition building up to him.” Raisman went on, “That very afternoon, Gandhi went out as usual, to pray in public… One of his fanatical followers just walked right up to him with a revolver and shot him dead at point blank range.”

Sir Jeremy sat back. John, fumbling with his pipe, remained silent. “Let’s have tea,” said Harry, playing the host. The Jewish refugees from Lithuania had become almost English. Almost but not quite. Unlike the English, they rejected any share of the blame. “Of course I told Mountbatten that I didn’t agree I was responsible” was Sir Jeremy Raisman’s disclaimer. He probably remembered 1947 as the year of Partition more than Independence, but with none of the English sense of guilt for the bloodshed.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Front Page> Opinion> Story / by Sunanda K Datta-Ray / Saturday, October 07th, 2017