Sometime in the 1850s, Ram Lochan Bandyopadhyay's small piece of farmland in East Bengal was swallowed up by the Padma river one raging monsoon. Starving and sick, he drifted down the swollen waterways till he managed to find a kindly landowner in the village of Paisagaon in Dhaka-Bikrampur district of what is today Bangladesh. It was determined that the bedraggled refugee's family occupation was the administration of rituals. The zamindar's village did not have too many priests, and he wanted to provide for some settled ones on his lands. So Ram Lochan got 10 bighas of land (about 500m x 500m, a quite considerable windfall, resented locally in ways that were to come out a generation later), tax-free (i.e. no revenue to be paid to the zamindar) on which he could raise a homestead, farm, and keep up a small temple to the resident deities of the village.) Ram Lochan raised a small hut of bamboo poles and coconut fibres, and settled down therein with his wife and young son.

By the time this son, Kailash Chandra Bandyopadhyay, was 6 years old, Ram Lochan passed away. Without someone to manage the fields or the gods, Ram Lochan's widow was reduced to spinning and selling measures of sacred thread (a monopoly granted to brahmin widows) to provide for her and her son. One thinks of scenes from Pather Panchali; on market days, she would trek to the local 'haat' to sell her thread for three-to-a-paisa, and with the proceeds buy cotton which was her raw material (apart from her spindle and her elbows.) Apart from this, she also developed a strategy to get subsidized food. The other priests  in the district would get rice and bananas as payment-in-kind for their services, often more than they could hope to reasonably consume.. Most householders would have these staples from their own fields, so there was not a local cash market for the base agricultural surplus. Ram Lochan's widow would wait by the creeks and rivulets as the pirogues were poled by, and pay a paisa or two in hard cash for the food the priests could not hope to consume, at some steep discount to the 'haat' price. My great-grandfather was thus raised on rice porridge with bananas.

One of the consequences of Ram Lochan's dislocation and untimely demise was that his son grew up with very little knowledge of his father's life. So the thread of generational memory was cut, we remember back upto Ram Lochan as a hazy picture reflected in the life of Kailash Chandra, but we do not know of about Ram Lochan's father, and grandfather, and great grandfather, except as ancestral names dutifully written and passed down.

Ram Lochan had passed on his love of books to little Kailash, who was easily the best student Pasiagaon had seen. At the time -- Bengal of East India Company just before the Sepoy Mutiny --students in 6th-grade appeared for Sanskritic scholarship examinations. Kailash excelled in these exams and secured a stipend, with which he learnt book-keeping, Persian jurisprudence (still applied in 'native' courts), and some degree of history. What he saw convinced him that the old order was dying, though he was not entirely able to come to terms with the new one. When William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society, went around in Bengal in the 1770s it is said that children ran after his palanquin begging to be admitted into his 'English' school; English education, as it diffused through Bengal, found fertile ground. Within a hundred years there were even girls schools that taught English in Dhaka-Bikrampur. When, in the 1890s, the first English school was indeed opened in the district town of Kamarkhara, Kailash Chandra was very particular about making sure that his eldest son Sharadindu was enrolled there.

Kailash Chandra first spent a few years in the early 1880s trying to be a mukhtar -- or native court attorney -- with the power, then, to argue criminal cases (which was to be restricted to civil ones after administrative reforms following the demise of Company Bahadur and the gradual establishment of formal jurisprudence under the Imperial Crown of Victoria .) This endeavor was unsuccessful, and he returned to his village and started a pathshala or village school under the crossroad trees. While fulfilling, this was not too lucrative. Eventually, he found a position with a neighboring zamindar family -- the Sanyals --  as a serestadaar or accounts clerk. He seems to have settled into this position for about 15 years, from around 1890 to 1905, during which period, every day for seven days a week, except for flood or festivals, he walked 6 miles each way across fields to the Sanyals' 'seresta' and kept accounts of their landholdings and commercial transactions. He seems to have saved prudently. Apart from this, he read ancient texts.

My grandfather Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, then, had the advantages of a philologist father, a liberal education, and what was then a family novelty, steady parental income. Early in his life, in 1905, Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal, the first of the death knells for the East Bengali Hindus. This was to cause a growing rift between my grandfather and his father. The young man wanted to move out of an area he felt was becoming politically untenable. The old man would respond saying that his father's and grandfather's funeral pyres were on the banks of the Padma, he could not countenance abandoning them to the Muslims of the district who were threatening to construct cow-slaughter abattoirs on all the Hindu funerary sites. "We shall stay and we shall fight, and we shall see what happens."


Around 1925, my grandfather moved to West Bengal and secured a position teaching Geography at the Railway School in Asansol. He instituted a subscription of National Geographic for the school, which enrolled sons and daughters of the employees of the Eastern Railway. For the children of track-layers, goods clerks, ticket-collectors and signalmen, the National Geographics must have been unbelievably foreign and an unspeakable luxury.

Those members of my grandfather's family who stayed behind -- brothers, uncles, in-laws -- perished in the riots following the partition into East Pakistan. My father, Samiran Bandyopadhyay, was born in Asansol in in 1934. He last visited Paisagaon in 1944 as a 10-year-old on summer vacation.

 

The historian will need to verify and validate. Rural India lacks birth certificates, marriage or death documents, so only some other sort of misfortune can generate an official record. In 1930, when my great-grandfather Kailash Chandra was in his 70s, his house in Paisagaon was attacked on Dec 18 by robbers who made away with Rs. 2145 in cash and (mostly) kind.

Constabulary were summoned. For months, the Sub-Inspector and his team who came across the river from Munshiganj would camp out in the courtyard of the ancestral house; soon, the burden of feeding them, answering their idiotic questions, running their errands, and keeping the young ladies of the household away from their lechery became so onerous that my great grandmother started feeling that the remedy was poorer than the affliction.

The needle of police suspicion centered on the swadeshis, who hitherto had robbed only the English merchants or those in close association with British power, but who were now beginning to go after softer targets. The perpetrators had covered their faces with rags, and seemed from their speech to be educated; the Sub-Inspector from Munshiganj therefore had no trouble applying his standard practice -- rounding up all the college-age young men from Paisagaon village or neighboring Tangibari, Vajrajogini, Bairak et al, and brutalizing them in custody till someone talked. This 'third degree' generated much ill-feeling towards my great-grandfather's household, and in any case the police-wallahs were eating them out of hearth and home; so a strategy was devised to take the entire family out for a pilgrimage -- my grandfather led the party and they were gone for many months in 1931, reaching as far away as Dwarka. One hears of witnesses having to move to the other end of the country for protection, this was a novel victim-protection-plan from rural Bengal.

However, the FIR did get my great-grandfather's name into the records, and you can see him mentioned in Appendix I of HW Hale's Political Trouble in India 1917-1937. This book is a curious compendium of Intelligence Bureau files on troublemakers in India. Its 1937 preface written by one J.M. Ewart, Director, Intelligence Bureau, states:

"In 1917 there was published, under the authority of the Home Department of the Government of India, a confidential publication entitled Political Trouble in India, 1907-1917, written by Mr. J.C. Ker of the Indian Civil Service, who had been Personal Assistant to the Director of Criminal Intelligence from 1907 to 1913. This book sets out to give a connected account of seditious and revolutionary activity in India between the years 1907 and 1917. The significance of the two dates deserves notice. The fact that the year 1907 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was an important factor in developing discontent, which was prevalent at the time on account of political and economic circumstances, in several parts of India, along channels of criminal and revolutionary activity. The year 1917 marked the close of a phase when a period of widespread politico-criminal conspiracies had culminated in the combination of those activities with enemy intrigue during the early years of the great war and the crushing of those activities for the time being through the machinery o [sic] special war time legal enactments. [...] Twenty years have passed, during which political agitation in India, both constitutional and criminal, has continued and developed to an extent and in a manner which could hardly have been visualized even by the writer of the review of events down to 1917. [...] The growth and development of Communism and cognate revolutionary activities in and affecting India has been dealt with in a series of publications compiled and issued from the Government of India, Intelligence Bureau. [...] The present book consists of a narrative, which I anticipate will be of considerable value to a fairly wide circle of readers interested in the administration of India, and of appendices which are intended to assist those, mainly police officers, whose duties require them to make a detailed study of the whole or portions of the past history of terrorism."

In discussing 'Terrorism' in Bengal the book says:

Another important group in Dacca was that led by Jiban Lal Chatterji. This group had planned with the main Jugantar Party a rising for the 23rd of June. On that night three persons were arrested in Narayanganj with wirecutting instruments, and on the same night telegraph wires were actually cut in two places in the Munshiganj Sub-division. Members of this group took part in a dacoity on December 18, when twenty bhadralok youths, armed with ramdaos attacked a house in Paisagaon and stole property to the value of Rs. 2145.

18th December 1930  ... Dacca, Bengal ... Properties worth Rs. 2,145 were carried away from the house of Kailash Chandra Banarji, of Paisagaon, Tangibari.

As a robbery it was a fairly large -- in the top 10 listed for the year all across India . The police records list an incident on 12th  October, when in Calcutta a 'dacoity with murder occurred at Armenian Street in the gadi of Manikchand Gopalchand, in which the culprits decamped with Rs. 2346'. A month later on 12th November, in Tangail, Rs. 15,000 was 'taken away from Jamadar and two durwans of Messrs. R. Sim and Co. of Elashin, while taking a cash remittance by road from Tangail to Company's Office'. With practice, the revolutionaries turned to easier prey . On 26th November we find Rs. 941  'carried away by dacoits from the house of Sarat Kumar Guha of Raghunathpur' in Barisal. The next day, in Jaraitola 'armed dacoity by some 16 bhadraloks looted cash and ornaments worth Rs 2,141' from another household. On 8th December, a bearer of the Intermediate College of Dacca was assaulted and his dak-bag robbed. On 12 January 1931, Rs. 22 was robbed from passengers at Nilganj Railway Station to help liberate the Motherland.

At a time when a school-master earned less than Rs 20 a month, the Rs 2145 loss would be nearly a decade's income. In contemporary terms, it is probably Rs 20 lakhs, or around half-a-million US dollars at PPP. It was a tremendous tragedy to befall the family. My grandmother gnashed her teeth against swadeshis to her dying day -- 'they were not revolutionaries, they were dacoits', she'd say of Ananta Singh and the Chittagong gangs  (whose exploits were being serialized in the Bengali features-magazine Amrita when I was small.) 'Give the student a gun, and that will rot him' was another of her insights into the logic of power. My poor grandmother, it must have seemed awful to her at time, especially since she gave herself a lot of the blame.

During the Pujas, my grandfather and grandmother had returned to Paisagaon from Asansol, as had other members of the extended family. In those days, the family gold was customarily buried anonymously under the floor of the house, digging a shaft 6 feet deep and dropping a pot with gold ornaments in it. When the robbers descended on the house with their ramdaos, my grandmother moved a mat over the location of the trove and sat down on it, with my infant Third Uncle Nirad Baran Banerjee in her lap. About 3 hours into the robbery, during which the perpetrators had destroyed almost everything looking for the cache, the leader came up and snatched Third Uncle away from grandmother: 'Tell us where the gold is or we will bash this child's head in', was the threat. My grandmother thought for a moment of misleading them -- how much longer would it take for neighbors to hear something and come to help? -- but a reflexive glance at the mat underneath her gave the game away. The robbers dug up the spot where she'd been sitting, and found what they were looking for -- the life savings of  Kailash Chandra. This is how my ancestors got into official historical records.

River, Robbers, and Riots -- that, my grandmother said, is your patrimony.

The Bandyopadhyay clan goes back a thousand years. Here is a link in this regard.