Past imperfect: From the tea plantations of Assam, a memoir of life towards 1971

Sips from a Broken Teacup by Raihana Hasan launched by Silent Reed.

KARACHI:

At the start of 1962, a woman made her way from Karachi to a tea plantation called Allynugger in Sylhet where she would start a new life among planters who “toil[ed] in the jungle far from civilisation to provide the civilised with their cheering beverage”.

Raihana A Hasan was to join her husband, Ashhad Hasan, at the estate where he worked as an assistant manager. What has emerged, nearly four decades later, is a memoir of those days in the bungalow infested with lizards and mosquitoes as big as bumblebees.

‘Sips from a Broken Teacup: Sketches from Life on an Assamese Tea Plantation’ is a memoir that embraces the decade which she spent in the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) till May of 1971. “This isn’t just a book,” said Hasan at the launch hosted by the Silent Reed on Monday. “It was like giving birth to child and for that I had to remain in gestation for 40 years.”

The book is written through the eyes of a tea planter’s wife and takes the reader to the remote world of East Pakistan’s tea plantations that started flourishing after the 1860s. In particular, Hasan has recorded the vicissitudes of those brave and often eccentric men and women who inhabited those estates during the mindless bloodlust that tore Pakistan in two in 1971.

Some time after the couple arrived in Allynugger, they were invited to dinner by a Bengali friend. During the course of the evening the electricity went out and the guests got a taste of their host’s resentment. “Our friend said that spending on infrastructure [here] was nothing compared to the revenues generated by the export of Bengali jute and tea,” she recalled.

For Hasan, who was completely apolitical then, it was an eye-opening encounter. “For the first time, I received the idea that Bengalis feel exploited at the hands of the government,” she explained.

During the war with India in 1965, Hasan saw Bengalis passionately supporting and defending Pakistan. However, this was undercut by panic of an imminent Indian attack at the rather defenseless East wing. “Many people went on to bluntly say that the government was defending the West wing at the cost of Purbo [East] Pakistan,” said Hasan.

Then, in the wake of the Bhola cyclone in which around half a million people perished in the East Pakistan, the gap widened due to the sheer mishandling of the relief work. This exacerbated the bitterness, which manifested itself in a landslide victory for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League in the national elections in December 1970.

By February 1971, Hasan had reached the point where she found herself asking, “Did the Bengalis regard us now as we had once regarded the British colonials?”

Revenge surely had to follow in the footsteps of the involvement of West Pakistan troops. “Our [Mukti Bahini] soldiers will cut them to pieces,” she recorded a Bengali colleague as prophesising. “They will gouge out their eyes and pour red chilies into their sockets. We will exact a terrible revenge for what the federal army has done to our people, I promise you.” Hasan describes the circumstances under which they were forced to flee, the arrests, the killings of non-Bengalis, the repeated visits by the Awami League and the Mukti Bahini and the last-minute rescues by Bengali colleagues. “As a Bengali woman, I ask your pardon for what my people are doing to yours. Don’t hate us for this, I beg you. We were not always like this,” Hasan quoted a Bengali woman named Iram, who saved their lives at one point.

In April 1971, Mukti Bahini dragged over two dozen non-Bengalis from their homes in the south of Chandpore, lined them up in a clearing outside the town and mowed them down with machine guns. “In recent weeks there had been examples of man at his lowest level of abasement. But the savagery had been tempered by the deeds of a few men and women of conscience and compassion,” wrote Hasan. The newspapers, on the other hand, were focused on defenceless Bengalis being slaughtered by West Pakistani troops.

A few of the characters in Hasan’s book came to attend the launch. Among them was Naheed Siddiqui, who is introduced in the book queued up against the wall with the families of non-Bengali tea planters. They were to be shot by the Mukti Bahini. “Maarte ho tou maaro…,” she bellowed at them. If you want to kill us, then do it. Fortunately they were spared when an influential Bengali persuaded the Mukti Bahini to let them go. They were all taken across the border to India and jailed in Agartala.

Thus emerges a “powerful politico-historical narrative”, which is how the book was described by a guest at the event, Dr Ishrat Lindblad, who lectures at Stockholm University. Indeed, for Lindblad it was almost misleading to use the word ‘sketches’ in the title because of the depth of the content. “Hasan has structured the book on the pattern of classic Greek tragedy,” said Dr Lindblad, adding that the reader would find all the five essentials – prologue, build-up, climax, reversal and epilogue – perfectly intertwined.

For Hasan, nobody is a hero and nobody is a villain in the book. “But I must say that the atrocities perpetrated by the Mukti Bahini were no less. What they did, even Pakistan’s army didn’t go to that extent.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2011.