Bangladesh remembers pen-wielding Liberation warrior

KOLKATA: Sunil Gangopadhyay's death on Tuesday went unreported in newspapers in Kolkata, thanks to the 'Puja vacation' virtually imposed on the print media, but in Bangladesh, it made front page headlines in nearly every daily.
According to noted Bangladeshi author Belal Chaudhuri, a long-time friend of the Jnanpith recipient, even newspapers with an extreme-right philosophy covered Gangopadhyay's death.Chaudhuri, who attended a condolence meeting in Kolkata on Friday evening, brought nearly 30 newspapers from his country and handed them to Gangopadhyay's secretary.
"There was widespread grief in Bangladesh when people came to know that Sunil had passed away. Everybody remembers his contribution to the Liberation War and his fight to uphold secularism. He was one of the most popular authors in Bangladesh. There was a time when festival numbers from India were banned in Bangladesh. If people came to know that Sunil had contributed in one of them, the books would get smuggled across the border. His novels were regularly pirated in Bangladesh. Efforts were made to stop this but nothing could be done due to the demand," Chaudhuri said.
The Bangladeshi author has been close to Gangopadhyay since 1960 when the two met in Kolkata. Gangopadhyay had returned from the US and was speaking at a function when Chaudhuri saw him for the first time.
"Do you know that we got arrested together as chicken thieves at Belpahari in East Midnapore? Every year, during the Pujas, we would go to Belpahari on vacation. It was 1965 and India and Pakistan were at war. As was our habit, we got off the bus near a village and entered somebody's house. After having our fill of mahua we went for a bath to the village pond. When we returned to the house where we had stopped, the villagers seemed extremely agitated and asked us to leave. We didn't know what had gone wrong but took shelter in a nearby field. Suddenly, we were surrounded by armed security personnel," said Chaudhuri.
It seems that a youth from the village named Rashid had crossed over to East Pakistan. "A few days after his disappearance, Pakistani aircraft strafed the Kalaikunda air base and everybody suspected that Rashid had provided the necessary bearings. The security personnel suspected us to be spies."
The security men left after ordering them to return to Kolkata. However, later in the night, villagers led the police to them all over again, accusing them of stealing chicken. "We were arrested and locked up in Binpur police station. It was only after the OC looked at us that we were released and given a royal treatment. His wife seems to have been reading a novel by Sunil," the Bangladeshi author said.
Chaudhuri and Gangopadhyay played an active role during Bangladesh's War of Liberation in 1971. The Indian author had a deep influence on litterateurs in Bangladesh. According to Chaudhuri, even somebody like Humayun Ahmed was influenced by Gangopadhyay. It was Gangopadhyay who first suggested to Ahmed that he write a full-fledged novel.
"This was how the book Jyotsna O Janani came about. Sunil was the first person to have said that Dhaka would be the literary capital of Bengal (both Bangladesh and West Bengal). Sunil's epic work Purba Paschim brought together the two Bengals and snuffed out allegations by fundamentalists that he was against a particular community. This work led to development of better relations between the two countries," Chaudhuri said.
It was much later that Sunil returned to his ancestral home in Purba Maichpara, Madaripur in the Faridpur. "We visited the village in Amgram where Sunil was born. The small room still remains and 'Sunil Mela' is held there every year," Chaudhuri said.