KOLKATA: Even in death, she looked resplendent in a tussar maroon-and-black saree, the big, maroon bindi in place. Heaps of wreaths, flowers and garlands covered Nabaneeta Dev Sen as the world around her mourned her.
Bhalo-Basa, her Hindusthan Park home for 81 years, brimmed with a sea of admirers since early on Friday, as writers, intellectuals, ministers, administrators, students, teachers, neighbours and bystanders streamed in to catch the last glimpse of the woman who was synonymous with positivity and liberalism. Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar was among the first to reach Nabaneeta’s home in the morning to pay his respects. Later, ministers Subrata Mukherjee and wife and Sovandeb Chattopadhyay arrived. Nabaneeta believed in blurring barriers. As her political views were all about fighting for democracy, it was natural that in her death, arch political rivals Chattopadhyay and CPM’s Rabin Deb exchanged pleasantries for some time together.
Poet
Shankha Ghosh looked frail and shaken at the passing of a dear friend. He could only shake his head in grief, unable to react. Poet Srijato, writer Bani Basu, linguist Pabitra Sarkar, historian Hari Vasudevan and former bureaucrat Jawhar Sircar also visited to pay their last tribute to the author and scholar who refused to be bogged down by the thought of death even when critically ill. “Her positivity was infectious… she never knew defeat,” Sircar said. In one of her last pieces for a Bengali magazine, Nabaneeta had summed up this attitude to life when she described her final journey as a ‘subha yatra’.
Amid the wave of adulation, Nabaneeta’s daughters,
Antara
and
Nandana
, moved protectively around their mother’s body as it lay on an ice tray in the centre of her favourite living room on the first floor, where she loved to work, chat and meet people. As the hearse left Bhalo-Basa, all those who had gathered started singing Tagore’s ‘Prano bhoriye trisha horiye/More aaro aaro aaro dao pran’, singing to her one last time.
On leaving home, the first stopover was at
Jadavpur University
, where Nabaneeta had studied comparative literature as a young girl and later, taught in the same department for years. The hearse was kept in the car park of the UG Arts Building, students, teachers and research scholars gathered around. “I knew her since the time I was a student and she was for us, the firebrand teacher who taught everyone to rise above the ordinary in thoughts and actions. To me, Nabaneeta Di was an enigma. I came from a conservative background, where no woman worked. For me, she was the personification of women’s lib,” said Nilanjana Gupta, English faculty member at JU. “We were not so lucky to get her as a teacher but we have heard how she would get involved in activism if she thought there was a cause to fight for,” said Ritashree Basu, a student.
Former registrar of the university Rajat Bandyopadhyay remembered how Nabaneeta would help him recite poetry. “We need more such people, whose motto is inclusion and tolerance,” said vice-chancellor Suranjan Das.
From JU, the hearse left for Bangla Akademi in Nandan, from where it headed for the
Keoratala
crematorium after around half an hour.