DHAKA TRIBUNE

Remembrance

Saturday, December 14, 2013

My Fathers War
I meant to ask you how when everything seemed lost And your fate was in a game of dice they tossed There was still that line that you would never cross At any cost
From Bang the Drum Slowly by Emmylou Harris and Guy Clark

Tanvir Haider Chaudhury n

y father was 45 years, 4 months and 22 days old when he was murdered, possibly around dawn on December 15, 1971. Roughly about 8 months younger than I am now. This thought haunts me. In the middle of a busy working day, or at night when Im reading just before going off to sleep, these numbers grab hold of me and wont let me go. I think about how much more I look forward to in my life, all thats left to be done. And I think about my father. How many plans he would have had that disciplined, conscientious, talented man. How many dreams and hopes. All those possibilities, extinguished. He was murdered because of ideas. He was not a political man, not a strident person. He expressed his ideas softly. But he knew what they were, and the depth of his convictions was startling. He simply held that Bangaliness is his heritage and there is no reason to downplay that because of his political identity as a Pakistani. A simple enough idea, but it was enough to get him killed. Along with so many of his compatriots with similar beliefs. Mufazzal Haider Chaudhury was my father. He was one of the countrys foremost educationists and a quite brilliant scholar. An Associate Professor of the Bangla department of (the erstwhile) Dacca University, he was an acknowledged expert specifically on the works of Rabindranath Tagore. Everyone who knew him saw him as a kind, courteous and generous man the very embodiment of the cultured Bengali gentleman. Yet the forcefulness with which he put across his thoughts on the Bengali cultural identity is something to behold. In the 50s, the Tomuddon movement was at its peak and a section of the local intelligentsia was proposing the creation of an East Pakistani literature that could contain no work by non-muslim, specifically hindu, authors. Some were going as far as to say it should contain nothing created before the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. My father countered by pointing out that this was imbecilic as well as farcical. If we left out everything that came before, he wrote, some of the major works of Pakistans national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam would be lost,

as well as the works of other Tomuddoni favourites like Golam Mustafa and Forrukh Ahmed. He was scathing on the irony of celebrating Nazrul as Pakistans national poet and playing him up as a Muslim icon, when in fact the great man had celebrated all the religions of our heritage, and indeed, the universality of the human experience. Here is one of the few instances of sarcasm in his writing: How will we separate Nazruls Islamic works from his Hindu ones? By tearing out certain pages of his books? You cant even do that, because Islamic and Hindu poems are written on different sides of the same page! He also took on the people who were conspiring to leave out Rabindranath from the University syllabus: Some find an un-Islamic flavour in Rabindranaths songs such as Ekti Nomoshkare or Amar Matha Noto Kore Dao, when in fact these songs are expressing heartfelt devotion to a merciful and compassionate God, exactly as we do when we pray. The only difference is that the word being used is Nomoshkar and not Sizda. These words were written in the profoundly xenophobic and paranoid climate of the East Pakistan of the 50s and the 60s. The dismal truth is, they still count as brave sentiments in the sovereign state of Bangladesh, 42 years after our independence. So that is the way my father fought his war. He was never an overtly political man, unlike many of his contemporaries. He never did time as a political prisoner; possibly never

Sazzad

come stay with them until the worst of the danger passed, but he would not hear of it. His work, and by extension his life, was here. His was one of the purest examples I know of of a life of the mind, of the ideas being

He simply held that Bangaliness is his heritage and there is no reason to downplay that because of his political identity

shouted himself hoarse in a procession. Even in 1971, he took his classes and attended to all his duties while taking part in meetings denouncing the military action in East Pakistan and helping the cause of the Mukti Bahini. Friends from Santiniketan, London and elsewhere implored him to leave his devastated homeland to

inseparable from the man. And it was those ideas which led to some of his own countrymen colluding with the mass-murdering West Pakistani army to have him tortured and murdered at the prime of his life. That gentle soul with its instinctive generosity, that steadfast spirit with its singularly compassionate perspective, snuffed out.

All of its possibilities, extinguished. In the end, it is how he lived his final hours that I think defines the man. Chowdhury Mueen Uddin, one of his students from the University, was one of the young men of the Al-Badr who came to abduct him and take him to his death on December 14, 1971. Mueen Uddin left my mother, uncle and aunt with the promise that my father would be returned unharmed; he would allow no harm to come to his teacher. My father was blindfolded and taken to the Mohammadpur Physical Training Institute with along Professor Munier Chowdhury and many other compatriots. They were left in a large room with other people who had been savagely tortured, their clothes drenched with blood, some with their eyes gouged out. A gentleman named Delwar Hossain, the only person to have survived the massacre of that day, has provided vivid eyewitness account of all of this. Around 8:30 that evening, some young men entered that darkened

room with lanterns and iron rods in hand. They approached Munier Chowdhury first, saying something along the lines of Youve taught yours students a lot, now well teach you a lesson. They asked him how many books he had written on Rabindranath Tagore. Munier Kaka he was the father of one of my dearest friends, the closest person I have now to a brother shook his head to say that he had not. They then asked my father the same question. My father said yes, he had written books on Rabindranath. Those young men then beat them with their iron rods. Delwar Hossain describes Munier Kaka bleeding from the mouth from the severity of the beating at one point. In the early hours of the morning, they took all the people in that room - educationists, doctors, writers drove them to a place called Katasur and bayonetted them to death. Only Delwar Hossain survived. So that was the man. He stared death in the face and said he wrote on Rabindranath. l

Shahidullah Kaiser was active

in politics and cultural movements from his student days. Following the formation of Pakistan in 1947, he joined the provincial Communist Party of East Pakistan. He started working as a journalist in 1949 with the Ittefaq in Dhaka. In 1952, he participated actively in the Language Movement. In 1958, Kaiser joined as an associate editor of the Daily Sangbad a Bangla language daily where he worked for the rest of his life. When the Military coup of 1958 put Ayub Khan in power, and martial law was proclaimed, Kaiser was arrested again on 14 October 1958 and remained in jail for four years till his release in September 1962. Disappearance Kaiser was rounded up on December 14, 1971. He never returned, nor was his body ever found. It is assumed that he was executed along with other intellectuals. His brother, Zahir Raihan, a notable film-maker, also disappeared while searching for Kaiser

This is a page from his draft of the enormously popular novel Shangshaptok, considered one of the greatest works of fiction in Bangladeshs literary collection.