The Nineteenth of May and I
Shaktipada Brahmachari (Translated by Arjun Chaudhuri, from উনিশে মে ও আমি, Dainik Jugosankha, 20th May, 2001) ————————————— 19th May, 1961. My employed life had started by then. But my college life wasn’t over yet. When I passed my ISC examinations in 1958, immediately after that I acquired a job as a teacher in a high school at Silchar. And I was getting ready to appear for my B.A. examinations as a teacher-private candidate. Then came the Nineteenth of May. My finals were to begin only a few days after that. I was never involved in active politics. But there once had been in me a youthful curiosity for politics. And it was this curiosity that ultimately led me to become a believer in Marxism. I also discovered a connection between my literary thinking and Marxist thought. Thusly, I am a communist at heart. At that time, there was only one party that could be called Marxist-Communist. The CPI or the Communist Party of India. There used to be an office for the Communist Party in Silchar at around that time. It was a small two storeyed wooden building in Nazirpatty. The highly respected Comrade Gopen Ray used to live in that office itself. That place was almost a one-man commune by itself. The other leaders used to come there in the day or in the night, for work or even when there was no work to be done. Achintya Bhattacharjya, Digen Dasgupta, Dwijen Sengupta, Mani Ray and many others used to gather there. The party office had a Bengali newspaper subscription. The publication was called “Swadhinota” (Freedom). It was, of course, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. I wasn’t a regular at this office. But I used to go there in the company of student-friends of my age, people who had been initiated in the ideology of Communism. I remember two of them especially. Chintaharan Das and Asit Aditya. Asit was a college mate of mine at G. C. College. We lived together for some time in the same house. It was through him that I came in touch with my other friend Chintaharan. Both of them were far ahead of me in their socialist ideas. They were both informed readers of literature, as well as voracious critics. Chintaharan went a step ahead. I have seen few such good orators as he was. This brings to mind that incident in 1959 when the Left led state government of Kerala was dismantled. The central government was a Nehru led Congress one. Indira Gandhi was the president of the AICC. The ‘red’ government was dismantled quite unethically. The communists were naturally very strident with their protest against this. A protest meeting was organised in Silchar as well in the form of a public convention right next to the round pond at Nazirpatty. The fiery address Chintaharan delivered in that meeting remains, in my opinion, almost unparalleled. Anyway, living amidst some close friends, with the reading of relevant literature, the adda at the tea shop, and other things, I continued to mature in my practices of writing poetry, and in the principles of socialism. And at around this time the year 1961 arrived. In the Assam State Legislative Assembly (then located at Shillong), they passed the State Language Bill. The language of this state would be only Assamese. The non-Assamese, especially the Bengalis, could not accept this easily. But the Assamese speaking crowd was numerically dominant in the Assam State Legislative Assembly. Purely on the basis of this numerical strength did Assamese become the official language of the state. The Bengalis were naturally quite displeased. Bengali must be given equal status as the official language alongside Assamese – this demand gradually gathered pace. The Bengalis in the Brahmaputra valley could not come clean with their objections to this bill, of course. But the Bengalis of Cachar (now Barak Valley) began to prepare for a protest movement. There was no support extended to this movement initially by any political party. Like it was in the rest of the country, the ruling party in Assam at that time was the Congress. It was this Congress government that had passed the Language Bill. Even though some of the Bengali Congress leaders of Barak Valley might have been secretly annoyed at this act of the government’s, they did not say or do anything by way of protest out in the public. As a result, there was an attempt to shape up an organisation to further the cause of the Bengali language movement by positing some nonconformist political figures at the helm of affairs. Even though there were quite a few senior leaders in the organisation, the primary driving force was a slew of young leaders from a middle income or a lower income background. It was then that the name of an entirely unknown young man began to emerge from among the ranks of the organisation. Paritosh Pal Choudhury. A child of an emigrant family. After leaving East Bengal, he had been busy in the Brahmaputra valley trying his luck. After that, he came to Silchar and soon achieved some renown as one of the leading organisers of the Bengali language movement. We began to hear of names like those of Rathindranath Sen of Karimganj, Harish Chakravarty of Hailakandi and others. They were engaged in consolidating the preparations for the Bengali language movement. But it seemed that the movement was not becoming forceful, or effective enough anywhere at all. That something so momentous would happen on the Nineteenth of May was not something anyone could have even thought of at that time. But there was a special reason behind that. The Congress was all in all in the political arena of the state of Assam at that moment. In the national context, the PSP (Praja Socialist Party) had acquired only some significance. The Communists were well known, but the party