BARISAL: WHERE THE WOMEN WORE SILVER

Barisal, most easily accessed from Dhaka, perhaps, by speedboat, is another of the ancient port cities of what was, for over two thousand years, one of the great trading centres of the world, offering access, not only to the agricultural wealth of the deltaic lands of Ganges and Brahmaputra, with its world famous cotton cloths, such as muslin, and even silk, but also to the enormous riches, both of Northern India and Tibet, but also China, along the Brahmaputra Silk Road. And even the fabulous gems and minerals of southeast Asia, the traders bringing their riches to the ports of the Delta, that from at least the middle of theist millennium BCE, welcomed traders from across the known world, including those from Egypt, Greece and Italy.

Kuyakata Beach, Barisal

Located on a distributary of the mighty Ganges, like the more famous trading centre at Sonargoan, on the Old Brahmaputra, there is little doubt that this port city welcomed visitors from across the world, from ancient times.

We know that, probably from the early days of Buddhism, the last few centuries of the last millennium BCE, this area hosted Buddhist Vihara, for which there is archaeological evidence in the area, and we are fortunate to have a glimpse of the city in the latter part of the 16^th century, in the Journal of the English merchant, Ralph Fitch, who visited it about 1584.

He records, ‘I came to Bacola (identified by experts as Barisal); the king whereof is a gentile (non christian!), a man very well disposed and delighted much to shoot a gun. His country is very great and fruitful and hath a store of Rice, much cotton cloth and cloth of silke. The houses are very faire and high builded, the streets large, the people naked, except the little cloth about their waste. The women weare great store of silver hoopes about their neckes and armes, and their legs are ringed with silver and copper, and made of elephant teeth’.

Guthiya Mosjid, Barisal

No visitor to Barisal today would recognise much of all that; the streets are narrow and crowded, and the arrival of Islam has rather transformed to garb that, presumably, in Fitch’s time, might have suited the climate!

But a wander around the thronging streets close to the riverside today, will, on careful examination, reveal considerable traces of the 18^th and 19^th century merchant houses that reflect a wealth from trade that probably didn’t end until the middle of the 20^th century.

In a very real sense, there is an air, in Barisal, of the busy international port that Fitch found, 450 years ago.

Limbless amphibian dating back 140m years found

A Chikila Fulleri, a limbless amphibian, believed to have appeared some 140 million years ago, recently found in Lawachhara Forest. 

Photo Courtesy: The Daily Star Correspondent, Maulvibazar.

Two Chikila Fulleri, a limbless amphibian believed to have appeared some 140 million years ago, was found by a team of Bangladeshi wildlife researchers in Lawachhara Forest in Moulvibazar on December 26. Wildlife biologist Dr Reza Khan and wildlife expert Tania Khan came upon the two worm-like animals, measuring 19 and 17 centimetres in length, while digging the forest floor. In September, Tania had found a skeleton.

One was released while the other was brought back to Dhaka for DNA confirmation, said the researchers.

The researchers said the animal, locally known as “snake with two faces/mouths” and present in Africa, Assam of India, and South America, had not evolved and its existence in Bangladesh proves that the subcontinent was connected to Africa.

The animal performs its life cycle 10 inches under the ground and cannot survive long above ground without moisture, they said. An Indian biologist named Alkock first wrote about the animal in 1904 and last February, some Indian researchers published an article based on their five-year research on it in a journal of The Royal Society.

Source The Daily Star: http://archive.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=263052

NANKAR REBELLION: ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS LIBERATION

Photo Courtesy: Kumar Bishwajit

music.tapu@gmail.com

Sunamganj may be the fascinating gateway to some of the most outstanding natural scenery in Bangladesh, but the number of historic buildings in the small town offer up a clue to a past that maybe hard to visualize in today’s small country town. It has its own history, unique, distinctive, and, in its own way, the epitome of a much wider history.

The history of mankind is littered with struggles for liberation from real, or perceived, oppression.

One of the claims to fame of the people of the lands of Bangladesh, and perhaps, in the great sweep of history, arguably the greatest, was the success of the kingdom, then known as Gangaridai, in the 4th century BCE, being the first to confront the army of Alexander the Great, and protected by the great Ganges, and the threat of their own large army, recorded by Greek and Roman historians as comprising infantry, cavalry, chariots and war elephants, put them into retreat. The first in the world to do so.

In more modern history, the movement of the people to conserve their language, their economy, and their own unique heritage, from the depredations of Pakistan, resulting in the Liberation War of 1971, and securing their freedom from outside oppression, laid the foundations for the nation of Bangladesh.

But, as one of the world’s greatest centres of trade from 2nd millennium BCE, right up to more modern times, and with one of the world’s more fertile lands, rich in agriculture and peoples, unsurprisingly, from the Khilji invaders of 12th century, Mughal of the 16th century, and British of the 18th century, they have found the need to constantly reassert their own liberties.

It was the Mughal rulers who confirmed the system of land holding that, right up until recent times bore a remarkable resemblance to what was known, more famously, in Europe, as the feudal system, administered by Zaminders, land holders who, owing tribute to the government, operated tenure on the same basis, with rents payable in kind, whether in produce, or labor, or both.

Such systems can offer security, when properly organised, depending on the degree to which the superior recognises the responsibilities that come with their rights. And, of course, the history of the world, right up to the present day, is rife with abuse.

But, in 1922, Sunamganj was at the centre of a movement, similar to others across the Indian subcontinent, as, over the centuries, across much of the developing world.

Known as the Nankar Rebellion, deriving from the local language of ,’nan’, for bread, and ‘kar’ for rent, which describes the system, under the Zamindari, established by the Mughals, for rents paid in kind or labor  Especially in the rapidly developing economy enjoyed by India, at times, within the British Empire, although such rents were supposed to be fixed, unscrupulous landlords found ways around them, and, in some cases, somewhat unscrupulous tenants found the concept burdensome when they had better markets for their produce, and more profitable means of using their own labor.

Assignment of the dues, by the landlords, in payment for other services, such as those of their personal staff, also, inevitably, led to circumstances of abuse.

And it was in Sunamganj that such tensions erupted, although,in fact, like so often, the immediate cause of the uprising had nothing to do with financial arrangements.

Photo Courtesy: Kumar Bishwajit

music.tapu@gmail.com 

Like Feudal overlords everywhere in the world, abuse of rights and privileges were commonplace. The cause of this outbreak was the kidnapping of a woman from a ‘nankar’ family by a Zaminder. The local nankar men responded by rescuing the woman from the Zaminder’s house. The rest is not hard to imagine; the British authorities probably didn’t approve of the actions of their local Zaminder, but felt bound to support their chosen local authority. The result was just one, of many such events, that only ended with the abolition of the Zamindari following Independence in 1947.  Although it might be a brave person who assumed that such abuse of authority doesn't continue everywhere in the world, today.

But this was Sunamganj’s own, small, if not successful, Liberation War, at least assertion of the rights and dignity of the individual in the face of abused authority, and neglected responsibility.

Hason Raja, Rabindranath Tagore and Lalon Shah:

Bengal’s mystic philosopher, polymath and social reformer

Photo Source: Web

The rich cultural heritage of the lands of Bangladesh, that certainly derive from the international influences of the great trading centre, that from as early as the second millennium BCE, brought traders and travellers from across the world to the delta of the great Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, echoes through the ages.
Here, Mahayana school of Buddhism developed, with the Tantric traditions that the 12th century monk, Atish Depanker, carried to Tibet, echoes in the work of the great 19th century poet, mystic and songwriter, Lalon Shah.
A man who lived to be 116 years of age, and left a lasting influence of religious tolerance that no efforts by fundamentalists of any religion seems able to shake, had many contemporaries, but Asia’s first Nobel Laureate for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore, remains, certainly, the most famous.

 
Photo Source: Web

Even Allen Ginsberg, the American poet who famously sympathised with the Liberation War of 1971, acknowledged the influence of Lalon on his philosophy.

But Tagore, in a lecture at Oxford University, where he was, himself, much lionised as an international litterateur, also drew to the attention of the world another of the great poets Bangladesh has given birth to, Hason Raja.

Photo Source: Web

 
Tagore and Hason had, perhaps, more in common with each other, that either had with Lalon, except their great expressions of religious and cultural tolerance. Both were products of the landed classes, the Zamindari, and Hason, particularly, who, unlike Tagore, was a man of his land and his home.

Photo Source: Web

The region around Sunamganj, in Sylhet, where, descended from ancient kings, he was born in 1854, can still show, proudly, some of the results of his responsibility as a traditional landowner he took seriously, supporting charities, and the building of schools, mosques, temples and churches. Indeed, the devastation of the Great India Earthquake, with its epicentre in Shillong, just north of Sylhet, so moved him that the last twenty years of his life was dedicated to the humanitarian works that resonated, too, from his poetry.

Photo Source: Tiger Tours

Tagore and Hason came from the tradition of landownership that encompassed the responsibilities, as well as the rights, that such ownership carried. Lalon, however, seems to have been even more aware of the spirituality of belonging to the land with such a rich heritage, and it was, perhaps that, that has made his bequest of social justice and tolerance so resonant, even today.

Photo Source: Web