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I created this website to tell about my homeland, the pains and sufferings my near and distant relations displaced from their land went through, and the obstacles and hurdles I faced while growing up and later.  To keep my story alive, overstepping the bounds of time, and to reach the same quickly to my friends and relations living in distant places, I have published it as a website. The site is also adorned with Travel videos, Photo albums, Travelogues, and things which I find interesting, to make the whole of me readable like an open book. I have tried to include in my Travelogues as much information and background materials as I could collect about the places I had visited. I want to propagate my ideas, views of life, feelings, and experiences to my descendants, relations, and those who may be interested to know about me through this site. In my story, I have also talked about those who are or had been in my periphery to make it a complete family record from mid-1947 till my time. Members of my family are not aware of all facts about my life. When they have time, a look into it would enable them to read more into me. I hope some member of my family, or someone from my descendants, may come upon this site sometime or other and may be interested to know what kind of person I was.  It would be worth the labour, even if a single youngster from amongst our relations or friends when in a difficult situation gets inspired by my story to fight the battle of life.  I believe there is something to learn from the life of everyone, and say with humility, there may be something to learn from my life, too.                                                                             

As I have already said, we hail from Sylhet, a wealthy district of Bengal Presidency in the early periods: the district that had delivered personalities of extraordinary geniuses now and then besides being rich in natural and agricultural resources. Finding it resource-rich, the British annexed this district to Assam in 1875 to make the latter self-sufficient. Again, after it had served its purpose, the British, on the eve of the independence of India, got it detached from the state of Assam through a hurriedly held questionable referendum to ease its annexation to Pakistan.  

We were displaced like thousands of others from our homeland consequent to this annexation to erstwhile East Bengal (later East Pakistan and now Bangladesh) following the referendum mentioned.  It was due to the farsightedness of my father that we did not have to face the onslaught of communal riots though many of our relations fell victim to it, one way or another. Some of these relations, at later times, either had to flee away, leaving everything behind or stuck to their guns there under constant threat of life.  My father had come over to India well in time to save our lives and values. We had crossed over almost empty-handed, counting only on the job of a printing press manager my father had secured before leaving our native place. Our woes did not end there. Again, due to a linguistic disturbance, as stated earlier, we had to leave the place we had settled in Assam after migrating from our homeland.  It is true we could return to the place after a period. By then, the printing press my father had established there, after much effort, had lost all its clientele. It could never revive again. As means of earning livelihood incapacitated, the family was finally to leave the place forever.  I can thus reasonably say that we became refugees twice within a span of a decade.      

Wants were regular companions of ours' and our relations who had migrated later. Our family had passed through many ups and downs; at times, we had been living almost hand to mouth. But for my father's tenacity, ruggedness and strength to steer through an uncertain state, and our firm will to stand up in life we would have been nowhere. Besides pursuing my studies, I had to engage myself from my mid-childhood in the work of our printing press and toil hard to help my father and the family. My brother, too, had his share of suffering. My sisters and some of our maternal uncles had suffered still worse. It is the partition accompanying the independence that had forced upon us all these sufferings. To earn two square meals, they had to work very hard and, at times, could not even manage to do that. However, they were high middle class, and some were even rich in their homelands.  I have, therefore, to say that independence came to us not as bliss but as a bane. 

But Sylhetis are born fighters; as Sylhetis, we fought our way to life. It was a struggle for existence, and like any other struggle, here, too, some won and some lost.  Regardless of our win or loss, the fact remains that we, the Sylheties, were thrown into a political gamble in which the Sylheti Hindus and their homeland were the pawns. Disastrous consequences followed. Hundreds of thousands of Sylheti Hindus lost their roots and became refugees. Large-scale immigration continued for decades due to religious persecution of those who tried to cling to their homeland. This flow of refugees migrating to India moved mostly towards the North-East; it mostly settled in Assam.  

There have been persistent efforts to drive out these hapless immigrants,  who had crossed over to Assam, on one plea or the other. Violence was perpetrated on the immigrants over the years in the forms of the Bongal Khedao Movements, the Imposition of Assamese as the only official language, detection and deportation of so-called foreigners and outsiders. Finally, a large chunk of immigrants was left out of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) while updating it as a follow-up to the Rajiv Gandhi Accord.  Later, when an amendment to the Indian Citizenship Act, 1957 was brought in and passed by the Parliament to give relief to those left out of the NRC and fulfilling some prescribed conditions, violence erupted and continued for a couple of months in various corners of India more particularly, in Assam in the form of the protest movements against the Amendment Bill. I had been a witness to this violence in Guwahati when in the course of my return journey after visiting my homeland Sylhet had reached Guwahati on my way to Kolkata. I had then also met some inconveniences in continuing my onward journey home. 

I have stayed in the Assamese-dominated Brahmaputra Valley of Assam for over a decade. I have witnessed the 1960-Bongal Khedao Movement and have also been a victim thereof.  I have always felt that the Assamese people, by and large, bear a hostile attitude towards the Bengalees living there. In the cosmopolitan College hostel where I had stayed, there were Assamese students too among us. But I could find no Assamese student having a Bengali friend or vice versa. Though outwardly there was no ill feeling amongst them, the Assamese were not well disposed towards the Bengalees. One of my school friends (not a Sylheti) has told me a story where he fell victim to the attack of a group of Assamese goons by responding to the call of an Assamese-Bengalee {2} friend of his.  The incident happened in Jorhat in 1970s. The Bengalees, or more particularly,  the Sylheti Bengalees, were always considered a thorn in the flesh by the Assamese.  We did not, therefore, have a homely stay in Assam as migrant Sylheti-Bengalees. 

Both my elder sisters and their families had to flee empty-handed under the threat of life.  Though they were very much attached to their places, they could not stay there. Details are available on the Page of Brother and Sisters. 

Most of my maternal uncles had migrated, some time or other, after the partition. My eldest maternal uncle who was a freedom fighter (details on the page on maternal uncles), with most of his immediate family members, stayed there till his death. But he had to face threats to his own life and the lives of his family members at different times. Once, his sons and their families had to flee to escape a murderous attempt on them by religious fanatics. Now, my uncle's descendants are leaving their Homeland (as in 2017-18) in batches to escape living under constant threat. Details are available on my page on Maternal Uncles & Cousins. It is no life worth living if one has to live under a constant threat of persecution.

In my later life as a civil servant, I had come across incidents and situations, political and otherwise, where I had my part to play. I had acted on these occasions at the dictate of my conscience, which due to my having, as it were, risen from ashes, had always directed me to follow the path of honesty, justice, and impartiality.  I did it even at the cost of causing displeasure to those under whom I had worked, knowing fully well that it could adversely affect my career. 

I have tried to bring out these facts and others associated with my life, overtly and covertly, through my life story titled "Life As I saw it" which begins at the page of the same name on this website.       

             Before going to other pages, please visit the page titled "Life As I Saw it".  To go there,  click the button  on the right

1. This site is best viewed on computers, desktops, or laptops. It can be viewed on mobile phones, too, but some of the features may not be available there. 

2. To open the navigation menu in mobile phones click the three horizontal lines on top left corner of the screen by the side of my site logo.

3. Google has withdrawn slideshow support for embedded albums at their sites. The procedure to see the albums as slideshows have been outlined on the Photo Album page of this site. Except for albums in the Photo Album page, all other albums elsewhere have been converted to Photo-show video and can be viewed just by clicking or tapping the play button on the body of the album. 

 3. As there are a large number of photographs posted on some of the pages, it might take a while to load those photos when the page is opened.