The World in Our Time, A Memoir, by Tapan Raychaudhari, is the English translation of the Bengali classic, Bangal-nama, undertaken by the Raychaudhuri himself.
The author is a noted historian, and witnessed the transition of his peaceful native of Barisal (now part of Bangladesh) to the horrors of the 1940s when political activism invited jail sentences. Raychaudhuri participated in the Quit India Movement, and has transcribed his experiences of those tumultuous days.
As he states: In 2006, I published a volume of memoirs in Bengali under the title Bangal-nama. In Bengali, the word ‘Bangal’ is often used in a derogatory sense to mean a yokel from East Bengal. So Bangal-nama would mean the life story of a yokel from East Bengal. It described the lifestyle of an extinct social group, the Bengali zamindars, who dominated the rural, and to some extent the urban society as well in that part of the world for more than a century. It disappeared overnight in 1947-48. The account of my childhood has the history of that extinct subspecies of mankind for its background. As such it may be of interest to a wider readership beyond the boundaries of the two Bengals.
This volume is not a literal translation of the Bengali book, but an entirely new work meant for a different audience unfamiliar with Bengal, its society and culture. Raychaudhuri comes from a family of Indian nationalists, followers of Gandhi, and he was brought up to oppose British raj.
The traumatic events in the last decade of British rule, the Quit India Movement for which he spent a short period in prison, the 1943 famine in Bengal which claimed three million lives, the Calcutta riots of 1946 and the upheaval of the Partition, are all touched upon in this fascinating narrative.
Our father, an uncompromising atheist, did not disregard the rituals. When the family priest asked us to bow down in honour of our departed ancestors, this atheist who had no faith in any life after death humbly did what he was asked to with a look of piety on his face...at night, the guards, who were nearly all Muslims, took out lethal weapons from the dark rooms when they did their rounds along the corridors…their loyalty was never in question even in the dark days after the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1946-47.
The World in Our Time
by Tapan Raychaudhari
HarperCollins Publishers
Rs.399