In 2022, we chanced upon a yellowing leaf of paper from the past, buried deep in a drawer among other documents. This was my great-grandfather, Bidhu Bhushan Sarkar’s election pamphlet from the first State Legislative Assembly Elections held in 1952 in West Bengal, independent India.
I found this letter written by my grandather to my grandmother on the eve of India’s Independence in 1947. It was posted from Muzaffarnagar to Deoband.
This is my great-grandfather’s journal. He wrote in it over six decades, from the 1920s to the 1970s, and the book reflects that history. He wrote these entries “for remembrance, a brief description of how we live our lives”.
There is a ruqqa, a wedding card tucked into the folds of a family album. It announces the union of my maternal grandparents – Ahmed Uddin and Rafi Unissa Begum, better known in our family as Pasha and Nafees, and dates back to February 12, 1961
The postcard is about 5.5″ x 3.5″ in dimensions. There’s a round black seal beside the stamp which reads “26 Mar 49 , 8 AM , Comilla”. That means it was posted at 08:00 am, 26th March, 1949, from the post office in Comilla.
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