An old album of photographs, likely taken between 1970 and 1985, is one of the few things I keep in my room from my grandmother’s working years as a Gram Sevika in Kakopothar. Somehow, it has become what I hold onto most.
A few years ago, my aunt had given me a set of photos in a ziplock bag – small, black-and-white prints, some gently curling at the corners, the ink on their backs now faint with time. At first, I enjoyed them as a playful gaze into my grandfather’s life across the world, but I’ve since begun to consider them as a testimony about time, reading them as I would a biography. Then, in 2023, after my grandfather’s death, I came to inherit two of the many cameras through which he once saw the world.
Dr. Ramesh Chandra De, my maternal great-grandfather, was an army doctor in the First World War. What I gather from family members is that he was first posted in the Khirgi-Waziristan division for traineeship, and then sent to France for the rest of the War in the capacity of a surgeon. Sudhir Chandra De, my maternal grandfather, chose to follow in his father footsteps and at the age of 21 in the year 1940, found himself appointed as the official physician at the notorious Andaman Cellular Jail.
My great-great grandfather, Prasanna Mullick was a Dalit farmer, who had settled on the land his family had cleared a generation ago. To support their upward mobility, the family had adopted the upper-caste surname ‘Mullick’ in the mid-nineteenth century. But as the family lore goes, in 1902, the local zamindar, recognizing the growing value of the land, murdered Prasanna in an attempt to steal it.
This photograph had come to my family to discuss our marriage. The next time I saw him to my heart’s content was when I had become Mrs. K.L Gupta. That day I felt that destiny had come to me in the form of this paper photograph to take me on the most beautiful journey of my life.
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