{"id":219,"date":"2017-01-08T04:38:57","date_gmt":"2017-01-07T23:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/?p=219"},"modified":"2018-01-08T16:46:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T11:16:55","slug":"letter-from-tollygunge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/letter-from-tollygunge\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter from Tollygunge"},"content":{"rendered":"

WORDS BY SANGITA SANYAL<\/strong>
\nTEXT AND PHOTOS BY AANCHAL MALHOTRA
\n<\/strong>Kolkata,\u00a0India<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

My father, Sunil Chandra Sanyal, was born in 1941 in Susang Duragpur Village, Mymesingh zila<\/em>, which is a part of present day Bangladesh. During the Partition of India in 1947, there had been no communal riots in their district and so the family had continued to live peacefully with no intentions of migration.\u00a0Baba\u00a0<\/em>was 7 years old when, in 1948, his mother decided to take the children and drop them off safely to Calcutta. Still hopeful that one day the children would be able to come back to the village, his parents stayed in\u00a0East Bengal for a year longer. But isolated instances of rioting began occurring in the districts around them and finally, in their village too, communal gangs would often ransack houses and cause ruckus.\u00a0The village became unsafe for young women, who were being abduct\u00a0or taken advantage of, and so finally, the couple decided to leave in 1949. In the middle of the night, raat ke andhere mein<\/em>, the couple fled from their hometown to the city of Shillong by bullock cart, from where they got into a train to Assam and finally, to Calcutta.<\/p>\n

Now I can tell that their journey was driven purely by the instinctive need for survival, as the years that followed were full of sadness and lament for a homeland that had been lost to them. Unable to set up themselves quickly in their new city of Calcutta, they stayed with relatives. My father stayed with his mousi (<\/em>maternal aunt) in Tollygunge, and his parents stayed with his mama<\/em> (maternal uncle) in Bansdroni. Unable to bear the loss of his home and land, my great-grandfather, Dineschandra Sanyal, passed away in 1952. One year after baba<\/em> wrote him a letter, asking him to send across his certificates so he can finally enrol into a school in Calcutta.<\/p>\n