Remembering Sylhet

The article by Anindita Dasgupta (August 2, 2008) took me back to the days of the Partition. Then I was in class VII in Silchar. The Independence Day celebration at Silchar was not immediately followed by an influx of refugees. Maybe, that is why the tragedy was slow to seep into our psyche over the years as we grew with the suffering of fellow-citizens, who started coming to a safer India, a country which became a foreign land by virtue of the Partition.

A national seminar organised by the Srihatta Sammilani was held in New Delhi in 1992. It was on the history and culture of the Barak Valley, a place which was named after the Jurma Valley got lost following the Partition. In the seminar, I submitted a paper on Srihatta Sammilani of India. At that stage there were about 13 Sammilanis; some were very active, like the ones in Calcutta (now three in number), Delhi and Allahabad, while others were dormant, like in Shillong, and some barely alive