In Calcutta, rumours were in the air — especially that familiar old rumour, the harbinger of every serious riot, that the trains from Pakistan were arriving packed with corpses. A few Calcutta dailies printed pictures of weeping, stranded Hindu refugees, along with a few lurid accounts of the events in the east. On 8 and 9 January, with refugees still pouring in, rumours began to flow like floodwaters through the city and angry crowds began to gather at the station.
And so the events followed their own grotesque logic, and on 10 January, the day the cricket Test began in Madras, Calcutta erupted. Mobs went rampaging through the city, killing Muslims and burning and looting their shops and houses.
The police opened fire on mobs in several places and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed on parts of the city. But the scale of the events had already swamped the police. On 11 January the army was called out of Fort William and several battalions were deployed throughout the city. In the next day’s papers, underneath the banner headlines, there are pictures of Sikh soldiers patrolling deserted streets. But in the Moulin Rouge on Park Street, it was business as usual, with a tea dance from 5 to 7 p.m. and a Dinner Dance with Delilah accompanied by the ‘popular Moulin Rouge quintette’.
The next day, with patrol trucks roaring through the streets, the Moulin Rouge advertised a twist competition and jam session to ‘Bongo rhythms’. Perhaps because of the curfew they couldn’t get to the newspaper offices in time to withdraw the advertisement.
‘Stray incidents’ of arson and looting continued, in Dhaka as well as Calcutta, despite the presence of the two armies, for a few days. It took about a week before the papers could declare that ‘normalcy’ had been ‘restored’.
There are no reliable estimates of how many people were killed in the riots of 1964. The number could stretch from several hundred to several thousand; at any rate, not very many less than were killed in the war of 1962.
It is evident from the newspapers that, once the riots started, ‘responsible opinion’ in both India and East Pakistan reacted with an identical sense of horror and outrage. The university communities of both Dhaka and Calcutta took the initiative in doing relief work and organising peace marches; and newspapers on both sides of the border did some fine, humane pieces of reporting. As always, there were innumerable cases of Muslims in East Pakistan giving shelter to Hindus, often at the cost of their own lives, and equally, in India, of Hindus sheltering Muslims. But they were ordinary people, soon forgotten — not for them any Martyr’s Memorials or Eternal Flames.
As for the two governments, they traded a series of curiously symmetrical accusations. On 7 January, a spokesman of the External Affairs Ministry in New Delhi declared that the situation of ‘lawlessness’ in East Pakistan was an ‘inevitable consequence of the incitement and provocative statements’ made by Pakistani leaders and the Pakistani press. A few days later the Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan was summoned to the External Affairs Ministry and informed of the Pakistani government’s view that the communal incidents in East Pakistan were being played up by the Indian press in order to ‘divert the people’s attention from the serious happenings in Kashmir’. But even more curiously, within a few days an almost congratulatory note entered into the exchanges between the ministries as they reviewed their respective success in ‘quelling’ the disturbances. For a while the presidents of the two countries even seriously considered issuing a joint appeal for communal harmony. But soon enough, that plan went the way of all good intentions in the subcontinent, and the memory of the riots vanished into the usual cloud of rhetorical exchanges.
In fact, from the evidence of the newspapers, it is clear that once the riots had started, both governments did everything they could to put a stop to them as quickly as possible. In this they were subject to a logic larger than themselves, for the madness of a riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore a reminder, of that indivisible sanity that binds people to each other independently of their governments. And that prior, independent relationship is the natural enemy of government, for it is in the logic of states that to exist at all they must claim the monopoly of all relationships between peoples.
The theatre of war, where generals meet, is the stage on which states disport themselves: they have no use for memories of riots.
By the end of January 1964 the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers, disappeared from the collective imagination of ‘responsible opinion’, vanished without leaving a trace in the histories and bookshelves. They had dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence.
A few months after I had made my discovery in the Teen Murti Library, I found, at the bottom of my bookshelf, the tattered old Bartholomew’s Atlas in which Tridib used to point out places to me when he told me stories in his room. Mayadebi had given it to me many years before.
One day, when it was lying open on my desk in my hostel room, quite by chance I happened to find a rusty old compass at the back of my drawer. It had probably been forgotten there by the person who had lived in the room before me.
I picked it up and, toying with it, I placed its point on Khulna and the tip of the pencil on Srinagar.
Khulna is not quite one hundred miles from Calcutta as the crow flies: the two cities face each other at a watchful equidistance across the border. The distance between Khulna and Srinagar, or so I discovered when I measured the space between the points of my compass, was 1200 miles, nearly 2000 kilometres. It didn’t seem like much. But when I took my compass through the pages of that atlas, on which I could still see the smudges left by Tridib’s fingers, I discovered that Khulna is about as far from Srinagar as Tokyo is from Beijing, or Moscow from Venice, or Washington from Havana, or Cairo from Naples.
Then I tried to draw a circle with Khulna at the centre and Srinagar on the circumference. I discovered immediately that the map of South Asia would not be big enough. I had to turn back to a map of Asia before I found one large enough for my circle.
It was an amazing circle.
Beginning in Srinagar and travelling anti-clockwise, it cut through the Pakistani half of Punjab, through the tip of Rajasthan and the edge of Sind, through the Rann of Kutch, and across the Arabian Sea, through the southernmost toe of the Indian Peninsula, through Kandy, in Sri Lanka, and out into the Indian Ocean until it emerged to touch upon the northernmost finger of Sumatra, then straight through the tail of Thailand into the Gulf, to come out again in Thailand, running a little north of Phnom Penh, into the hills of Laos, past Hué in Vietnam, dipping into the Gulf of Tonking, then swinging up again through the Chinese province of Yunnan, past Chungking, across the Yangtze Kiang, passing within sight of the Great Wall of China, through Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang, until with a final leap over the Karakoram Mountains it dropped again into the valley of Kashmir.
It was a remarkable circle: more than half of mankind must have fallen within it.
And so, fifteen years after his death, Tridib watched over me as I tried to learn the meaning of distance. His atlas showed me, for example, that within the tidy ordering of Euclidean space, Chiang Mai in Thailand was much nearer Calcutta than Delhi is; that Chengdu in China is nearer than Srinagar is. Yet I had never heard of those places until I drew my circle, and I cannot remember a time when I was so young that I had not heard of Delhi or Srinagar. It showed me that Hanoi and Chungking are nearer Khulna than Srinagar, and yet did the people of Khulna care at all about the fate of the mosques in Vietnam and South China (a mere stone’s throw away)? I doubted it. But in this other direction, it took no more than a week …