The World Consumer Day was celebrated recently in Madikeri under the joint auspices of Kodagu district administration, Food and Civil Supplies Department and Kodagu District Consumer Forum.
MirAnisAhmed, DCofKodagu, inaugurated and V.A. Patil, President, Kodagu District Consumer Forum, presided over the programme which was attended by more than 150 people.
C.V. Nagaraj, retired Senior Chemist, Regional Agmark Laboratory, Bengaluru, demonstrated simple tests to detect adulteration in various food items. He also spoke about the harmful effects of various types of adulteration and on the laws that exist in India against food adulteration.
Associations interested in arranging such lecture-demos can contact C.V. Nagaraj ( 2521640, 9945651990).
CULTURAL FEST
The Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Pooja Bhagavat Memorial Mahajana Education Centre, has organised an inter-collegiate cultural festival on April 12 and 13. For registration contact festival convener Paul Iruthayaraj on 9739824423, Faculty coordinators Gunarekha B.S. on 9480438394 or Priyadarshan Bhat on 8867204780.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> National> Karnataka / Mysuru – April 11th, 2016
More than 6,000 specimens at the 105-year-old herbarium in the Institute of Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding (IFGTB) can now be accessed by the click of a mouse, as the institute plans to digitise it.
The digitisation will help preserve the fragile specimens, prone to damage due to constant physical handling.
The Fischer Herbarium, which was started in the year 1911 on the Forest Campus in R S Puram, was created as a repository to house the many collections made by British forest officer Cecil Ernest Claude Fischer. He had an extensive collection of specimens from the Nilgiris, Palanis, Coimbatore forest divisions, Seshachalam Hills and Ganjam District of Andhra Pradesh. The herbarium also houses century old collections by forest officers,T F Bourdillon and M Rama Rao from the Travancore presidency. The herbarium was brought under IFGTB’s control in 1988.
The herbarium, considered a national repository by the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), contains 2,954 species, 254 families of plants and 1,257 genera, some of them as rare as the one by forest officer J R Drummond in 1879.
“The herbarium is visited by a lot of taxonomists and botanists. So, when they discover a unique species but have heard of similar looking species being present in a herbarium in another part of the country or world, they often have to physically visit the herbarium to cross check the facts,” said IFGTB director R S Prashanth. “But now they can cross-check with the image and data available online,” he said.
The digital herbarium, which can be accessed through the website www.frcherbarium.org, currently contains 6,231 of the total 23,000 specimens available with the IFGTB. “This digitisation was done by former librarian at the Kerala Forest and Research Institute K H Hussain,” said the head of the biodiversity division at IFGTB C Kunhikannan about the project which cost Rs 6 lakh.
“The website has uploaded the herbarium’s sheets and allows people to zoom into the image to take a closer look at the specimen and the officer’s own writings,” said Hussain. “We will be shortly applying for more funds to digitize the rest of the herbarium’s data,” said the director. The institute, however, admitted that they were yet to review all the data on the website and eliminate spelling errors that might have occurred since the data entry personnel were not taxonomists.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Coimbatore / TNN / April 13th, 2016
The ancient site of the Madan Kamdev temple was once preserved by a Muslim. The fact that this has been forgotten is a sign of a larger erasure that we should be concerned about.
Madan Kamdev in Assam. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Arup Malakar.
Over a century ago, the incisive colonial historian Edward Gait, who compiled the first compendium of history in modern Assam lamented the fact that “…there is probably no part of India regarding whose past less is generally known. In the histories of India, as a whole, Assam is barely mentioned, and only ten lines are devoted to its annals in the historical portion of Hunter’s Indian Empire.”
Despite the passage of a hundred years, Gait’s observations on the narrativisation of Assam in popular Indian historiography remain true as ever. Timothy Garton Ash writes that recorded history is a history of memories. And when memories are being deliberated upon, can forgetting be far away? The act of peeking into the silences of historical narratives that have developed over centuries in Assam, or anywhere else in the world, becomes a crucial intervention.
Some such silences are palpably becoming more visible in the culturescape of poll-oriented Assam. The state has often been termed as ‘Sankardev-Azaan Ore Dexh’ – the land of Sankardev and Azaan Fakir, two religious and cultural saints of medieval Assam responsible for altering its socio-religious landscape. Srimanta Sankardev inspired the Bhakti movement, while Azaan Fakir established Sufi Islam here. Renowned Assamese geographer and social scientist Mohammed Taher observed that the syncretic relationship between Sankardev’s Vaishnavite religious traditions and Azan Fakir’s Sufi Islam was one of the main reasons that Muslims became a part of Assamese society.
These syncretic traditions have been an intrinsic part of Assamese society, including its political and cultural milieus. They are also reflected in the case of Ismail Siddiqui, one of the main commanders of the great Ahom general Lachit Barphukan. Siddiqui defeated the Mughal Army led by Raja Ram Singh in the historic Battle of Saraighat in the 17thCentury. For his bravado, Siddiqui was given the honorific Bagh Hazarika, or the Tiger commanding a thousand soldiers.
Religious sites have also been a significant marker of this syncretism. There have been many instances where Hindu religious sites have been taken care of by Muslims for years and Muslim sites have had been under the care of Hindus. In fact, Azan Fakir who ventured into Assam around 1636 AD, was known to have married a high-status Ahom woman. His dargah was constructed by the Ahom King Swargadeo Churamfa as an act of penance, at Saraguri Chapori in Sivasagar District close to the Ahom capital.
Madan Kamdev
There are many such stories across the Brahmaputra valley in Assam, and one of them is found in the history of the ancient temple site Madan Kamdev, the mythical place where Kamdev supposedly resurrected himself after being burnt to ashes by Shiva. These magnificent ruins lie 40 kilometres outside Guwahati.
Though the site has been dated to the 11-12th century CE, new scholarship suggests that the place may have been even older. Construction may have started with the ruler Vanamalavarmadeva of the Salasthambha dynasty in the 9th century, and continued by the succeeding Pala dynasty up to the 12th century.
The site is the capital of ancient Assam, which was known as Kamrupanagara. Even today, one of the major districts in Assam which encompasses this area is known as Kamrup, and those staying in this district in Lower Assam are generally referred to as Kamrupiyas.
Though the temple is dedicated to Uma-Maheshwar, the site of Madan Kamdev has often been referred to as the Khajuraho of the east due to the numerous erotic sculptures dotting the expansive landscape. Madan Kamdev finds mention in the important 10th century Hindu text, Kalika Purana and in the 16th century Tantric text from Assam, Yogini Tantra. However, this stone temple stretching to around half a km was subsequently destroyed by various earthquakes over the centuries, starting with the earthquake of 1548 CE.
Sculpture at Madan Kamdev temple. Credit: Travelling Slacker/Flickr CC 2.0
The ruins of Madan Kamdev were first excavated in 1855 by the colonial military officer, Captain Dalton. But not much information is available on the kind of preservation or conservation efforts that were undertaken post this discovery. However, records do show that a Muslim land official of the colonial administration, Niyamat Ali Mondol, took the responsibility of preserving this ancient temple. Niyamat Ali belonged to the nearby Piyolikhata Village, around 2 kms from the temple site. He was given the title ‘Mondol’ by the British administration, which meant that he measured land in order to calculate revenue for the colonial administration, and also arbitrated land disputes.
Very little is known or written about Niyamat Ali Mondol, but what is significant is that he became the first doloi or chief administrative officer of Madan Kamdev for 10 years, starting in 1901. The upkeep of Madan Kamdev, as with a lot of similar temple sites was administered by a committee made of locals till either the Government of India or the Assam government or the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) took over the responsibilities of conservation and restoration. It was only as recently as 1977 that the directorate of archaeology in Assam officially took over the responsibility of the upkeep of this ancient site.
Mondol’s role
When the temple faced a severe scarcity of funds, Mondol paid its khazna or land tax in his individual capacity for about four years. With such a history, one would expect the temple to hold information or the villages around the temple to offer some narratives, oral or otherwise. However, as Garton-Ash writes, ‘…writing history is nothing less than an infinity of individual memories of any person or event’. One can definitely discern a new form of historiography in the making – one that is complicit in the erasure of certain persons or events or even the linear chronological history of a tangible space. The ASI museum at the site of the temple does not offer any narrative on who discovered the site, how was it maintained, and who was associated with the site in modern history.
Mondol’s descendants who still live close to Madan Kamdev feel that there is an effort to do away with this part of the history of the temple, and in the history of Assam in general. ‘In the early 1990s, the temple officials including the thendoloi came to our house and took away the only surviving portrait that we had of Mondol, as they wanted to honour his efforts and install the portrait at the temple office,’ says his grandson, 86-year-old Bhola Chowdhury. ‘But the portrait went missing after a few years. We have tried locating it as that was our only tangible memory of him, but unfortunately we have no trace of it,’ he rues.
Kamal Nayan Patowary, an assistant professor of history whose doctoral thesis was on Madan Kamdev, offers an interesting anecdote on Mondol: ‘The locals did tell me about a person called Mondol who was the first doloi of this temple. But apparently, there was some issue with the locals and he was removed from the post of doloi soon (after). Hence, in anger, he took a tamrapatra or copper inscription from the temple, and threw it into a pond. According to the locals, the history of the temple has thus been lost. I did try to excavate the inscription during my doctoral research, and even employed divers to search in the pond, but it was a futile exercise.’
This narrative is however confounded by the fact that Mondol’s son, Chand Mohammed Chowdhury Kamrupi himself was part of the temple committee for about five years after the death of his father. Chowdhury was also part of the temple committees of other ancient temples in the region such as Goreswar, Pingleswar, and the 200-year-old Patrapur mosque. He was a prominent citizen of the region, who was bestowed the title Kamrupi by the locals because of his avowedly secular nature and love of the land. Kamrupi was also a well-known political figure, as well as a published writer and poet. He authored the book Vivaah Chitra in 1936, and also had his essay Purdah published in the journal Chetana which was edited by Ambika Giri Rai Chowdhury, popularly known as Assam Kesari.
Forgetting
In the temple precinct, there is also a palpable reluctance by the current trustees to talk about the modern history of Madan Kamdev. There is no awareness of the histories or narratives associated with sites such as these among devotees, or even in the villages nearby. Historian Will Pooley exhorts us to engage with the absent narratives and corroborate the voices that are heard.
In 2016, the state is facing elections which many term as a game-changer in the political landscape of Assam. Perhaps this is also a historical moment to critically examine the larger absences that are being created. It is a narrative or an absent presence that seems to haunt the Khilonjia or local Muslim community of Assam, which has always identified itself with its ethnic rather than religious identity.
History and memory are always interlinked. Changing memories involve the process of what Garton Ash has called ‘slow fading or forgetting.’ Whether this forgetting can be contained and lost memories retrieved is a question that the Assamese community as a whole may want to ponder upon this year.
The author is a PhD research scholar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> Communities> by Shaheen Ahmed / April 10th, 2016
Iconic Bollywood actress Meena Kumari’s original publicity material and memorabilia, including paintings and portraits of her films, will be on the display at the Womanhood Festival here.
At the event, paintings of 1972 ‘Pakeezah’ and the 1953 classic ‘Daera’, co-starring Nasir Khan will be showcased. Portraits of Dilip Kumar-Meena Kumari starrer ‘Kohinoor’ and ‘Benazir’, co-starring Ashok Kumar and Shashi Kapoor, will be on the display at an event scheduled tomorrow at Osianama Liberty as part of the ongoing festival. Besides, posters of ‘Meena Kumari ki Amar Kahani’, ‘Phool Aur Pathar’ and images of ‘Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam’ will also be featured.
The actress’ films like ‘Pakeezah’, ‘Parineeta’ and ‘Daayra’ will also be screened at the event. “She is a true icon for Womanhood & Cinema, absorbing all, breaking all, in the search to be herself… Along with Nargis and Madhubala, she represents the feminine iconicity just as ‘Mother India’, ‘Mughal-E-Azam’ and ”Pakeezah’ represents a different trinity of Indian cinema,”Neville Tuli, chairman, Osian’s Group said in a statement. Meena Kumari aka Mahjabeen Bano, starred in over 90 films in her career spanning nearly 30 years.
Listen to the songs of Meena Kumari on gaana.com
http://gaana.com/album/meena-kumari-hits
WATCH: Chalte Chalte Yunhi Koi Mil Gaya Tha – Meena Kumari – Pakeezah – Ghulam Mohammed – Old Hindi Song
Sana began the ride in November from Goa, where she had been participating in a rally. So far she has covered 10 States and Kochi is the 50th city she has visited.
Sana Iqbal, a solo biker, is on a mission to create awareness against suicide and on depression
The wheels of life often take unchartered routes and open new vistas, just as they did for biker and life coach Sana Iqbal from Hyderabad. A personal reversal had driven the young mother to abject depression, even to a point when she hoped a bike accident on the highway would bring a quick end to her misery. But then things changed. Today, the 28-year-old is journeying solo across the length and breadth of the country conducting sessions on tackling issues related to the young. So Sana talks on matters that trouble young minds from subjects as innocuous as acne problems to complex ones on relationships, career, marriage, depression and suicide. She is simultaneously pursuing a Master’s in Psychology and does corporate training sessions on behavioural skills.
Though she began young as a biker, as early as in school, she took to hardcore riding only last September. Till then she drove not beyond 20 km of central Hyderabad. But in a desperate state, Sana undertook a long solo journey. There she found support and encouragement from unexpected quarters. Passers-by cheered her, children gathered around her in curiosity and waved her luck as she rode; little gestures that alleviated her grief. A change in mindset came about. She felt that solution to life’s problems was in perception, in looking at the other side. With it also came a desire to help society with this thinking, to propagate a positive attitude among youngsters and her peers.
“When the aspirations of a normal life fail then extraordinary things happen.” she says on her decision to undertake this ride of a lifetime, a mission. Make happiness contagious is her message to fellow beings, which is imprinted boldly on a placard fixed to her Royal Enfield.
Sana began the ride in November from Goa, where she had been participating in a rally. So far she has covered 10 States and Kochi is the 50th city she has visited. She starts her day early and ends at sunset. Local people and truck drivers are her navigators and she rides along where the road takes her to. She carries a knife with her, one that she has never needed. “Our country is the safest place for women,” she says, dispelling the prevailing idea that India is unsafe for women. As a lone female rider she has not encountered any problems that have required help. On the contrary she has found camaraderie everywhere she has been to. In Jhansi where her bike had a flat, she was not charged any fee. In fact, the gentleman commended her efforts and requested her to disseminate the message that Uttar Pradesh is safe and not a lawless state as thought to be. An accident in Rajasthan left her frightened but she changed a hostile situation by her approach. “When the man whose car had hit my bike came to see what had happened, when I least expected the gesture, I said thank you. He was so startled at my response and wondered why I was not threatening him,” she recalls pointing out that kind words can change a situation.
To control one’s anger and to be forgiving are two messages that she wishes to give youngsters. India’s burgeoning biker community is her network, friends that help her with boarding, lodging and connectivity.
In the city, Sana addressed students at Chinmaya Vidyalaya and at SCMS College. From here she moves on to Thiruvananthapuram and Kanyakumari. The North East States are next on her plan.
“Every State has a different traffic sense. Kerala has narrow roads and Rajasthan wide ones but it has a lot of animal traffic. Each place has its beauty,” says Sana preparing her onward mission. “We all want to ‘be the change’ but only a few step out to bring in that change. I hope my act will help do so,” she says, putting on her helmet.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Priyadershini S / Kochi – March 16th, 2016
Hindi-urdu Sahitya Award Committee, Uttar Pradesh is organising an International Literary Seminar on the poetic contribution of the former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam to literature.
The seminar is part of the annual celebrations of the committee which will be held on April 9 at Rai Umanath Bali Auditorium in Qaiserbagh.
Getting together people from both Hindi and Urdu backgrounds, the seminar will have writer and poet Ganga Prasad Vimal, Irtiza Karim, chairperson National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, Yogendra Narayan and Qazi OR Hashmi, Jamia Millia Islamia among other academicians and poets.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Lucknow / TNN / April 08th, 2016
The media may not remember Yamin Hazarika, but for many she is still an Assamese icon.
Guwahati, ASSAM :
Since last week, there has been a flurry of news items in social and mainstream media about Sanjukta Parashar, the superintendent of police in Assam’s Sonitpur district. They gave instances of her bravado, heaped richly-deserved praises on her, and many of them described her as the “first female IPS officer from Assam”.
Sadly for me, the articles were a reminder that popular history, both in Assam and the rest of India, has forgotten all about Yamin Hazarika. That petite lady wore a heavy mantle at a time when women were still defining their roles in India. She was selected in 1979 for the state police services DANIPS (Delhi Andaman Nicobar Islands Police Services) and made it to Indira Gandhi’s security team. While it’s unclear whether she was later promoted to the Indian Police Services, most people in Assam saw Hazarika as no less than an IPS officer and a trailblazer in every way.
To those growing up in Guwahati in the ’90s, Hazarika was one of the few modern female Assamese icons. I met her only twice in my school years but she left a lasting impression on my young mind. She belonged to the Assamese Muslim community, from which few women icons had emerged until then. That impression stayed with me. So last week, when the news reports on Parashar began appearing, I decided to learn more about Hazarika. Who was she truly? To find out, I met her 80-year-old mother and her younger brother Yusuf Hazarika at their home in Guwahati.
Breaking barriers
Yamin Hazarika was born in the late 1950s in Lakhtokia, Guwahati, to Shameem Hazarika and Mohammed Serajul Hazarika. She was the second of five siblings.
Lakhtokia is one of the oldest pockets in Guwahati city that was designed by the British and houses some of the most elite and accomplished Assamese Muslims. Former Indian President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed too was from Lakhtokia, and as my conversation with Hazarika’s brother revealed, their family is related to the late president.
Her grandfather Ikram Rasul was the superintendent of excise in colonial times and was posted in Sylhet. Due to his involvement in the freedom movement, the family said, he was sacked from the job. Hazarika’s mother Shameem was one of the first female car drivers in Guwahati.
Hazarika started her schooling at St Mary’s Convent in Guwahati and passed her senior Cambridge examinations from Pine Mount Convent in Shillong. After that, she left for Delhi to read history at IP College. “She was a bright and studious girl who was always into her books and was completely no-nonsense,” recalled her brother.
After graduation, Hazarika pursued law in Guwahati and appeared for the UPSC examinations twice – first in 1977-78 and then in 1978-79 – clearing both times. She finished her police training at the Maharaj Ranjit Singh Punjab Police Academy in Phillaur, Punjab, where she met her future husband, Rajeev Sagar, who was an IPS officer from the Haryana cadre.
“The results were delayed by over a year when she appeared the first time,” said Yusuf. “Those came out in 1979. By then she had already cracked her second attempt and qualified for the DANIPS [Delhi Andaman Nicobar Islands Police Services] and was part of Indira Gandhi’s security team.”
Does DANIPS qualify as part of the IPS system? One serving IPS officer said a DANIPS official is on par with an IPS officer since DANIPS is a feeder cadre for the IPS. “Yamin was indeed the first Assamese woman to be an IPS officer,” the serving officer insisted, though Scroll could not independently verify this claim. A query to the Ministry of Home Affairs revealed that DANIPS officials get promoted to IPS after certain years’ service. Either way, Hazarika went on to serve in important positions.
Hazarika was posted as assistant commissioner of police in Chanakyapuri, Delhi, and after some time she was promoted to the position of deputy commissioner of police (crimes against women cell) in the capital. In 1998, she was sent to Bosnia as part of the UN peacekeeping force for three months. It was there that she was diagnosed with leukaemia and she had to return to India. Hazarika received treatment at the Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai and at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences, but she succumbed to cancer on July 25, 1999. She was only 43.
Strong but mild-mannered
The few articles on the web on Hazarika describe how she oversaw stringent measures to cut down sexual harassment of women on the capital’s streets. Yet, despite her strong cop persona, Yamin was mild-mannered. “Innu was a very simple and soft spoken lady,” said her brother. “She would hardly raise her voice or be rude.”
Her daughter Huma Hazarika Sharma added: “She was a strong person. Though she was a strict disciplinarian, she was also a fun-loving person. Everyone in the police force who interacted with her still has incredible things to say.”
An officer at the Hauz Khas police station in Delhi, where Hazarika was posted, spoke at length of the time when he served under her. “She was a very tough lady and even today I will salute her,” he said. “I learned so much from her. I cried a lot the day she died.”
Yamin Hazarika may have faded from the media’s memory, but she is still the first female Assamese icon for many. That includes me.
Shaheen Ahmed is a research scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and a former journalist.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Women Icons / by Shaheen Ahmed / June 17th, 2015
Sirat Library finds few mentions in recorded history and it is even fading from the personal histories of the Khilonjia Muslims who live around it.
Image credit: Shaheen Ahmed
Every time Assam heads into an election, the political discourse in the state invariably veers towards the issue of indigeniety. Who is an original inhabitant (and who is not) becomes a central question, with all the political parties nudging the electorate’s collective memory to recall real and imagined injustices.
With elections having kicked off in Assam again, my thoughts returned to something else, to my childhood when I would accompany my parents to a concrete structure in Guwahati’s Lakhtokia area. The structure was architecturally nondescript, but the images and the experiences of it still coalesced to form fragments of my memory. Known locally as Sirat Library – although the Assamese pronunciation Sirot often rendered the name incomprehensible – it was located within the precincts of a mosque called Lakhtokia Masjid No. 1.
I vaguely recall public meetings being held in the small library. And till the early 2000s, it moonlighted as a voting booth. For a child, it was an unusual sight to see so many people of different religions line up to cast their votes and even more unusual to see them do so in a library inside a mosque.
The structure still stands today. But the only sight that greets a visitor is of a small room bereft of books or readers. Its holdings are restricted to a small glass cupboard and a few Islamic texts in it.
Legacy of the past
The history of the library is really important to the Khilonjia Muslims or ethnic Assamese Muslims living in Guwahati. Khilonjia Muslims have been in Assam since before the Ahom invasion in the 13th century and they have always been known to relate to their ethnic, rather than their religious, identity.
Shehabuddin Talish, the official scribe of Mir Jumlah, the Nawab of Bengal who invaded Assam in 1662, described their encounter with the Muslims in Assam: “The Muslims whom we met in Assam are Assamese in their habits, and Muhammadans but in name.”
The famous colonial historian Sir Edward Gait, in his monumental work A History of Assam published in 1905, extensively employed Talish’s descriptions to map out a definitive chart of Assam’s history. Nevertheless, historical narratives of Khilonjia Muslims remain sketchy. The same fate is shared by the library in Lakhtokia.
There are no written records of when or who constructed the library. It is, however, believed that the structure is among of the oldest libraries in Guwahati, and the mosque it is a part of is among the three oldest mosques constructed in the colonial period.
The mosque finds a mention in an article in 1885 in the journal Assam Bandhu, which was edited by the Assamese intellectual Gunabhiram Barua. The land for the mosque was donated by Col. Jalnur Ali Ahmed, the father of the fifth President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. Col. Ahmed was a distinguished Assamese of his time: he was the second Assamese associated with the Imperial Medical Services and the first Assamese to receive an M.D. degree from London.
Personal histories
Writer-lawyer Akdas Ali Mir, one of the inhabitants of the locality, points to a letter written in 1915 by AHW Benting, the then Commissioner of Assam, which is probably one of the earliest and only clues to tracing the history of the library. “Benting had issued directions in an Order Letter to shift the Makhtab (primary Islamic school) established by the British from the mosque to the present location, where the Junior Madrassa High School is in Guwahati.”
Mir continued: “We can surmise that Sirat Library is the spot where the Makhtab was and then got converted into a library.” This may be true as Sirat is an Arabic word meaning a “way of life”.
As with all public libraries in the state, Sirat Library too was awarded a monthly grant from the government for its upkeep. But the actual running was done by the area’s Assamese Muslims, with people taking turns as librarians. Renowned Assamese filmmaker Altaf Majid remembers his childhood days spent in the library reading in the quiet. “My uncle used to be the librarian for many years. Every Friday afternoon he would take me to the iconic Lawyers’ Book Stall in nearby Pan Bazaar to buy books. In fact I read the Mahabharata in Bengali in Sirat Library in the 1960s.”
Majid continued: “This library was also a repository of well-known pulp fiction of the period. They were in English, Assamese and Bengali. In fact, I also read my first English novel in this library as well as the famous Bengali Mohan Detective Series and the Assamese adventure series Pa-Phu.”
Credit: Shaheen Ahmed
Mukimuddin Ahmed, another resident, talks of the days in the late 1950s when he would act as the librarian in the evenings. “I was paid Rs 5 every month as the librarian and I worked for a year. Every afternoon after school I would go to the residences to collect the newspapers for the library. In the evenings after the readers had finished reading them I would then return them to the respective households.”
Assamese Muslim women had a strong role to play in the library’s upkeep. In the late 1960s, the only Assamese Muslim women’s social organisation, Anjumaan-E-Khawaateenein Islam, contributed Rs 10,000 to construct the new building for the library from the earlier Assam-type house construction. Noted Assamese woman writer Alimun Nessa Piyar donated furniture to the library in 1960.
As Helena Barranha and Susana S. Martins poignantly observed , “Memory has become both an intellectual challenge and a commodity for easy consumption.” This is true for contemporary India in general, and Sirat Library epitomises the trend. The erasure of the library from popular memory testifies to the erasure of cultural traditions that were once so integral to the Assamese society.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Memory Lane / by Shaheen Ahmed / April 05th, 2016
A view of Aziz Mulk Street off Model School Road. / Photo: V. Ganesan
Just beyond the Gemini flyover, Model School Road, Anna Salai and Graeme’s Road enclose a perfect rabbit’s warren of streets. There are nine of them, and they all take their name from Aziz Ul Mulk, a Muslim nobleman who once owned the entire area.
This was known as Aziz Baugh till the early 20th Century and was most likely more of a garden than the residence of the owner. When Sir William Thomas Denison, Governor of Madras, was leaving the city in 1866, he, his wife and daughter were invited for a farewell hosted by the Muslims at the ‘Gardens of Azeez Ool Moolk Bahadoor, Graemes Road, at 7 1/2 pm, on Saturday, the 24th of March’.
‘An evening entertainment in the gardens of a man bearing such a name!’ enthused Denison in his diary. He expected something out of the Arabian Nights and was not disappointed. The first family alighted in front of a wide, open verandah that was brilliantly lit, the brightness being enhanced by ‘suspended globular mirrors’. The hosts, all clad in white but sporting red turbans and sashes, stood on either side of the steps and ushered the guests to sofas at the rear of the verandah. A formal address was presented.
Dinner was in a shamiana to the side of this pavilion and ‘old Azeez Ool Moolk’ led Lady Denison to it, while the Governor was escorted by Nazim Jung, his son ‘who is an active intriguing man, a sort of politician in his way, and the presiding genius of the present entertainment’. Dinner was served in European style and described as a ‘tedious affair’ in which the English found much to their amazement that the hosts ate nothing but a ‘biscuit and some fruit’. Thereafter, the group moved to another shamiana where a nautch was presented.
‘Eight dancing girls, all dressed alike, stood in the centre of the apartment, each holding one of a cluster of eight ropes, which were suspended from the ceiling; and then with a slow and graceful movement passed to and fro, in and out, in such a manner as, by this movement only, to twist the eight ropes into a regular plait through their whole length, and then to untwist them, the whole being done by the dance only, without the application of the hands’. We would recognise this today as pinnal kolattam.
All this gaiety hid the fact that Aziz Ul Mulk was heavily indebted, mortgaging much of his valuables with the bank of Girdar Das Vallaba Das. Like the aristocrat in Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar, he was clearly spending his money on entertainment he could ill afford. Aziz Ul Mulk’s death is not recorded, but by 1868, the intriguing son — Sumsaum Ud Dowlah Bahadur aka Nazim Jung — was dead. The family finances must have declined thereafter, for, by 1902, we find the area recognised as a slum. Certainly, there is no trace of the garden where a Governor once dined.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus> Hidden Histories / by Sriram V / Chennai – April 08th, 2016
India today said Begum Hazrat Mahal, who had rebelled against British colonial rule in the country in 1857-58, will always be remembered for her contribution in India’s freedom struggle and described her as a “source of inspiration”.
Recalling Begum’s contributions towards the freedom movement of India, India’s Ambassador to Nepal Ranjit Rae laid a wreath on her tomb to commemorate her 137th death anniversary here.
“We must remember her with great honour as she has been a source of inspiration for us all,” Rae said.
Begum of Awadh and the first wife of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who was one of the heroes of freedom struggle of 1857, died on April 7, 1879 during her refuge in Nepal.
Noting that Mahal was one of the freedom fighters of the first freedom movement of India, Rae said she had always been remembered for her contributions in India’s freedom struggle.
He also offered to provide necessary assistance to protect and preserve one and a half century old Hazrat Mahal tomb located in the heart of Kathmandu.
“Hazrat Mahal has been a symbol of age old tie between Nepal and India,” Rae said.
Begum fiercely fought the British East India Company during the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, with the help of her commander Raja Jailal Singh. When her forces regained power of Lucknow for a brief stint, her son Brijis Qadra was declared ruler of Awadh.
When the forces under the command of the British re-captured Lucknow and most of Awadh, she was forced to retreat. She then took refuge in Kathmandu along with 10-year-old Qadr and some other loyal supporters.
Begum’s rebellion was ignited by the demolition of temples and mosques by the East India Company to make way for roads.
source: http://www.ptinews.com / Press Trust of India (PTI) / Home> International / by Shrish B Pradhan / Kathmandu – PTI, April 07th, 2016
