Page 33 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 2: Amitav Ghosh; Shadow Lines: Detailed Study of Part—I (A Bird’s Eye View)

about it that the whole episode did not report of the single loss of life. Thousands of people took Notes
part in demonstrations but they comprised Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Buddhists et al. A
remarkable unity was displayed.
In Pakistan also there were meetings and demonstrations in both wings of the country. It was
declared that the theft of the relic was an attack upon the identity of the Muslim. Karachi observed
31st December as a ‘Black Day’ and soon other cities followed the suit.
Later when the relic was recovered there was rejoicing all over Kashmir but while the people were
dancing on the streets and organizing thanks giving meetings in Kashmir, a procession marching
against the disappearance of the relic turned violent in Dhaka. A couple of lives were lost and
properties of Hindus were put to fire. Over the next few days the riots spread outwards from
Khulna into the neighbouring towns. Hindu refugees began to pour over the border into India.
Soon Calcutta also erupted and mobs went rampaging through the city killing Muslims and
burning and looting their shops and houses.
Once the riots started in Khulna the government of East Pakistan lost no time in sending the army
there to put down the ‘disturbances’. But it was already too late. One of the headlines of
7th January read: Fourteen die in frenzy off Khulna.
Over the next few days the riots spread outwards from Khulna into the neighboring towns and
districts and towards Dhaka. Soon Hindu refugees began to pour over the border into India, in
trains and on foot. The Pakistani government provided these trains with armed guards and appeared
to have done with it could to protect them. At some places on the border the trains were stopped
by mobs, some of which were heard to chant the slogans ‘Kashmir Day zindabad’ (perhaps at that
very moment, the crowds in Kashmir were shouting ‘Central intelligence zindabad’). But there
did not appear to have been any serious attacks on the trains. The towns and cities of East Pakistan
were now in the grip of a ‘frenzy’ of looting, killing and burning.
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 8th and 9th January, with refugees still pouring in, rumours began to
flow like floodwaters through the city and angry crowds began to gather at the stations.
And so, the vents followed their own grotesque logic, and on 10th 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 part
of the city.
‘Stray incidents’ of arson and looting continued for a few days, in Dhaka as well as Calcutta,
despite the presence of the two armies. 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 organizing 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.
The two governments levelled a series of symmetrical accusations. None of the two seemed to
own up the responsibility for it. They wanted to wash their hands off the affair by blaming it on
the other. On 7th 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

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