Ripples from Bengal

Around the middle of the 19th century, two men set out from a village in Hooghly district of what is today West Bengal, striding towards their future. Their journey, almost entirely on foot, took them through the entrails of lowland Bengal into the borderlands of hilly colonial Assam, their destination. After nearly a year on the road, they reached Shillong, then a backwater. There, they found the British authorities engaged in survey work. This was a lucky break, as it gave them a business opportunity: supplying groceries and other items to the survey team, and eventually to others. Over the next few years, their business expanded into many other activities, including running a commercial horse-driven mail service between Shillong and Calcutta, a large business that was eventually taken over by their children. Of those two intrepid travellers, one was the grandfather of my maternal grandfather.

My father's ancestral home is in the district of Noakhali, the heart of southern Bengal, in present-day Bangladesh. It is well known for high levels of emigration, as land shortage has driven millions to seek their livelihoods elsewhere. The migrants have been derisively referred to in Bengal and surrounding regions as goru chor (cattle rustlers), juta chor (shoe thieves) and other such epithets. It has a high education rate, as the migrants will generally try anything that could raise an income. One joke, common to other regions of Southasia with high emigration rates, recounts how, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, a Noakhali man with a tiny shop tried to sell him a packet of cigarettes. He had migrated there before the first man on the moon.