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Forty years ago this month, the country of Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan. Then-President Richard Nixon supported Pakistan during the war because he wanted to prove the US would stand by an ally.

Many Americans disagreed with that stance. And when a ship headed for Pakistan with military equipment and ammunition was set to stop at a US port, one group of Americans felt it was necessary to get involved.

“I was ready to risk my life there,” says 78-year-old Richard Taylor. “I just wanted to get in front of that ship.”

In July 1971, Taylor and a group of protesters used canoes and kayaks to try and block the Pakistani freighter Padma from reaching the Port of Baltimore.

The ship was coming from Canada, bound for Pakistan. It was said to be carrying military equipment and ammunition, presumably to aid the government in its war with what was then called East Pakistan.

The US had ordered an arms embargo on new shipments to Pakistan. But newspapers reported that Pakistani freighters like The Padma were still visiting US ports to load military equipment that had been purchased before the embargo.

Taylor’s flotilla of two canoes, three kayaks and a rubber raft left from Baltimore’s Broening Park. The police and Coast Guard tried to stop it. But Taylor says the group was undaunted.

“One of key parts of this was that the US government was sending military aid to the West Pakistani government that was doing the invasion,” says Taylor. “So that made it poignant. People were suffering thousands of miles away, but our government was helping that suffering to happen.”

Timmy Aziz knew that suffering first hand. He grew up in East Pakistan. He was 10 when war broke out. He now teaches environmental design here in Baltimore.

“It’s really impressive how far they would have had to have gone,” says Aziz. “They would have been way in the middle of the water and completely in harm’s way. This massive freighter and these tiny little canoes, which would easily get washed away in the wake of the ship that size.”

Forty years on, Bengalis are expressing a renewed interest in their country’s independence movement. One of them is New Yorker Aris Yousuf. He finds the canoe blockade story so fascinating that he’s making a documentary on it.

“I wanted to see if I could make a film about the history of 1971, Bangladesh’s independence war and what happened in the US and be able to put it together from the people who participated at that time,” says Yousuf.

What happened that time in July 1971 was that the US Coast Guard foiled Richard Taylor and his friends. The Padma made it into the harbor; it was eventually loaded and left. The following month, protesters expanded their actions to include any Pakistani ship trying to dock in the US, regardless of its cargo. And they enticed longshoremen at the Port of Philadelphia to join the boycott.

“The cause had a heart, had a deep heart,” says 64-year-old Elliot Gevis. “And there were tremendous atrocities that were going on.”

Today, Gevis is a pediatrician. But back in 1971, he worked the docks in Philadelphia. He learned about the war in East Pakistan and the canoe protest from flyers, and helped convince other longshoremen not to load ships. The first freighter affected was The Al-Ahmadi. Richard Taylor and other protesters again used canoes and kayaks to try and block the ship. When it ran the blockade, Gevis and other dockworkers refused to unload it.

“Not everybody was supportive of that,” Gevis recalls. “But then again, they did respect unions. And they did respect not crossing picket lines, things of that sort. But at the same time, they had to pay bills and feed families. That was a big consideration.”

When the ship pushed off, no cargo had been loaded or unloaded.

After four more months of intense protests–and picketing in front of the White House– the US government finally ended all arms exports to Pakistan. It marked the end of one of the more unusual protest movements in America’s history.

“We’ve been just humbled by people who are Bengalis saying we couldn’t have done it without this movement here,” says Phyllis Taylor, Richard’s wife.

She, too, was involved in the protests.

“Not us necessarily, but a small group of committed people giving us hope, as Dick said, in the jungles that you could make a change.”

After nine months of fighting, East Pakistanis won the war. Their prize: a country now known as Bangladesh.

By Praveen Swami

The Hindu

By Mark Dummett BBC News

On 13 June 1971, an article in the UK’s Sunday Times exposed the brutality of Pakistan’s suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising. It forced the reporter’s family into hiding and changed history.

Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.

So starts one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.

Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK’s Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army’s brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.

Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed, but certainly a huge number of people lost their lives. Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. The Bangladesh government puts the figure at three million.

The strategy failed, and Bangladeshis are now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the birth of their country. Meanwhile, the first trial of those accused of committing war crimes has recently begun in Dhaka.

Anthony Mascarenhas

• July 1928: Born in Goa
• 1930s: Educated in Karachi
• June 1971: Exposes war crimes in East Pakistan that alter international opinion
• 1972: Wins international journalism awards
• 1979: Reports that Pakistan has developed nuclear weapons

There is little doubt that Mascarenhas’ reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the then editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her “on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India’s armed intervention,” he recalled.

Not that this was ever Mascarenhas’ intention. He was, Evans wrote in his memoirs, “just a very good reporter doing an honest job”.

He was also very brave. Pakistan, at the time, was run by the military, and he knew that he would have to get himself and his family out of the country before the story could be published – not an easy task in those days.

When the war in what was then East Pakistan broke out in March 1971, Mascarenhas was a respected journalist in Karachi, the main city in the country’s dominant western wing, on good terms with the country’s ruling elite. He was a member of the city’s small community of Goan Christians, and he and Yvonne had five children.

It was terrifying – I had to leave everything behind”

Yvonne Mascarenhas

The conflict was sparked by elections, which were won by an East Pakistani party, the Awami League, which wanted greater autonomy for the region.

While the political parties and the military argued over the formation of a new government, many Bengalis became convinced that West Pakistan was deliberately blocking their ambitions.

The situation started to become violent. The Awami League launched a campaign of civil disobedience, its supporters attacked many non-Bengali civilians, and the army flew in thousands of reinforcements.

On the evening of 25 March it launched a pre-emptive strike against the Awami League, and other perceived opponents, including members of the intelligentsia and the Hindu community, who at that time made up around 20% of the province’s 75 million people.

In the first of many notorious war crimes, soldiers attacked Dhaka University, lining up and executing students and professors.

Their campaign of terror then moved into the countryside, where they battled local troops who had mutinied.

Initially, the plan seemed to work, and the army decided it would be a good idea to invite some Pakistani reporters to the region to show them how they had successfully dealt with the “freedom fighters”.

Foreign journalists had already been expelled, and Pakistan was also keen to publicise atrocities committed by the other side. Awami League supporters had massacred tens of thousands of civilians whose loyalty they suspected, a war crime that is still denied by many today in Bangladesh.

Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province. When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to.

But one of them refused.

Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers him coming back distraught: “I’d never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional,” she says, speaking from her home in west London.

“He told me that if he couldn’t write the story of what he’d seen he’d never be able to write another word again.”

Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried.

Pretending he was visiting his sick sister, Mascarenhas then travelled to London, where he headed straight to the Sunday Times and the editor’s office.

Evans remembers him in that meeting as having “the bearing of a military man, square-set and moustached, but appealing, almost soulful eyes and an air of profound melancholy”.

“He’d been shocked by the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale,” Evans wrote.

Mascarenhas told him he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a “final solution”.

Evans promised to run the story, but first Yvonne and the children had to escape Karachi.

They had agreed that the signal for them to start preparing for this was a telegram from Mascarenhas saying that “Ann’s operation was successful”.

Yvonne remembers receiving the message at three the next morning. “I heard the telegram man bang at my window and I woke up my sons and I was, oh my gosh, we have to go to London. It was terrifying. I had to leave everything behind.”

“We could only take one suitcase each. We were crying so much it was like a funeral,” she says.

To avoid suspicion, Mascarenhas had to return to Pakistan before his family could leave. But as Pakistanis were only allowed one foreign flight a year, he then had to sneak out of the country by himself, crossing by land into Afghanistan.

The day after the family was reunited in their new home in London, the Sunday Times published his article, under the headline “Genocide”.

‘Betrayal’

It is such a powerful piece of reporting because Mascarenhas was clearly so well trusted by the Pakistani officers he spent time with.

I have witnessed the brutality of ‘kill and burn missions’ as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages.

I have seen whole villages devastated by ‘punitive action’.

And in the officer’s mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honourable men proudly chewed over the day’s kill.

‘How many did you get?’ The answers are seared in my memory.

His article was – from Pakistan’s point of view – a huge betrayal and he was accused of being an enemy agent. It still denies its forces were behind such atrocities as those described by Mascarenhas, and blames Indian propaganda.

However, he still maintained excellent contacts there, and in 1979 became the first journalist to reveal that Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons.

In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country’s Liberation War Museum.

This was one of the most significant articles written on the war”

Mofidul Huq/Liberation War Museum

In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country’s Liberation War Museum.

“This was one of the most significant articles written on the war. It came out when our country was cut off, and helped inform the world of what was going on here,” says Mofidul Huq, a trustee of the museum.

His family, meanwhile, settled into life in a new and colder country.

“People were so serious in London and nobody ever talked to us,” Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers. “We were used to happy, smiley faces, it was all a bit of a change for us after Karachi. But we never regretted it.”

The book and the film celebrate 40 years of Bangladesh’s turbulent history. Through images by the finest photojournalists in the world and personal interviews of photographers, freedom fighters, refugees and care givers, they map the birth of the nation and record the pain and sacrifice of the ordinary Bangladeshi, in what was one of the most massive human displacements in recent times.  There are brief references to the complexities facing modern Bangladesh and its hope for the future.

at the Chhayanaut Auditorium, House 72, Road 15A, Dhanmondi, Dhaka 1209

at 11 am on Monday, 12 December 2011

For those of you who missed David Burnett’s brilliant presentation last night, this is a chance to meet him in person. David Burnett, Raghu Rai and Abdul Hamid Raihan are the three photographers interviewed in the film.

Please link with us at www.drik.tv and watch live web streaming of the launch . The live streaming will commence at 11 am (Bangladesh time), on the 12th of December 2011.

Rashid Talukder 1939 – 2011

‘Daktaaar’. The loud call would be promptly followed by a big grin and a bigger bear hug. He insisted on calling me by that title and always referred to it, when addressing me in public. Rashid Talukder (Rashid Bhai – elder brother – to all of us) didn’t speak ‘posh’ Bangla, struggled somewhat with English and wasn’t encumbered with any of the polish of ‘bhodrolok’ upbringing many of us were trapped in. Unlike many others however, he took pride in his upbringing. That his apprenticeship involved making tea for the darkroom team, was something he was completely at ease with. There lay his charm. Quick witted, fast on his feet, streetwise, gregarious, loud and completely disarming. Rashid Talukder was an unlikely rebel who was impossible to dislike. He took ownership of my title. Despite his genius, he was all too aware of how photojournalists were regarded. In a profession way down in the pecking order of the hierarchical newsroom, he had felt the full brunt of the class structure where the photojournalist was the illiterate worker. Visually illiterate news editors would call the shots when it came to picture use. The concept of a picture editor had never entered newspaper parlance. The status my Daktar title implied to a photojournalist was something we were all going to share.

Those were the days one would check the chemistry in the developer from its taste. An extra puff of the cigarette would serve as a safelight to check if the film had been sufficiently exposed. Deadlines often meant printing directly from wet negatives. Once the twin lens reflex cameras gave way to the more versatile 35 mm, the film stock itself was often the back end of a roll of cine film bought cheaply from movie industry rejects. Fibre base wasn’t a fashionable thing in those days. It was the only type available. Chinese Xiamen and Era paper were found in limited grades with changes in the chemistry providing variation in contrast. It was in those grueling unventilated toilets converted to darkrooms that Rashid Bhai made print after print that documented the painful, rebellious, joyous moments of a young nation in the making.

I chided him for the fact that he had never made any contact sheets. His life’s possession, a garbage bag filled with negatives in no specific order or category, made it impossible to work from his archives. But what photographs! This was the man who had witnessed every major event in Bangladesh’s turbulent history. Interspersed between the iconic images of our nation’s past were the curious observations of a natural story teller. Kids bathing in the river with a real live elephant for a rubber duck. The courtship rites of hill people, a child being blessed by a sadhu, a duck sedately walking her ducklings across a busy Motijheel street were the slices of life that peered out of the more remembered seminal moments of our history that this remarkable photojournalist had meticulously recorded.

Like the other photojournalists of his time, he too had been exploited by many. Fellow photographers who had borrowed negatives which were never returned, only to be published later in the borrower’s names. Publishers who sweet-talked him into handing over negatives and prints for which he was often neither paid nor credited. Politicians who had used his photographs to further their campaigns. Surprisingly, there was no cynicism in Rashid Bhai’s description of these events. He said them in his matter of fact way. Even the time when he had faced the brutality of a policeman, whose life he had saved in an earlier skirmish, left no trace of anger or a search for revenge. I knew full well, Rashid Bhai would yet again put his own life on the line to save the same policeman had the situation recurred. On that particular occasion, the police were still after him, and we had smuggled him out of the hospital bed, knowing he wasn’t safe there.

This was a man who knew everyone worth knowing in this land of ours. But it was his relationship with lesser mortals that characterized the man. Walking with him to a major bank was an eye opener. Sure he could walk into the office of the chairman without an appointment, but he also knew every guard, every cleaner in the building. Would stop to ask someone how his new grandchild was doing. Whether his arthritis was better. Quietly slip someone some money because he knew there was no food at home. He remained his unassuming self regardless of who was at the other end. His was a large family whose members transcended all barriers of race and class. He was everone’s Rashid Bhai.

His first editor, A B M Musa had given him a simple instruction on his first assignment. “Arrive 30 minutes before the event, leave 30 minutes after it is all over.” Rashid Bhai had taken the message to heart, not only in terms of time, but in the spirit of the advice. He would always go that extra mile. His were the images that the others had failed to notice. The otherwise insignificant moments made significant through his discerning eyes.

In the days of territorial battles when photojournalists were barred from becoming members of the Bangladesh Photographic Society (BPS, a camera club that was more inclusive and embraced amateurs and art photographers), Rashid Bhai gave up his membership of the photojournalist association that he himself had founded, to show his solidarity with the wider fraternity. He wore the predictable ostracization as a badge of honour.

As an understudy during a trip to a photo conference in Kolkata, Rashid Bhai, then the president of BPS led our motley gang to what in those days was a major regional event. This was when I saw first hand his remarkable people skills. Hardened customs officers at the Benapole border, who knew no language other than the one of Taka, soon became long lost friends. Perfect strangers were soon inviting us home for dinner. Rashid Bhai, playing the fake prima donna, insisting on his favourite dish being on the menu. His infectious charm brought out the cheekier side of Saeeda Khanam, the veteran woman photographer, who displayed a side we had never suspected.

We had both been given an honourary fellowship by the Bangladesh Photographic Society. In the group exhibition at Shilpakala Academy (The academy of fine and performing arts), Rashid Bhai presented a set of prints all laminated with a prominent “Gold Medallist” stamp in the corner. It had upset me at that time. They detracted from the images and I saw no reason for him to mention he was a ‘Gold Medallist’. It seemed cheap. It was much later that I was able to step down from my high horse and recognize the reason for his actions. The man who had dedicated his entire life to telling the untold stories of his nation, had never been appreciated by his own public. Sure they praised him, and patted him on the back condescendingly on appropriate occasions, but he had never been given the professional respect that he deserved. The Ekushey Padak, the award given in memory of the language martyrs had never been given to the man who had done the most to enshrine that memory. Even upon Rashid Bhai’s death, the newspapers that wanted to publish his pictures, wanted them for free. “We’ll provide a credit line” they’d say, knowing the family still had outstanding medical bills to pay. They did not respect his work, understand his craft, recognize his sacrifice. They did understand gold medals. Yes, he had stooped to their standards. Pampered to their value systems. He was prepared to do so for his profession. The ‘daktar’ title suddenly made a whole lot of sense.

The Lifetime Achievement Award he had been given at Chobi Mela V provided scholarships for deserving students from Bangladeshi villages to study at Pathshala, The South Asian Media Academy. My earlier attempts to get him recognized had failed. The Side Gallery had offered a grant to host his exhibition. Rashid Bhai had failed to get his work together in time. I was delighted when my nomination for the first National Geographic Pioneer Photography Award went to Rashid Bhai. Now that the award is said to be closing down, perhaps he will remain the only recipient of the prestigious award. Sadly here too the money never made it to him in time. Before he left for the United States, we arranged a long interview. Stories poured out that left us all in awe.

Rashid Bhai had felt slighted at the wedding of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s son. The father of the nation, sensing Rashid Bhai’s obhiman, also refused to eat at his own son’s wedding. Pride was restored and the wedding went ahead only when the two men sat down to dine together. Stories of having kathal and muri at the open house of the great Maulana Abdhul Hamid Khan Bhashani were amongst the nuggets that he shared with us that day.

That was the last day we spoke. When I visited him in hospital near Drik, he was asleep. That was the only time he had failed to hug me or call out ‘Daktaar’. Adieu my friend. May they recognize your greatness in afterlife. May we learn from your loss. May the light be with you.

Shahidul Alam
Mexico City
25th October 2011

Rashid

Talukder was a founder board member of Pathshala, South Asian Media Academy and a contributing photographer to majorityworld.com. His entire work is archived at Drik Picture Agency.

By Peter Marshall

From the blog >Re Photo

“Isn’t it a thrill to have him here in London” said the woman behind me to a friend as we we all waited, hardly an empty seat in the small lecture area of National Geographics’s Regent St first floor, and the next hour or so listening to Shahidul Alam talking, showing pictures and answering questions certainly justified her anticipation.

Probably most of us in the audience had some idea of the incredible transformation Dr Alam has made to the world of photography, not just in his native Bangladesh but worldwide, although so much still remains to be done, but I think all of us found there was even more to him – and his family – than we had been previously aware.

Alam’s mother in particular was a formidable woman; determined to get a university education despite the opposition of her mother-in-law to the education of women, she left home every morning in a burkha “going to visit friends” and went to study. Armed with her degree she dedicated herself to the education of women, and having found little backing for her project, bought a tent and used it to set up her own school for girls.

Later too we heard that his father had dared to evade the “invitation” sent to him along with the other leading intellectuals of the country to take tea with the occupying Pakistani generals in 1971 just a few days before the end of the war. It was a story accompanied by a picture by Rashid Talukdar of a severed head in rubble, from the killing fields of Rayerbazar. Altogether more than a thousand teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, artists, writers and engineers were massacred.

Shahidul Alam was sent to study chemistry in the UK in 1972, gaining his Ph.D in London, and taught the subject while at the same time developing an interest in photography, at first making camera club style pretty pictures. But then he came across photographs that were harder to understand and seemed to have more depth – such as Steichen’s ‘Heavy Roses’, said to be the last picture he took in France in 1914, sumptuous but slowly decaying and fading as the Great War started – and began learning to see and to work at finding out what was interesting about such less obvious pictures. While living in Kingsbury in Northwest London he photographed people in his locality and took them to the local paper, who published them as a spread on the back page and paid him a tenner for them (a local paper paying – how times change!) – his first professional work.

He had (and still has) a particular love of photographing children, and having seen that a child portraiture studio – Young Rascals Studio in Acton – wanted photographers he went for an interview and got the job, and was soon the most successful of their photographers, earning around £350 a week, a pretty good wage at the time.

After a while, although he was doing well financially he decided that what he was doing was not something he wanted to devote his life to, and he made up his mind to return to Dhaka with his savings of £2800, and go back and live with his parents and try and become a photographer and take part in the life of his own country . It wasn’t easy to find any employment there, so he set up his own business as a photographer as well as starting to teach photography and work with communities.

Alam was at pains to point out that he had no problem with white western photographers coming to photograph in his country, but that he felt that photographers from countries in the majority world had an understanding of their own communities that provided them with a different viewpoint. He wanted a pluralistic world in which different people got to tell stories, but was against the kind of monopolistic view that media around the world tended to project of countries like his own. This was brought home strongly to him while on a visit to Northern Ireland when a five-year-old showed her surprise at seeing him playing with a few coins. Even at that age she knew that people from Bangladesh didn’t have any money.

Increasingly too he began to question his own position in his own society, as a middle class man with a camera – and characteristically began to do something practical about it. In 1994 he set up a women’s’ photography group, bringing a woman to the country to teach them, and he also began teaching photography to classes of working class children. He then set up the Pathshala school of Photography, now recognised as a world-leading school for photojournalism, with its students and ex-students gaining exceptional success in international competitions. It is also possibly unique in that all of those finishing the course have found work as photographers, though Alam did say that the market for photographers in Bangladesh was now becoming saturated and he was having to think about encouraging some students to work in ancillary professions such as picture editing and picture research.

It was great to see in his photographs and a short film clip how photography was being taken to the people in Bangladesh, with mobile exhibitions mounted on bullock carts and cycle carts being taken into villages, and also the work with village children. Alam also founded and directs the Chobi Mela international festival of photography held in Dhaka every two years which he set up is the largest photography festival in Asia and takes photography out on the streets (and on a boat) with a very different atmosphere to most festivals.

Through his photographic agency Drik, (now part of a wider multimedia organisation) set up in 1989, Alam has worked hard to change the way that rich world publications deal with events in Bangladesh and the majority world generally, although not always yet with great success. From 1983 the political events in his country turned him to documenting the political movement against the military rule of General Ershad which lasted, with minor changes until 1991. During the later years of that period there was increasing disorder and a ban on reporting pro-democracy activities – which newspapers responded to by ceasing publication. During this time Alam kept sending out pictures of the political events to news organisations around the world – who ignored them , as to them it wasn’t news. The only time the world press took any interest in Bangladesh was at times of natural disasters – cyclones and floods. (Presumably, though he didn’t say so, this became news because of the pressure from the major aid agencies, who avoid involvement in ‘political’ issues.)

Alam’s talk was entitled ‘When the lions find their storytellers‘, from the widespread African proverb “Until the lion find their storytellers, stories about hunting will always glorify the hunter.” Whoever does not have a voice is almost always going to be the loser. His life’s work has been trying to tell the lions’ story and to teach the lions so they can tell their own story.

Drik Picture Agency has played an important part in this, and more recently has set up ‘Majority World‘, a platform set up to allow “indigenous photographers, photographic agencies and image collections from the majority world to gain fair access to global image markets” and to present image buyers with “the the wealth of fresh imagery and photographic talent emerging from the Majority World.”

He ended his talk with a little about two of his heroes, and the final image was what is now perhaps his best-known photograph, possibly the last official portrait of Nelson Mandela. As always, Alam had a story to tell, of how he was held up travelling from Mexico to take it and thought he had missed his chance to take the picture, but hearing about his transport problem, Mandela actually rescheduled the sitting for two days later. The picture seemed to be a suitable backdrop against which to take his picture and I got out my Fuji X100 and took a few frames from my third row seat, some of which needed rather drastic cropping.

Questions at the end of the talk brought out some other vast aspects of his work that he had not included, including the work he and his fellow photographers have undertaken over the years on the vast environmental problems of his country, much of which is likely to disappear as global warming leads to sea level rise.

One questioner brought up the problem of the relationship between documentary and art photography, and of how Alam has managed to work so effectively across both spheres. It was during his answer that he removed the pair of ordinary inexpensive sandals he was as always wearing and held them up into the light, saying put them in a gallery with the right display and lighting and they would sell as a work of art for thirty or forty thousand pounds (I did think he might have to change his name to Tracey Emin as well) before putting them back on his feet and saying these are now just sandals again. It was only a part of his response, but like much of his talk, one that promoted thought. He also talked about the Crossfire project on extra-judicial killings in Bangladesh which rather than attempting to look at these by documentary photographs of events he made large format colour images of the places where the killings had taken place, exhibiting them together with the facts about the events in what he called “A quiet metaphor for the screaming truth” – and which was closed and barricaded by armed police – but as I also mentioned here was opened in the road outside the gallery.

It was a talk that was full of hope and inspiration, but one that also left me with something of a feeling of despair for the situation of photography in my own country. In Bangladesh things seem much starker and the struggles and possibilities more obvious. Here photography often seems strangled, choked by the money and prejudices of the art world, distorted by academia. We’ve seen the abandonment of our major documentary resource, Side Gallery, by the Arts Council and the continued side-lining of our most democratic photography festival, the East London Photomonth, by the photographic establishment.

Shahidul Alam’s first solo retrospective in the UK, ‘My Journey as Witness‘ opens at Tristan Hoare’s gallery in the Wilmotte Gallery at Lichfield Studios, 133 Oxford Gardens, London W10 6NE on 6th October, and runs until 18 November 2011, with a book of the same title being launched the in the UK on October 10 by Skira, Milan. Copies are actually already on sale and I took a short look at it at the National Geographic Store. It is certainly a tribute to Alam that the first volume in what Skira intend to be a multi-volume series on the arts of Bangladesh is devoted to him and to photography. The book has an introduction by Sebastião Salgado and preface by Raghu Rai.

Also here on >Re:PHOTO you can read about two earlier exhibitions curated by Alam, in ‘Bangladesh 1971‘ at Autograph and ‘Where Three Dreams Cross’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2010. Writing about World Photography Day earlier this year (a piece prompted by a post on Shahidul News) I concluded:

Photography may have started in France (and England) and perhaps came of age in the twentieth century in Europe and the USA. But now much of the more interesting work is happening elsewhere.

It seems a good way to end this over-long piece too.

A politically incorrect letter to Tareque Masud

by Mac Haque

“I’ve overcome the blow, I’ve learned to take it well, I only wish my words could just convince myself,that it just wasn’t real. But that’s not the way it feels” – Jim Croce

Status: Open/Unrestricted

Mood: Meditative/Gloomy/Angry

Music in Background: Do it Again – Steely Dan

Date/Time- Line: From Then, Now to Never

My Dear Tareque,

Something went awfully wrong on Saturday the 13th of August 2011, and they tell me that you will remain incommunicado forever. Fair deal pal…that appreciated if not understood; I hope you will take time out to read this letter. I have deliberately marked it open and unrestricted, so that somewhere down the line somehow, maybe through a gap in the ether, it will be delivered to you unblemished.

You are the savviest of communicators for our generation indeed in the history of Bangladesh. I know for certain that you will continue with your job beyond the 24/07/365 spectral dimension, a rather limited sphere for a genius like you.

It’s this delusion we call life the Baul in both of us recognizes that stops me from mentioning you in the past tense. It would be an insult to the living and illuminated spirit that has broken free from a clay tomb. Death is a celebration as much as life an unending cycle; the entrapped Clay Bird is now free to hover.

As early as 1983 when you were working like an obsessive maniac on Adam Surat featuring living footages of Lal Miah, you charted your road map in life. You chose an iconoclast, a living legend as your subject. A subject who on the quiet had gone International, and his paintings hung side-by-side with masters like Matisse and Dali, was yet, little known to his own people then, as even today.

Quite characteristically you explained with unending patience, about technological advancements and why your 16 mm celluloid print of Adam Surat can’t be sent to a festival as the mandatory requirement was U-Matic, NTSC BVU format etc. Very few people in Bangladesh understood what the heck you and I were talking about.

Worse was to follow. Despite my reluctance you bull headedly went ahead and talked to the illiterate proprietor of the Travel Agency where I was working – for sponsorship. You were shown the door and the same month I quit. In retrospect, not many doors were open to us anyway friend. We had a notorious reputation for speaking our minds and there wasn’t a huge appetite for our brutal to a fault honesty.

Communications between us were never regular or irregular, but I find it comforting to think that whenever there was a crisis we always met and spent quality time. In winter of 1987 after a whiskey wasted night when we talked only about financial solvency I had no way of knowing what was really doing overtime in your mind.

So it was more of an embarrassment than a shock that the same morning after waving me goodbye, you tried a hop-skip-and-jump in front of a public bus? Man that was weird. If your ambition was to bag an athletic gold for Bangladesh in the Olympics, you chose a real lousy turf for a practice run……phew!

Your personal turbulences were officially over in 1988 when you walked in to my office arm-in-arm with Catherine Shapiere. Before long fate conspired and she was being hounded by people in absolute power who were not quite able to understand the economics or politics of a visiting American student with a perpetually broke Bangladeshi boyfriend! Love perhaps was an obsolete word back then.

Our last ditch plea to get the US Embassy to help was met by a stern official on the phone. To our horror we learnt that he will ensure Catherine’s passport is returned, but could do nothing about the deportation order. The three of us hugged and cried but our gloom was short lived.

I remember Catherine promising she would return which she did much earlier than expected. And that poem on her adopted motherland written at the Departure lounge of Dhaka Airport after a humiliating interrogation by Immigration Police was bitterly poignant. The two of you were destined to serve the Nation, and do so with the greatest honor and highest of admiration. No power on earth could dare stop that.

I came to know about your nuptials courtesy the grapevine. Months later you enjoyed my quip when I pointed to the framed portrait of the two of you in a wall. Prem er porey frame – aha!

Then most annoyingly you vanished without a trace not to return until the early nineties. When you did, you excitedly summoned me to talk about a treasure trove that you had discovered in New York and NO, you assured me you haven’t robbed a Bank!  Nevertheless I rushed to see you and Catherine with a hope that..…ahem….I may end up being an important side-kick for a soon to be billionaire in Bangladesh.

An hour into the meeting at your Kalabagan hangout with all that hush-hush secrecy, I realized what you have in hand was indeed priceless, but fraught with risk higher than a Bank vault. It was a people’s statement that no political party would be able to stomach. Never spoken but never denied – our lives were at stake.

Reading between the lines, I am sure had it not been on Catherine’s insistence, you wouldn’t have budged to call up Lear Levin. This was based on an emotive flashback by a much inebriated Tareq Ali in New York. And sure enough Lear Levin was on the phone directory. And sure enough so was the cache, preserved in mint condition in his temperature controlled basement. Hours of raw celluloid footage of the Liberation War, not blood or gore but front line cultural activists in action, entertaining guerrillas and common people.

And there was Tareq Bhai, Benu Da, Naila and Shahin Apa, Shopon Da and so many more. From reel, real to surreal, it was as if 1971 had returned, courtesy you – to tell its own tale in 1995.

The two of us have tormented for years whenever the Liberation War came up for discussions. Here we were faced with a new generation and our reminiscences as teenagers growing up in 1971 were rubbished. “Were we dreaming back then, or are we lying today?” You finally had the answer to my question. We NOW HAVE THE PROOF Dosto! The next challenge was how to get this across to the people of Bangladesh, the ultimate beneficiary of the treasure.

Muktir Gaan was then an unfolding history of a history in changed times, when we had all but given up on the bloodiest phase in our history. From handling the Censor Board without editing out a single frame, to organizing screening and alternative out-of-the box distribution without sponsors or patron you masterminded the movie reaching furthest corners of Bangladesh without dithering on your resolve.

Ironically while you received a lot of pats on your back, when it came to real help, you had next to none. Try as you may to hide this my friend, I know for a fact that with all of that happening around you, there were days you went without food. The prohibitive cost of the movie burnt a huge hole in your pocket which was never very deep in the first place.

It was my sheer fortune and destiny to be a tiny piece in a gigantic jig-saw puzzle that was to be the Muktir Gaan project. I am honored together with other volunteers and friends, to be a roadie and lift and lug the very expensive projector equipments and precious celluloid prints during the initial screenings at Public Library Auditorium.

I am equally honored that you ordered our friend Shampa Reza and me to be the MC’s for the first screening of Muktir Gaan to diplomats, bureaucrats and others at the Dhaka Museum Auditorium. The shows at Manikganj, Faridpur and Bhanga where I accompanied you and Catherine in those tumultuous days will forever be etched in my memory.

But then, we had our differences sometimes very heated. While you agreed with me most times, you never accepted my pathological rejection of the status quo or contempt for Culture Vultures and Media Mafia who were hanging around our motley crew for all the wrong reasons.

To quote Bob Marley, I was merely “Oba, ob-serving the hypocrites, as they would mingle with the good people we meet”, so all I could do was watch dejectedly from the periphery and take another toke of Sinsemilia! You are the superior being. You could hear history calling, you could hear the peoples cry when defeat after defeat, our senses had gone numb.

And then it was Matir Moyna (Clay Bird) and Cannes in 2002. You firmly placed Bangladesh in the International Cinema map. Everything was to change, except you my dear friend. Your dynamism was infectious as usual, but you remained the forever approachable Tareque Masud.

I thank God for that. Your head didn’t outgrow your shoulders. You had no pretensions to be a Ray or Kiarostami or stoop to the perverted commercial decadence of a Farooki……..who?

Last if not the least Dosto…Runway was awesome and I don’t know if I thanked you enough for the peek preview at your house last year.

Catch up with you soon.

Salutes – my comrade in thoughts.

Cheers!

Mac

PS. I have not been able to go see Catherine and Nishad. I don’t know what to tell them about your disappearance when enough has already been said.

New Age XTRA. Print Version. Friday, 26th August 2011

By Salil Tripathi

Does the controversial book about Bangladesh’s war of liberation uncover new truths, or simply reverse old biases?

It is an article of faith in Bangladesh that three million people died in its war of independence in 1971. At that time, the population of the former East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh) was about 70 million people, which means nearly 4% of the population died in the war. The killings took place between 25 March, when Pakistani forces launched Operation Searchlight, and mid-December, when Dhaka fell to the invading Indian Army and the Mukti Bahini forces (who was aiding whom depends on which narrative you read— India’s or Bangladesh’s). As per Bangladesh’s understanding of its history, the nation was a victim of genocide. Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one of the most lethal conflicts of all time.

One of the most brutal conflicts in recent years has been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the International Rescue Committee reported that 5.4 million people died between 1998 and 2008. A more thorough Canadian analysis now concludes that the actual figure is about half. At 5.4 million deaths, the daily death toll would be around 1,500; at 2.7 million, around 750. Was the 1971 war up to 15 times more lethal than the Congolese conflict?

A history of violence: A scene from the bloody conflicts of the 1971 Bangladesh war. Photo: Getty Images

It is an uncomfortable question. Many Bangladeshis feel that raising such a doubt undermines their suffering and belittles their identity. But a thorough, unbiased study, going as far as facts can take the analysis, would be an important contribution to our understanding of the subcontinent’s recent history.

In Dead Reckoning, the Harvard-trained Oxford academic, Sarmila Bose, tries doing that, arguing that Bangladesh has believed two national narratives—that it was an innocent victim, and that it fought bravely. She challenges both notions, causing considerable hurt, and even a sense of betrayal, among many Bangladeshis. Bose is Bengali, from India, and the grand-daughter of Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose. How could she let the side down?

Bangladeshis welcomed Bose warmly when she began her study, and many intellectuals, historians, academics and survivors told her their stories. She also went to Pakistan, and remarkably, was able to get the cooperation of many Pakistani commanders who participated in the war. Pakistan’s army is not entirely an accountable organization to begin with, and except for a judicial commission in 1971, which was set up to examine the narrow question of what led to Pakistani defeat in the war, there hasn’t been a serious attempt to understand what happened. Any effort to get Pakistani generals to talk is welcome, particularly since the war crimes trials, set to begin in Bangladesh soon, will not try Pakistani nationals, but only Bangladeshi perpetrators and collaborators.

Those seeking justice will end up being perplexed after reading Bose’s account, because she makes a valiant attempt to show the Pakistani army as one trying hard to operate professionally, and in many cases acting with restraint. Bangladeshis don’t have an appetite for such a narrative—a recent film,Meherjaan, a love story between a Bengali woman and a Pakistani soldier during the war, had to be withdrawn from public release following an outcry.

Dead Reckoning—Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War: C Hurst and Co.,London, 239 pages, £20 (around Rs. 1,415)

Academics should ask tough questions. Bose rightly attempts a detailed forensic examination of the Bangladeshi version of events. She doesn’t always question Pakistani claims with the same thoroughness.

She notes how a Bengali officer mis-remembers the name of his Punjabi counterpart, or how the testimony of the sole Bengali survivor of a massacre can’t be corroborated. But she accepts when she hears of tens of thousands of Biharis (Urdu-speaking, non-Bengali East Pakistanis) dying at Bengali hands. She disparages Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League’s overwhelming victory in the 1970 elections, when the party won 160 of the 162 seats, giving it an absolute majority in the combined Pakistani legislature, by pointing out that only 56% of East Pakistanis voted in the election, when by the standards of most democracies, that’s a reasonable turnout.

Yahya Khan, the dictator who ruled Pakistan at that time, has been the butt of many jokes even in Pakistan, and observers of Pakistan’s politics like Tariq Ali have blamed him for strategic and tactical blunders. Bose’s Yahya is reasonable, trying to get two recalcitrant politicians— Mujib in the east and Zulfiqar Ali Bhuttoin the west, who hadn’t secured a majority, but still wanted to be the prime minister—to talk, but who is almost reluctantly driven into using force in the east because of Bengali secessionist demands.

Some statistics are impossible to establish. There has been controversy over the number of rapes Bangladeshis cite (up to 400,000), and Bose’s account hardly mentions rapes, implying that the issue may not be that big. That is peculiar, considering that even in normal circumstances, rape is an under-reported crime, and in a subcontinental context, more so, given the inevitable stigma.

One can debate whether the 1971 conflict fits into the precise legal definition of genocide. But even if it is not genocide, far too many terrible things were done to far too many people, whose dreams of redress and justice remained unfulfilled for too long.

Bose is right in pointing out that the conflict was a complex one. She prefers the Pakistani characterization of the war—that it was a civil war—over the Bangladeshi preference—that it was a war of independence. As evidence, she shows the Awami League negotiating for a solution till early 1971, implying that linking Bangladeshi nationalism to the language agitation of the 1950s was an ex-post-facto justification, rather than a well-thought strategy seeking independence. That is an interesting point, but Bose doesn’t develop the argument further. And she refutes an argument not many reasonable people have made, when she says that Mujib was not leading a non-violent movement.

She writes of several incidents in which Pakistani soldiers act in a humane way. Clearly, every Pakistani soldier was not evil incarnate, nor every Bengali nationalist an angel. And yet, Pakistanis won’t find Bose’s account comforting-some terrible atrocities are documented here. Bangladeshis should not ignore it either. They should rise to the challenge and document their own suffering more accurately.

In any event, several conclusions emerge-that many Bengali students of all faiths were targeted, and killed; that many Bengali women were raped, or forced into sexual slavery; that many Bengali intellectuals were murdered two days before surrender; that not all Pakistani commanders were brutal, nor all Pakistani soldiers evil; that Bengalis did terrible things to Pakistanis and Biharis.

Missing is the simpler grand narrative: that a nation with two halves separated by 1,000 miles with little in common except faith, was probably a bad idea to begin with. And when the part which felt discriminated against, protested, and demanded respect, cultural autonomy, and greater resources, even winning a majority in nationwide elections, the dominant half ignored the verdict, sent troops, and killed tens of thousands of people, before surrendering to a guerrilla force assisted by a superior army, but not before destroying the new nation’s physical infrastructure and killing intellectuals who could have helped lead the country.

Call it what you will. It was terrible, and it remains a crime against humanity.

Salil Tripathi writes the fortnightly column Here, There, Everywhere in Mint and is researching a book on the 1971 war.

Somewhat romanticised, particularly considering what’s been happening in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But it is a beautiful country, despite the politicians. Thanks to my Pakistani friend Isa Daudpota for forwarding the clip.

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The regular weekly “Solidarity for Limon” rally had been steadily attracting bigger crowds, despite the monsoon rains. The gathering this Friday the 24th June 2011 was especially large. The street plays were popular and since this was not an event aligned to either of the main political parties, it attracted ordinary people who came to express solidarity, or merely to enjoy the performance.

This week’s performance, a drama called Khekshial (Jackal), performed by Aranyak Natyadal in front of the National Museum at around 4:30pm, was however disrupted when two men burst through the surrounding crowd and began wrecking the props.

Attack visible from 8 mins 58 secs onwards.

The audience, intially slow to react, as they thought it was part of the play, soon went after the men, but they disappeared into the crowd. Later a young man called Al-Amin was caught by the crowd and accused of being one of the attackers. The man was taken away by Shahbag police, who arrived sometime after the event. The police are reported to have released Al-Amin as he was an innocent by-stander.