Kurigram and Kermat

The immigration of Bangladeshis into India through the porous North-eastern border remains a touchy subject in that region. In his recent book, SANJOY HAZARIKA examines the reasons that drive immigrants across the border - which neither government seems able to stop. Exclusive extracts.

WE had risen early that morning, about 4 a.m., at Kurigram, the capital of the district of the same name in northern Bangladesh. It was October 1997.

There were about a dozen of us, mostly from Assam and other parts of India, to film in Bangladesh for a documentary film that Jahnu Barua, the film director, and I were making on the Brahmaputra river. We had completed filming in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

Our arrival in Bangladesh had been preceded by some of the most exasperating red-tape that I have experienced in many years of dealing with governments, especially bureaucrats. The discussions with the Bangladeshis went on for several months over the script, the itinerary and locations for filming. In fact, at one point, I was quite convinced that the permissions would not be forthcoming.

These finally came through, thanks to support from people within the system like the dapper and astute diplomat, Farooq Sobhan, then his country's Foreign Secretary, and figures like Mahfuz Anam, the amiable and erudite editor of the Daily Star. Mahfuz is a popular, influential man who had been a debating star in Dhaka University before the West Pakistani military crackdown in 1970, in which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were butchered. He also was a Mukti Bahini or a guerrilla fighter during the war of Liberation, as were other men and women who have since become academics, senior government officials and political leaders in Bangladesh. His network was formidable, indeed.

* * *

After looking around the area briefly, Jahnu, cinematographer Sudheer Palsane (him of the thin frame, untrimmed beard and studious, lost look) and I decided that we would return very early next day to capture the awakening of this river village.

* * *

The morning in October 1998, we got out of bed before dawn and staggered into the 22-seater Toyota Coaster which took us to the last point before Chilmari Ghat. It was still dark, with the gloaming of early morning barely able to penetrate the thick fog. We walked down the embankment and started putting up the cameras; the sound recordist got busy capturing the morning sounds: water drops falling off the side of a boat, plip! plop! Fishermen yawned as they stretched and stepped down from the boats to wash, hawk and spit; small waves lapping against the shore and the boats; the cries of river birds, and the chugging of the first motors as their owners set out to fish, with music issuing from radios on board and on shore.

Jahnu and Sudheer decided that the spot chosen for the first shots weren't right. So the camera was shifted again. The boats stood in silent silhouette against the mist. The light of dawn was warming the mist and the water, the land and people. Slowly, both boat people and land settlers came out as part of their daily ritual and then stopped to watch our small group of characters with numerous cameras, tripods, instructions and dialects.

I was standing not far from the camera when a deep male voice rasped in my ear, "Sir, you should go about 100 yards further away, from there you will get a perfect shot."

Of course, the voice did not speak in English. That is a literal translation of what it said. Nor did it speak in Bangla or Bengali, the national language of Bangladesh and West Bengal. It spoke in Assamese, the language of the Brahmaputra Valley, my language.

I jumped in surprise and saw a dark, lean man in a blue and green checked lungi and a long shirt. He was standing by Joseph, the tough, all-seasons and all-purpose man from Assam with a gigantic appetite for rice and an equally prodigious capacity for hard work and physical labour. It was Joseph's first visit outside the country and he was enjoying every moment of it. However, he thought and said so, in his characteristically simple way, that there were too many Bangladeshis in Bangladesh, that the place was too crowded and abysmally poor. "We do not have this kind of poverty in Assam, such wretchedness, such misery," he would exclaim as we passed a village market or a town, where the principal food on sale appeared to be mounds of ripe, golden- yellow jack fruit with its loamy, rich smell and taste.

"Oho, Joseph, since when have you become such an expert on camera angles and that too in a place we hardly know?" I snapped at him in mild irritation. The reason for this was that the voice had interrupted a pretty shot of the silhouetted boats with some ducks waddling in front of them. I later did get the photo, without the ducks - they did not wait for me to recover from my surprise at the next part of the conversation.

The dark, wizened man smiled, revealing teeth stained by decades of chewing paan. "I was talking, sir, not him, I'm from here, sir." The sir was pronounced saar.

By this time, I was quite stunned. "But you speak Assamese, good Assamese, how do you speak it so well, you are from here, aren't you?"

"Ah, saar, I am from here but I've lived for 35 years in Assam, I know it well and I learned Assamese quickly."

The name?

"Keramat, Keramat Bhai."

I was filled with a strange exultation. It was only well after the conversation was over that morning with Keramat and three others (who had visited or lived in Assam for a number of years), that I recognised the feeling that was building up. It was of elation, of unbridled triumph. Triumph against the politicians and bureaucrats, the academics and pseudo-intellectuals in India and Bangladesh who tried either to prove or disprove the border crossings between these countries, based on statistics, or polemics, or propaganda, or theory especially, the shallow ideology of the left.

Here I was, a non-graduate, dabbling in things like demography and international relations, not to speak of international journalism, untrained in the social sciences and the decent skills of social analysis. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Such skills are necessary. But they can be learned, even informally. But, more important, I felt, was the fact that I was coming to the field with an uncluttered mind, ready for fresh thought and initiatives, unmindful of set and pet theories and bombast. I carried no ideological baggage or prejudice.

To my untutored mind, that single, simple incident proved beyond any doubt that Bangladeshis came to Assam; they worked, lived, voted, ate and fished there. "It's all come together for me in this little village by the Brahmaputra," I noted in my daily journal that evening.

Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India's East and Bangladesh, Sanjoy Hazarika, Penguin, Rs. 295.

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