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Sylhet: Its seasonal canvas and glimpses of history
Raana Haider
On road to Sylhet, the Nature’s palette of colours sweeps across the changing landscape. In mid-January, an early morning departure from Dhaka, in order to escape the mega-metropolis’s tentacle traffic, reveals a pale yellow sun dotting the yet silver-grey sky backdrop – a Monet-captured canvas. Enveloped in dense fog, boughs of trees appear suspended in space on the distant horizon. Ghostly and eerie forms reveal trees. A majestic rain tree appears as a looming monstrosity. Nearing Sylhet, thickets of rubber trees appear edged with autumn colours – the impact of the dry winter season.
In the aftermath of a stormy downpour, twisted branches and broken bamboo stalks bear witness to Nature’s fury washing away the sins of the Mankind. Nature both endows and cleanses. Now, reflective pools of still water dot the revived earth whilst foliage glimmers from thirst-quenched branches. Luminous green fields of rice paddy carpet the horizon. The plains and low-lying hills of Sylhet are spin-off recipients of the heaviest rainfall in the world that takes place in the Jaintia hills (foothills of the Himalayas range) at Cherapunjee, Meghalaya in north-east India.
Sylhet’s etymological origins probably date to ‘Sreehatta’ (rich market place). A tenth century brass engraving found during archaeological excavation refers to the Maharajah Shreechandra having conquered the Sylhet region. The Sufi saint from Yemen Hazrat Shah Jalal with 360 disciples arrived in Sylhet in the fourteenth century. In this context, Jalalabad becomes a reference name for Sylhet.
The Turko-Afghan, Muhammad Bin Bukhtiyar, invaded Bengal early in the thirteenth century. A decisive battle was fought in 1612 between the forces of the Afghan warrior Khwaja Osman Khan and that of Mughal Emperor Jehangir led by Islam Khan Chisti at the Afghan-built Osman-garh fort. Victorious, Mughal rule was established in the area. Only the site remains. Hardened by the dual forces of sun and rain, the time-baked soil with its rivulet cracks possibly conceals remnants of towering walls of the once mighty Osman-garh. Now in the midst of flat plains, wooded areas and scattered homesteads, one needs to be well-armed with a head full of history and an accompanying fertile imagination.
Amongst East India Company’s many servants serving in Sylhet, the story of the larger-than-life character ‘Sylhet’ Thackeray,’ otherwise known as William Makepeace Thackeray, is legendary. Having arrived in Calcutta in 1766, he served there till his appointment in 1771 as the Fourth in Council at Dacca. At the tender age of twenty-three, Thackeray assumed the post of First Collector of Sylhet on orders from Governor-General Warren Hastings. He held the post from 1772 till 1776 when he returned to England.
Sir William Wilson Hunter notes in The Thackerays in India and Some Calcutta Graves (1897), “In this great outlying north-eastern Bengal new branches of commerce opened to him. Sylhet, with its virgin forests and mineral wealth, supplied the materials for the new fortress and city of Calcutta, several hundred miles off at the other end of the great river highway.”
The windfall appointment that came Thackeray’s way has also been mentioned with admirable awe by F.B. Bradley-Birt in his biographic tome ‘Sylhet’ Thackeray (1911). Bradley-Birt enthuses: “It was a task as fascinating as it was responsible. A collector of revenue, a maker of roads and builder of bridges, an elephant hunter and shikari, a magistrate, judge, policeman and doctor in one, he was called upon to play an infinite variety of parts, the sole source of authority over an immense area and subject only to the far-off Council at headquarters, which was dependent almost entirely upon him for its knowledge of the district.” Also as First Collector of Sylhet, Thackeray led the British expedition against the Rajah of Jaintia in 1774. In the language of a conqueror, Bradley-Birt refers to the son of the defeated Rajah in the following terms: “So ends the Jaintia expedition and the young Raja, under Thackeray’s protection, begins his reign with a fair prospect, in full possession of all his father’s property.”
Virtually denuded trees that stand tall in the dry season are transformed into lush shade-trees during the monsoon period. Long-established tea-estates with names like Allynugger, Balishera, Chandpore, Daragaon, Deanston, Nalwa, Pallakandi, Parauara, Ramnagar and Shamshernugger roll off one’s tongue. Duncan and Finlay’s dominate the tea tracts while others are in private hands. Conventional coolie colonies date from centuries past. Speck-like orange-yellow butterflies in the distance transform into the all-female labour force, who pluck the ‘two leaves and a bud’. The tea-plant in a wild state was indigenous to the land. Robert Bruce, a British merchant, identified the tea plant in 1823. John Cooper in The Three Presidencies of India (1853) reports: “In 1837, samples of tea, prepared from the wild plants of the Assam district, were forwarded to Calcutta, and favourably reported on.” Its harnessing into an industry was taken up by the British and the rest is history.
In common parlance, ‘Sylhet’ refers both to the division and the city. Yet the region itself constitutes four districts: Habiganj, Moulavibazar, Sunamganj and Sylhet. Sylhet district hosts the city of Sylhet. If one’s lucky, just maybe, one may catch a glimpse of a dilapidated bungalow forlorn in splendid isolation in the midst of an open expanse. More likely is the sighting of moss-covered corrugated iron roofing or a single side of a bungalow wall now caught off-guard and book-ended between towering structures. This is the Sylhet city of today – a mirror composition of Dhaka. Yet as recent as in 1985, in Bangladesh: A Travel Survival Kit, we find the following description of Sylhet city: “Though a centre for Muslim pilgrimage during the Tughlukh dynasty, Sylhet was most influenced by the British occupation. They have given this town a unique style of architecture: tall windows, shaded by large curved awnings, and roofs topped by several enclosed glass cubicles to provide light and ventilation. The whole town has a distinctly British atmosphere, more so than other colonial settlements.” From my first visit to Sylhet district in the early 1980s, I bear witness to the cataclysmic changes.
All that remains of the Sylhet Station Club in Sylhet city is an ornate marble fireplace. Standing forlorn in the midst of a field of brick and plaster rubble, the sole survivor of the 1886 established district Club yet manages to retain an element of defiant majesty despite its ravaged environment. As the year 2008 came to a close, so did the original bungalow – the last vestige of the 123-year old Sylhet Station Club came down to make way for a ‘modern’ multi-storied meeting place of the Club stalwarts. Demolished is the single-storied white chunam plastered bungalow with green corrugated iron-sheeting roof. The ‘home away from home’ for legions of men of Sylhet remains today only a memorable memory. The fate of the original fireplace has mercifully been left in-situ; to be carefully dismantled and reset in some setting of the future Club building. Such a move we have seen at the highland Shillong Club where the old fireplace graces the new bar.
British tea planters and army and administrative officials were the founding members of the Sylhet Station Club (SSC) in 1886. It opened as ‘Fireplace Club’ and only later was the name formalised as Sylhet Station Club. A popular past-time cricket was played between members of the Sylhet Station Club and neighbouring tea-estate clubs. Close ties were maintained with the highland clubs at Cachar, Gauhati and Shillong. A written charter was set up in 1931 whereby only British residents of Sylhet could be Permanent Members of the Sylhet Station Club. The first ‘Native Member’ of the Sylhet Station Club was Khan Bahadur Abdul Hye Choudhury. He joined the Club in 1946 when he was Excise Commissioner of Revenue. Rumour has it that a pre-World War II signboard proclaimed: ‘Dogs and Indians Not Allowed.’ After 1947, the Club was bought by nine Sylheti prominent and life members. Even in the 1950s, there were few Muslim members as compared to the large number of Hindus.
A riveting and heartfelt account of his posting in the 1940s in first Shillong and then Sylhet is to be found in Nari Rustomjee’s autobiography Enchanted Frontiers: Sikkim, Bhutan and India’s North-eastern Borderlands (1973). An Indian Parsee ICS, Rustomjee was enamoured of the region. On his posting to Sylhet, he writes: “Sylhet had the reputation, those days, of being the toughest of all the districts of India. Litigation is the life-blood of the Sylheti, and my first three years of service were a round of litigation and land-disputes, dacoities and devilry…” As a young man, Sylhet was the site of ‘many a first.’ “It was at Sylhet that I received my first lessons in the social graces of the service…It was at Sylhet, too, that I first learned to put down Scotch…The Station Club was next door to the District Magistrate’s bungalow.” Appointed Subdivisional Officer at Maulavibazaar, Rustomjee initiated fund-raising for the Maulavibazaar College. Here he confesses: “Few things have touched me so much as when, fifteen years later, during my tenure as Dewan in remote and distant Sikkim, I received an invitation ‘to honour with your presence the Inauguration of Maulavibazaar College’, together with a neatly-mounted photograph of the new institution. It was a graceful gesture from old friends who, in spite of Indo-Pakistan tensions, still remembered.”
Battling for space across the bridge over the Surma River – in competition with scores of rickshaws, CNG scooters, cars, buses and pedestrians – a contrasting scenario is the following description by William Griffith in his account Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhutan, Afghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries published in 1847. Griffith writes: “September 27th, We entered the mouth of the Soormah, or as the natives seem to call it, the Barak. The water of this river or portion of the Megna? is remarkably clear, compared with that of the Ganges; as indeed is that of the Burampooter. 30th September: Some time after we entered the Soormah we apparently left its channel, and up to this morning we have passed through a tract of jheels with a few clear and very deep channels. The villages are built on small eminences, and are entirely surrounded with water; they have the usual form, and those houses adjoining the water have fences of an Arundo, which they tell us are intended to keep out the grass…”
The thickly wooded Lawacharra forest never fails to amaze me. With the car windows rolled down, we fill our lungs with oxygen. In the monsoon season, the fresh foliage creates ‘green tunnels.’ Clean and untarnished is the scenario. Few months later, in the winter ‘picnic-season’, litter-strewn trails and the cacophony of loudspeakers accompanying scores of buses disrupt the natural serenity. A little known nugget of information – the sati scene in which Phileas Fogg and his man-servant Passepartout rescue the widow Aouda from the funeral pyre – was shot in these forests. The film ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ was based on the novel by Jules Verne and was produced in the 1950s.
A disciple of the revered Hazrat Shah Jalal, Shah Helimuddin arrived in Kanihati. His son Daulat Malik married the daughter of a princess from Tripura. The senior princess was Kanak Rani. The legend followed that the area took its name from her. Kanak-hati (Kanak’s market) evolved into Kanihati. Our destination is a 120-year old small bungalow in the village of Kanihati. Home to generations of in-laws, the restored retreat bathed in the midday sunlight, beckons with its front verandah, painted mustard yellow (my input taken from a similar bungalow seen in Goa). From a distance, flame-red Krishnachura trees stand out against the clear blue skyline. The smaller Radhachura also beckons yet dwarfed by soaring trees now decked in white, purple or pretty pink petals of bougainvilleas. Other branches trail across the green painted corrugated iron roof – creating a rainbow of hues. Whilst at night, an ascending moon appears caught between slender coconut trees and a million and one stars criss-cross the night sky. Either way the picture is perfect for a postcard.
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