The Bengali Language Movement: It is movement of it’s kind ,where Sylheti –Community People fought a Language which is not their mother-tongue.The Sylhetis have their own Sylheti-Nagari Language.The Bengali Language Movement in Barak Valley,Assam was a protest against the decision of the Government of Assam to make Assamese the only official language of the state even though a significant proportion of the population were Bengali speaking. In the Barak Valley, the Bengali speaking population constituted a majority. The main incident, in which 11 people were killed by State police, took place on 19th May 1961. In April, 1960, a proposal was raised at the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee, to declare Assamese as the one and only official language of the state. Tensions ran high in the Brahmaputra Valley, where Assamese mobs attacked Sylheti settlements. The violence reached its peak between July and September, during which an estimated 50,000 Sylhetis fled the Brahmaputra Valley and arrived in West Bengal. Another 90,000 fled to Barak Valley and other regions of the North East. An one man enquiry commission was set up under Justice Gopal Mehrotra. According to the report of the commission, 4,019 huts and 58 houses belonging to Sylheti were vandalized and destroyed in 25 villages of Goreswar in Kamrup district, which was the worst affected by violence. Nine Sylheti were killed and more than one hundred injured.On 10 October 1960, Bimala Prasad Chaliha, the then Chief Minister of Assam presented a bill in the Legislative Assembly that sought to legalize Assamese as the sole official language of the state.Ranendra Mohan Das, the legislator from Karimganj (North) assembly constituency and an ethnic Sylheti,protested the bill on the ground that it sought to impose the language of a third of the population over the rest two thirds. On 24 October, the bill was passed in the Assam legislative assembly thereby making Assamese as the one and only official language of the state.
On 5 February 1961, the Cachar Gana Sangram Parishad was formed to agitate against the imposition of Assamese in the Sylheti speaking Barak Valley.On 14 April, the people of Silchar ,Karimganj and Hailakandi observed a Sankalpa Divas in protest against the injustice of the Assamese government. On 24 April, the Parishad flagged off a fortnight long Padayatra in the Barak Valley, in the regions surrounding Silchar and Karimganj to raise awareness among the masses. The satyagrahis who took part in the Padayatra walked over 200 miles and covered several villages. The procession ended on 2 May in Silchar .Later on a similar padayatra was organized in Hailakandi. After the Padayatra Rathindranath Sen, the Parishad chief declared that if Bengali was not accorded the status of official language by 13 April 1961, a complete hartal would be observed on 19 May from dawn to dusk. The Parishad also called for due recognition of the languages of other linguistic minorities.
On 12 May, the soldiers of the Assam Rifles, the Madras Regiment and the Central Reserve Police staged flag march in Silchar. On 18 May, the Assam police arrested three prominent leaders of the movement, namely Nalinikanta Das, Rathindranath Sen and Bidhubhushan Chowdhury, the editor of weekly Yugashakti.On 19 May, the dawn to dusk hartal started. Picketing started in the sub-divisional towns of Silchar, Karimganj and Hailakandi from early in the morning. In Karimganj, the agitators picketed in front of government offices, courts and railway station. In Silchar,the agitators picketed in the railway station. The last train from Silchar was around 4 PM in the afternoon, after which the hartal would be effectively dissolved. Not a single ticket was sold for the first train at 5-40 AM. The morning passed off peacefully without any untoward incident. However, in the afternoon, the Assam Rifles arrived at the railway station.At around 2-30 PM, a Bedford truck carrying nine arrested Satyagrahis from Katigorah was passing by the Tarapur railway station. Seeing the fellow activists arrested and being taken away, the Satyagrahis assembled at the railway tracks broke out in loud protests. At that point the truck driver and the policemen escorting the arrested fled the spot. Immediately after they fled, an unidentified person set fire to the truck. A fire fighting team immediately rushed to the spot to bring the fire under control. Within five minutes, at around 2-35 PM, the paramilitary forces, guarding the railway station, started beating the protesters with rifle butts and batons without any provocation from them. Then within a span of seven minutes they fired 17 rounds into the crowd. Twelve persons received bullet wounds and were carried to hospitals. Nine of them died that day. Ullaskar Dutta send nine bouquets for nine martyrs. On 20 May, the people of Silchar took out a procession with the bodies of the martyrs in protest of the killings. Two more persons died later. One person, Krishna Kanta Biswas survived for another 24 years within bullet would in chest. After the incident, the Assam government had to withdraw the circular and Bengali was ultimately given official status in Barak Valley.
Root Cause Behind The Bengali Language Movement: Of the major issues that informed the culture and politics of post-independence Assam, none (other than the issue of immigration) perhaps acquired the kind of centrality that language did. The post-independence Gopinath Bardoloi-led Congress provincial government, and also sections of the civil society through various organisations such as the Assam Sahitya Sabha and Assam Jatiya Mahasabha took upon themselves the task of construction of a political discourse—the genesis of that lay of course, in the cultural politics of colonial Assam which culminated in the referendum and ceding of Sylhet, a Sylheti-speaking, Muslim-majority district of the province, to East Pakistan in 1947—and that sought to project the province as one which bore nothing but a unilingual/cultural character. The hegemonic linguistic nationalism, sponsored and propagated by the Assam(ese) provincial State, was primarily pitched vis-à-vis the Bangla language and sylhetis, the largest linguistic minority (despite the exclusion of Sylhet) of the province.By introducing a series of language policies since 1947, the provincial government clearly pronounced its intention of restoring for the Assamese language the position of supremacy that it was always denied; but this had nothing other than a historically legitimate right. And it was the culmination of such measures that saw the introduction of the Assam Official Language Bill followed by the Assam (Official) Language Act (ALA) in 1960 which stated that Assamese was to be then and thereafter the sole official language of Assam. Given Assam’s historically multilingual character, the launch of the ALA however, only added to the often violent conflict-like situation—between Assamese (with nearly 150 per cent rise in their population following the census of 1951) and non-Assamese speakers—already prevalent in the State. Cachar (geographically contiguous to Sylhet in undivided Assam), a district on the southern tip of the State with an existing Sylheti-speaking majority—and growing steadily due to the inflow of sylheti partition-migrants—was a site of tremendous protest against the ALA.While language-based mobilisations in post-independence India have been paid considerable attention in academic as well as the larger public sphere, yet in a curious act of oversight the one in Assam has perhaps received not more than a footnote treatment. In fact, for most scholars and public commentators (mainly those based outside southern Assam) the language-based mobilisation of the 1960s in Assam was nothing but an instance of “resistance”, and not a movement; more importantly, the complex historical-political factors that contributed to what I would not hesitate to term as the movement (and not “resistance”), have always not been factually accurate, and therefore, susceptible to partisan and hence, incompre-hensive and simplistic analysis. As recently as 2010, T.K. Oommen, the well-known scholar and commentator, in his two-volume edited work on social movements in India, also misread the situation that prevailed in Assam during the two decades that followed the partition—including the “resistance” of the 1960s—and thereafter. The following discussion, therefore, looks at that “forgotten” (outside southern Assam) Bhasha Andolan/language movement that rocked Assam half-a-century ago. Indeed, it remains significant not only for a critical understanding of the linguistic/cultural politics of contemporary Assam but also India and neighbouring Bangladesh.
Loving and Dying for a Language ,which is not their mother-Tongue:
THE Sylhetis of southern Assam in particular—the region popularly known since the 1980s by the epithet Barak Valley to represent Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi districts—following partition spearheaded campaigns for territorial reorganisation of Assam (and in fact, the entire North-Eastern Frontier) on the bases of language, culture, geography and other factors, by proposing, first, a Plan for Purbachal in 1948,—and not Purbanchal as Oommen (2010) writes—and second, Purbachal Reconsidered to the States Re-organisation Commission of India in 1954. Gone unheeded, such failed campaigns also added to the language movement that was already in the making in the State. The fear of the Sylhetis of Assam in general (and also people of the hill districts of the State), articulated clearly and vociferously by those based in Cachar in particular, grew not only due to the State Government’s policies related to political-economic development, rights of a linguistic/cultural minority, fate of the Bangla language medium educational institutions, but also the gradual “loss of position of social dominance” they had had under the colonial administration. Quite predictably, the battle-lines had been clearly drawn, and amidst hectic manoeuvrings of political parties such as the Congress, CPI, and so forth, and civil society groups, the ALA came through as nothing but the last straw.Organisations such as the Nikhil Assam Banga Bhasha-Bhashi Samiti, Sangram Parishad, Cachar Zila Gana Sangram Parishad intensified their protests against the implementation of the ALA, as did the district Congress Committee which formed the Bhasha Andolan Samiti; students, eminent community leaders, intellectuals, and so forth eventually joined the process of mobilisation across Assam. Throughout 1960 clashes—a few turning violent—between protesters, the police and pro-Language Bill/Act supporters were reported (and sometimes unreported) in the press. Largely non-violent modes of protest—like processions, satyagraha, padayatras, hartals, meetings, picketing, and so forth—were adopted in Cachar (including Karimganj and Hailakandi), and it was on a procession of satyagrahis at Silchar, the headquarters of the district, that the State Police fired on May 19, 1961 killing one woman and ten men. The death of eleven protesters along with numerous wounded, and an equal number arrested signified the high point of the language movement. On May 29, as a protest against the police firing, a complete district-wise bandh was observed. “Paritosh Pal Chaudhary, the chief architect of the Sangram Parishad… cate-gorically stated that ‘the movement would be resumed and carried on until the Bengali language was recognised at the State level’”. [The Times of India, May 30, 1961 cited in Goswami 1997: 62] Following the brutal state repression and matters snowballing in all likelihood into, to say the least, a major controversy, the Congress High Command in Delhi (and the State Government) in a reconciliatory move appointed Lal Bahadur Shastri to initiate and implement suitable damage control measures. Suggesting amendment of the ALA he proposed the following: “(a) to give local bodies the authority to alter the official language of their area by a two-thirds majority; (b) to allow communication between the State capital and Cachar and the hill districts to continue to be in English; (c) at the State level to continue the use of English along with Assamese; and (d) to incorporate stronger provisions for the protection of linguistic minorities”. [Chakrabarty 1981 cited in Baruah 1999:105] The Shastri formula was unpalatable to both the Sylhetis and Assamese, and the district level political groups; while the former accused Shastri of bypassing the central issue of official recognition of the Bangla language in the State, the latter alleged that they were not duly consulted. Meanwhile, the officially consti-tuted Mehrotra Commission which enquired into the May 19 killings submitted its report, as did the independent one headed by N.C. Chatterjee (with members, namely, Ranadeb Choudhury, Ajit Kumar Dutta, Snehangshu Kanta Acharya, and Siddhartha Shankar Ray). But Cachar continued to be disturbed—also due to internal differences within the leadership of the movement, the Sangram Parishad in particular—necessitating heavy police and armed forces deployment. In September 1961, the State Cabinet taking cue from the Shastri formula resolved to amend the ALA.While Cachar’s response was cautious and a little more than lukewarm, sections of Assamese civil society resented the proposed amendment. The Assam Sahitya Sabha, in a memorandum to the Union Home Minister, argued: “The Assamese people strongly resent that their legitimate demand for recognition of Assamese as the only official language of the State which has been partially fulfilled in the Assam Official Language Act, 1960, as it stands, will be further adversely affected if the Act is amended … [and] the Assamese language will be reduced to the Status of a regional official language within the State ….” [Memorandum of Assam Sahitya Sabha to the Union Home Minister, June 29, 1961 cited in Goswami 1997:151]. Be that as it may, the ALA stood amended to grant Bangla the status of the other official language—but only of Cachar district—in October 1961. By the early 1970s a number of hill States were finally carved out of Assam, though Cachar remained in Assam. The issue of the Sylheti linguistic identity of Cachar, and its preservation arrived centre-stage yet again during the “language riots” in 1972 (and then in 1986) which broke over the issue of Gauhati University’s decision to introduce Assamese as the “language of education” in its affiliated colleges. After protracted negotiations a “compromise formula [was struck] that allowed for the continuation of English and removed any compulsion on matter of colleges switching to Assamese”. [Baruah 1999:106] The Bangla language/culture issue, however, continued to simmer in Cachar. The Cachar Gana Parishad Union Territory Demand Committee – demanded autonomy, that is, grant of Union Territory status in 1972, and reiterated that—during the high period of the anti-immigrant Assam movement—in 1980 and 1986 —by submitting memoranda to the then Prime Ministers.
The Summer of 1960s, and After:
THE brief sketch of the language movement offered above is certainly not sufficient for its compre-hensive and critical reading. However, after fifty years it is certainly time to initiate an informed and non-partisan discussion on it so as to understand not only its complex trajectory—its colonial historical roots, ideological framework, mobilisation tactics, leadership issues, following and mass base contact, negotiation strategies—but also evaluate the political and cultural processes it subsequently unleashed. Of critical significance is the near extraordinary emotional chord it strikes among the young and old alike in contemporary Barak Valley. Indeed, the language movement, the killing of eleven protesters on May 19 in particular, remains as an overwhelmingly living memory in the region. Fifty years after the eleven protesters laid down their lives for upholding the cause of their matribhasha/mother tongue Bangla—a language of their love, and also finally death –and christened as Matri Bhasha Shahids/Mother Tongue Martyrs, May 19 continues to be commemorated as Bhasha Shahid Dibash/Matri Bhasha Dibash/Language Martyrs’ Day/Mother Tongue Day across the valley. Internal cultural differences in Barak Valley notwithstanding, May 19 is the symbol around which the contemporary cultural identity of the valley gets constructed, and propagated; the heroic pride that the language movement—May 19—generates has at the same time a touch of melancholy too, but that is negotiated through the idea of martyrdom of eleven protesters, their blood being spilt for a just cause, their love for Barak’s folk life, and finally, their love for Bangla until death. The poem cited below partially illustrates that:Nineteenth May/tell me where I should/Keep our bleeding youth of long forty years?/My backbone, as I straighten it up/I see Tagore and Nazrul/Extending their caring arms/The fertile field of rural Barak, Boatword River, the warm heart of mankind/Soil-plastered hut in the courtyard/Everywhere, in happiness, sorrow, festival/Dear to the roots of tongue/Folk tales, Folk songs, Rhymes, Tune, Rhythm, the Padmapuran with smells of life/Dhamail, Bratakatha, Paachali, the songs of Ghazi/The inherited Nineteenth May/The tell-tale water, roots/The restless water, space. [Gupta 2002:1]
In fact, so large is the oeuvre of writings (primarily in Bangla) on the language movement and May 19—added to that now are those written to mark its fifty years—that it is impossible to discuss those here; also statues honouring the eleven protesters, and Shahid Bedis/Martyrs’ Altars dot the Barak Valley landscape, not to mention the repeated (failed) appeals by its citizens to the Railway Ministry to name the Silchar Railway Station—site of May 19 police firing—as Bhasha Shahid Station. On May 19, 2011 at a seminar organised jointly by the Sahitya Akademi and G.C. College Alumni Association (a Silchar based college of repute) in New Delhi to mark fifty years of the movement, the discussion, among others, raised an interesting issue: the message of the language movement, May 19, and eleven dead protesters was not to remain confined to Barak Valley. For half-a-century, the audience argued, the Indian state (and even the predominantly Bangla-speaking West Bengal) had failed to take note of the fact that Barak Valley’s “production” of eleven Mother Tongue Martyrs (including one woman named Kamala Bhattacharjee) had no parallels in history; more importantly, the United Nations declared February 21—the day two protesters were killed during the Bengali language movement in erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1952—as International Mother Tongue Day because India failed to offer due recognition to the Mother Tongue Martyrs who were born, bred, and finally made to bleed to death on its own soil. The discussion no doubt bordered on deep emotional outpouring not unrelated to what could be called a cultural or rather, an expanded existential angst, yet it touched upon questions that certainly require exploration. Without suggesting that India should have entered into the competitive politics of “production” of number of Mother Tongue Martyrs—India had eleven and Bangladesh two—the issue still remains as to why the event(s) of the summer of 1960s—not just May 19 but the entire movement—in Assam stood, and stands marginalised in the Indian public imagination.
A BRIEF RECONNOITRE OF ITS CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS
The contexts and immediate history of the Language Movement in Assam go a long way back to the beginning of the sixties decade of the last century when at the session of the State Legislative Assembly held on 3rd March, 1960, the then Chief Minister of Assam, Sri Bimala Prasad Chaliha discoursed on the issue of Assamese being declared the official language for the state of Assam. There were of course other related contexts which date back to even as early as 1947, during the time when the first Legislative Assembly was convened in Assam. But the present report studies an introduction to the incident of the infamous date, 19th May 1961, celebrated thenceforth by popular acclaim as Bhasha Shaheed Divas (Language Martyrs Day), not only in Barak Valley which had been the land of its origin but also in Sylheti cultures across the country and the world.
Reportedly, in spite of his pro-Assamese hegemony stance, Chaliha did not directly present his argument in favour of the Assamese language. He stressed that only when the indigenous linguistic minorities of Assam are agreed unanimously regarding the declaration of Assamese as the official state language could the issue be taken up in earnest and brought into effect. Chaliha stated that the issue of a state language was not to be decided on the basis of linguistic minority but on the firm foundation of acceptability. But the chief minister’s statement had quite the opposite and as history shows, a far reaching effect on the contemporary socio-political scenario. Overzealous activists who besought the predominance of the Assamese culture over all other existing cultural and linguistic groups within the territorial boundaries of Assam took up the matter and within a few days, the entire region was rife with propaganda for the institution of Assamese as the official state language. It can be said that Chaliha’s seemingly democratically laden statement had almost been a beckoning for such a movement to follow. On 16th April 1960, following this, a call for a counter movement was launched in Silchar by the local populace to protest against this infringement of constitutional and human rights in the form of a public assembly. Other activities followed and throughout the rest of that year, several public and socio-cultural organizations launched their own efforts to this effect.
In the month of July that year, following a police attack on a students’ demonstration in Guwahati (3rd July 1960) in which a student named Ranjit Barpujari was shot dead, the entire Brahmaputra Valley region erupted in flames of communal violence. Thus began the infamous Bongal Kheda Andolan (“Banish the Bongal” movement –Bo ng a l being the name for Bengalis in Assamese, often used in a derogatory sense) which resulted in the mass displacement of thousands of Bengalis across the state. Arson and public murders marked the so called ‘patriotic’ movement. Non-Assamese students in the University of Gauhati, Dibrugarh Medical College and Assam Medical College were forced to flee with barely their lives. Such was the intensity of the zealots that they spared not a single head which had not been shaded by theg a mosa and which claimed not the Assamese language as its mother tongue. Throughout the next few months the unrest continued to fester and spread. Meanwhile the counter movement in protest against the Bongal Kheda Andolan and the predominance of the Assamese language as the state language continued unabated in areas like Shillong, Karimganj and Silchar. These were non-violent protests which obviously could not stem the tide of the violence directed against the non- Assamese populace of the state.
In October that year, following a visit by a committee of parliamentarians under the leadership of Sri Ajit Prasad Jain to Assam, the central government at Delhi delegated Sri Govind Ballabh Panth to visit Assam and work out a solution to the communal unrest that had by then engulfed almost the entire state. Sri Panth participated in a series of meetings with representatives of the state government and leaders of the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee as well as with those from other agencies like the Silchar Bar Association, Cachar District Congress Parishad and relief committees formed for the succour of victims of communal violence from the Brahmaputra Valley. But all that was to avail since all conciliatory efforts were shunned by the state government. In spite of all such aims towards a placation of the violence and the unrest, on 10th October that year, Sri Bimala Prasad Chaliha proposed the plan for what became the Language Bill later. In spite of efforts on all fronts, the influence of the Language Bill exerted itself on all levels. What followed as a result was a mass protest against the unthinking and insensitive attitude of the state government. People from all walks of life participated in vehement protest against the government’s dictum.
19TH MAY, 1961 – BHASHA SHAHEED DIVAS – THAT RED DAY
On 14th April 1961, the people of Cachar, Hailakandi and Karimganj observed Samkalpa Divas (Resolution Day) in protest against the injustice meted out by the state government against non-Assamese, particularly the Bengali speaking community, in Assam. A procession on foot that would span a major region around Silchar and Karimganj was organised and flagged off on 24th April. The satyagrahis who participated in the procession walked for miles during the next few days, crossing several villages and chalets till the final day on 2nd May. The procession lasted for nearly two hundred miles and was welcomed back at Silchar by several public leaders and hundreds of commonmen and women. A similar procession was also organised at Hailakandi later on.
On 19th May, a call for a bandh was announced by the Cachar Zila Gana Sangram Parishad. What had begun the previous year as verbal or peaceful protests was now on the way to assume the status of a full fledged revolutionary movement. Picketers and volunteers on behalf of the Parishad sallied forth in the early morning of 19th May to ensure that theba n dh was successful. Though the administration made every effort to curb the movement and to thwart theba n dh yet the effort was a huge success. The police made mass arrests and tried to quell the revolutionaries. In Tarapur Railway Station, a crowd of satyagrahis had assembled on the railway tracks and were facing the repeated lathi charges of the police without giving up their place on the tracks. At around 2:30 pm, a Bedford truck bearing nine arrested satyagrahis from Kaatigorah was seen mending its way across the crowd in front of the railway station. The satyagrahis who till then had maintained their peaceful composure were instigated on seeing the administration’s treatment of their fellow activists and they broke out in loud protest. On seeing the situation take a turn for worse the policemen escorting the vehicle as well as the truck driver disappeared from the scene. Seizing the opportunity, someone (it is not known clearly who) set fire to the truck. A fire rescue team from the nearby relief quarters (housed in the premises of Sri Dhirendra Mohan Dev’s residence) rushed to the place and tried to bring the flames under control.
In a matter of a few minutes, the entire area around Tarapur was transformed into a veritable battlefield. Military and paramilitary forces arrived on the scene and began serial lathi charges against the gathered satyagrahis. Many of them tried to escape by fleeing for the nearby railway station. In the meanwhile, the police and other forces also assaulted the satyagrahis who had assembled on the railway tracks. Suddenly, without any prior warning, the armed forces opened fire on the unsuspecting and terrified satyagrahis. It was exactly 2:35 pm then. One after another, eleven people succumbed to their bullet injuries and became martyrs for the cause of their mother tongue. It might be noted here that the time elapsed between the commotion to break out in front of the railway station and the armed forces to arrive and open fire on the satyagrahis was astonishingly minuscule – only five minutes. The precision with which the entire operation was carried out by the armed forces makes one wonder at the apparent mechanism of it. The eleven people who died were –
1.KanailalNiyogi
2.ChandicharanSutradhar
3.HiteshBiswas
4.SatyendraDeb
5. Kumud Das
6. Sunil Dey Sarkar
7. Tarani Deb Nath
8. Sachindra Paul
9. Birendra Sutradhar
10. Sukomal Purakayastha
11. Kamala Bhattacharjya
There were several others who fell under the assault of bayonets and lathis and were rushed for immediate treatment at the Silchar Civil Hospital. Many of their names and their details are no longer available. Though they did not die that terrible afternoon yet many of them were disfigured or maimed in that ruthless attack.The afternoon of that 19th May did not end with the terrible bloodbath. Within minutes of the shooting at the railway station, Hemanta Majumder (then a Subdivisional Officer at Silchar) declared curfew in the town. Accompanying him was Revati Paul (then Town Sub-Inspector). The dead and the wounded satyagrahis were rushed to the Red Cross Hospital and to the Silchar Civil Hospital by the people present there then while the news of the terrible act spread throughout the town. Local leaders like Sri Mohitosh Purakayastha and Smt. Jyotsna Chando made their way to the scene of violence with the Municipal ambulance. Six of the dead satyagrahis were dispatched to the Civil Hospital in that ambulance while many of the other wounded were rendered first aid at the residence of Sri Satindra Mohan Dev by a few doctors. The hospitals had started overflowing with the wounded or dead satyagrahis and the hospital compounds and corridors with thousands of indignant people, shocked beyond belief at the senseless violence perpetrated by the administration. All restraints had been abandoned – even the declaration of the curfew had had no effect on the inflamed spirit of the masses who flooded the streets to watch and to render their salutations to the great martyrs of the day who by their selfless sacrifice had ascended the portals of paradise and the mere memory of whose names had become hallowed. By that evening nine dead bodies from the firing at the railway station had been assigned to the custody of the hospital mortuary.The next day saw thousands of mourning people descend onto the streets to accompany the dead bodies of the martyred to their final resting place at Silchar Smashan Ghat (the local crematorium). The air resounded with a drone of thousands of voices announcing their protest against the heinous and terrible act of dishonour that the administration had carried out the previous day. The nine dead martyrs received their last rites at the hands of a race which would forever be indebted to them for their sacrifice. These nine were Kanailal Niyogi, Chandicharan Sutradhar, Hitesh Biswas, Kumud Das, Sunil Dey Sarkar, Tarani Deb Nath, Sachindra Paul, Sukomal Purakayastha and Kamala Bhattacharjya. On 21st May, the day next, two more bodies,those of Birendra Sutradhar and Satyendra Deb, were rescued from the pond at the railway station and on the next day, they were carried to the crematorium in a befitting manner with hundreds of people following them.Those few days of the language movement passed in a flurry of incidents but the impact of those few days has altered forever the lives of the people of this valley. Even today, with every passing year, the people of this valley await the achievement of the ambition that had been marked out by the satyagrahis so many years ago in 1961. And very year brings us closer to the great Eleven, as every child, man and woman of this valley know the martyrs; in feeling and in passion, in our love of the mother tongue.
This holy territory of Barak Valley thus has a glorious tradition of language movement spanning a half-a-century period. This protest culture is perhaps the only way to cherish the plural and multi-cultural fabric of the State of Assam.
IMAGES OF GREAT SYLHETI MARTYRS :
Related Link:http://mridul-nandy.blogspot.in/2012/04/language-movement-in-barak-valley-19.html
Courtesy- Mridul Nandy,Convenor of Sylheti Youth Welfare Association
sylhetiyouthwelfareassociation 