Vast unpredictable rivers in Bengal have destroyed the glorious deeds of men, their livelihoods, their towns and threatened their very existence; they continue to do so today. The Nandy family, once residents of Faridpore, were forced by the raging waters of a rogue river to leave their homestead and they went to settle on the other shore. After a time Mathura Nath Nandy, along with a few close relatives, came to settle in the village of Kushtia, P.S. Ghior, Manikganj town, in the district of Dhaka. He married Priyotama Dhar in the beginning of the 20th century. They went on to have seven daughters and three sons. The eldest son was named Manmatha Nath and given the ‘daknam’ (pet name) – Montu. The Nandy house still stands in Kushtia.
Mathura Nath Nandy finished his FA examination financially assisted by his elder brother. He intended to join a law course, but financial pressures made this impossible and he chose to join the Police Service. He took early retirement in the late 1930s and settled down as a farmer in Kushtia. His wife Priyotama, a devoted mother, had received no formal education but was an ardent reader of Bengali literature and was a subscriber to Prabasi. She took great interest in her children’s upbringing. The ten produced two doctors, one lawyer, several headmistresses and a college lecturer in Physics. Many of her grandchildren recall hearing her tell them Bengali folk tales as well as stories from other lands. Mathura died in Kushtia in 1946.
Manmatha, the eldest son, was born in 1910, when his father was serving as a police officer at Feni, Noakhali. He matriculated from Rajbari School in 1926 and gained his ISc from Rajendra College in Faridpore and was admitted to Presidency College, Calcutta. He graduated in 1930 with honours in chemistry. While studying in Calcutta, he stayed in the Hindu Hostel of the Presidency College. Academically outstanding, he read widely and took an active interest in a whole range of sports, gaining Calcutta University blues in hockey, football and boxing; his boxing trainer was Mr Van Inghen. Manmatha read Vishnu De, Jibanananda Das and had a great liking for the works of Manik Bandyopadhyaya. Throughout his life he kept up his interest in sports, Bengali literature and Left politics. The politics led him, as it did many others at the time, to seek out and address social problems.
After Presidency College, Manmatha went on to study medicine at Carmichael Medical College (now R G Kar Medical College), Calcutta. He graduated in 1935, standing first in surgery and awarded the Lt Colonel S P Sarbadhikari Gold Medal. While in his penultimate year, he joined a voluntary group of doctors, commissioned by the army, who were rushed to Bihar to attend to the victims of the great earthquake centred around Munger that occurred on 15 January 1934. Completely destroying Munger and Muzaffarpur, this earthquake affected large parts of Bihar and Nepal, taking the death toll to over thirty thousand. Young Nandy along with the team of volunteers spent over three months working tirelessly in treating rescued people. Years later he told his children that it was the sight of such devastation that made his hair stand up – and it stayed that way! There was also a touching postscript in the mid-fifties in Dhaka: the family was visited by a young man named Manmatha, who claimed to have been saved from the debris of a collapsing house in Mungerr by Dr Nandy.
Manmatha married Santi Ballow Majumdar in 1934, when she was preparing for her matriculation examination from a boarding school in Jalpaiguri. Her family, though then based in Matelli, a small tea plantation town in the Dooars, was also from Manikganj, not far from Kushtia. After marriage she carried on her further studies at Scottish Church College. The couple lived in a flat in the Entally area of Calcutta. Having qualified as a doctor, Manmatha became a house surgeon and later a registrar at the Carmichael College. While still a student, he had come to the attention of Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, the legendary physician and first Chief Minister of West Bengal post-Independence.
In 1939, the very prosperous and charitable family of the Bhagyakul Kundus (the Roys) asked Dr B C Roy to suggest to them a good doctor who would be prepared to help with organising a village hospital in Sreenagar, Bikrampore, Dhaka District. At Dr Roy’s suggestion, the Kundus approached Dr Nandy.
Manmatha had a bright future ahead of him. His father-in-law had offered to help financially to send him to England for further studies. Calcutta was a city with plenty of opportunities and plenty of facilities. Sreenagar had no running water, no electricity, no roads. The source of drinking water was shallow wells or river water collected mid-stream. Hurricane lamps and Tilley lamps were the main sources of lighting. Wireless sets worked off car batteries, which needed to be transported to Dhaka for charging. Transport was by petrol driven boats and launches in the rainy season or by bicycle along high ground (saraks) at other times. There were no medical facilities nearby. These were some of the problems; more would become obvious later. But the wish to give his services to the needy persuaded Dr Nandy to accept the proposition of the Kundus. In 1939 he decided to take charge of the organisation of the hospital in Sreenagar named after Raja Srinath Roy. Santi, at this time, had given birth to a set of premature twins, a girl and a boy, in Calcutta. It was with his small family that Dr Nandy went to Sreenagar.
The first social problem he faced involved the local Zamindar, an upper caste Hindu, who resented the setting up of a hospital paid for by the Roys (Kundus) known to be Telis by caste. Many obstacles were created by the Zamindar and false allegations were levelled against the young doctor. The Nandy family have many tales to tell about the petty harassments. Dr Nandy overcame all the troubles that were thrown at him and the Raja Srinath Hospital began to function. In this task Dr Nandy was ably assisted by Dr Monindra Choudhury and Dr Barun Ganguly, who also sacrificed their certain good futures to serve the needy. The hospital provided its services free and the financial responsibilities were borne by the Bhagyakul family. Later the Zamindar family also came to grow very close to the Nandy family with past problems forgotten and forgiven.
In Sreenagar, another son and daughter completed the family by 1942. A cow and well helped household hardly eased the family’s austere domestic arrangements. The family acquired a boat with one Majhi (boatman); it was a convertible in the sense that in the rainy season it donned a chhai (covering). The boys were admitted to Sholaghar High School where they travelled mostly on this boat.
During this time Nandy organised football tournaments, a Bikrampore-wide sports event, a library named the Friends Association and a back garden badminton court. Dr Nandy had earned many medals for his own sports activities which he donated to deserving sportsmen. Although not playing football himself, he refereed many games.
Many tales are told about the operations Dr Nandy carried out successfully in dimly lit rooms assisted sometimes even by his wife, Santi. He travelled by boat and/or bicycle to the remotest of places where his diagnostic skills and healing powers came to be reputed as near miraculous. Many times he escaped from snakes and the hands of dacoits in the course of his duties. With the assistance of other doctors, he undertook the training of nurses, compounders, hospital cleaners and other paramedical officers. They had no official diplomas, but they were fit for purpose.
Although the doctor was not an official member of the Communist Party, he was an ardent fellow traveller. With the Party he agreed to the right of self-determination of Muslims. When he came to work in Sreenagar two young Muslim friends came to form lifelong bonds with the family. At the time they were both leftists, but over their lifetime they grew to follow completely different trajectories. Shamsuddin Ahmad, known to the Nandy children as Shamsuddin Kaku, later became a dedicated member of the Muslim League, once officiating as the Secretary. The other friend was the very young Faiz Ahmed whom the children, and in turn their children, called Faiz Da. Both these family members are dead now. Shamsuddin died in Pakistan where he had gone after the Bangladesh war of independence. Faiz Ahmed became famous for his Bengali poetry, political writings and journalism.
In 1943, when Dr Nandy was only 33 years old, Bengal witnessed the worst sub-continental famine in the twentieth century. It was a man-made disaster. In mid-1942, the British government under Winston Churchill feared that the Japanese would follow up their conquest of Burma with an invasion of British India from the Bengal Border. A ‘scorched earth’ policy was implemented in the Chittagong region, near the Burmese border, to prevent access to supplies by the Japanese in case of an invasion. Country boats, the main means of transport of people and foodgrains were systematically disabled and sunk under the ‘Boat Denial Scheme’. Rice stored in godowns was confiscated and food deliveries from other parts of the country to Bengal were refused by the government in order to make food artificially scarce under the ‘Rice Denial Scheme’. Valuable goods and most of the revenue collected were despatched home. Munshiganj, Sreenagar and all of Bikrampur suffered catastrophically. Later, estimates of deaths from this famine reached over four million.
At the time of this famine, Sri Asoke Mitra, ICS, was the sub-divisional officer headquartered in Munshiganj. Dr Nandy and Asoke Mitra co-opted a team and started relief work. Later Mitra recollected his memories of those days in his autobiography ‘Teen Kuri Das’, referring to Doctor Nandy as his friend, philosopher and guide. Dr. Nandy organised the godowns that were emptied of grains, set up temporary hospitals, medical clinics, relief centres and an orphanage. He trained volunteers and received help from St John’s Ambulance. The orphanage was supervised by our mother Santi helped by other volunteers. It is rumoured that both Asoke Mitra and Nandy slept on their bikes. The extreme bicycling took its toll in later years. Nandy and Mitra brought out a small report on the famished mothers of the area. Unfortunately no copies survive.
After the famine, Governor Richard G Casey awarded Dr Nandy a silver medal for his work during this time. Dr Nandy’s work was also mentioned in the Famine Inquiry Commission Report (1945).
In 1946, dark fearful clouds of partition loomed on the Indian horizon. Bengal was to be partitioned as it had been once before. Panic gripped the Hindu upper caste communities in areas that were to become East Pakistan, most of whom decided to migrate to West Bengal. In East Bengal, teachers, doctors, civil servants, lawyers, were mostly upper caste Hindus. Almost all of them abandoned their posts leaving East Pakistan without an adequate social infrastructure for schools, hospitals, law courts and various posts in the civil service. Mathura Nath Nandy had died just before independence. Manmatha would not abandon his Janmabhumi. Thus, he, along with his family, stayed on and accepted citizenship of Pakistan.
In 1948, Dr Nandy was transferred to Dhaka Medical College. Santi had temporarily gone back to her parents with her children to finish her graduation. She came back to finish degrees of Bachelor of Teaching (BT) and Master of Education (MEd) in Dhaka. She served as a headmistress in a number of Government and private schools in Dhaka and Mymensingh. At this time Dr Nandy rented a house – 16, Juginagar, near Thatari Bazaar (now known as Captain’s Bazaar) in Dhaka. The two sons joined the Priyonath School (now known as Nawabpur Boys’ High School) and the daughters joined the Nari Shiksha Mandir (now called Sher-e-Bangla Nagar Government Girls College), where Santi was the headmistress.
