Web Write-up Abed Chaudhury

Memory and Legends:

Memory is what separates us from lesser organisms. While we closely share with them the basic processes of life , like digesting food, sleep, fight and flight in higher processes of being that creates a sense of self and destiny we are alone. That loneliness of being unique and human amongst all the myriad formsof life is at once bitter and sweet. Bitter because we alone feel the inevitability of death and oblivion and the forlorn sadness of life’s immutable transience; sweet because we alone transcend this sadness through poetry and music, and with ideas of spirituality and gospels of genesis. Also sweet also because we live not in minutes and days but in the memory of what was and still could be; transforming our existential fear into sublime pathos of collective memory, making the past alive through legend.

A land known as Kanihati:

Many such legends nurture us. In our country we know of legends carried in the oral folklores, in the Puthis of our peasants, and the urbane written history of our literati. But oral history, the fountainhead of timeless legends come to an end as people die and people move on; as many vagaries destroy the bucolic village life of gossips, grooming, friendliness and hospitality. One such legend that is about to die unless resuscitated and nurtured is the legend of a land-mass known as Kanihati.

Ask anyone in our capital city of Dhaka or even greater Sylhet where Kanihati is located and these days you might get a blank look. Our historical amnesia has been nurtured by colonialism, independence that never was in 1947, and the post-71 traumas. The British carefully changed the names of places, not allowing the names of the old timeless places to stay during their times. The old Pargana system, where places were named after local heros and heroines, after events of huge historical significance, were changed into meaningless ahistoric pronouncements. So a place as important as Palassy was not allowed to survive. And so it happened for Kanihati. A place of legendary history, of fables that mingled the core processes of our history and genesis as people was allowed to be obliterated slowly. The name was never recognised in any administrative unit of the land, not a Thana or a Upazilla, not a Gram, nothing. Only in collective memory of the people it continued to survive and slowly it threatens to get perished in the amnesia that grasps much of the nation insofar as its history is concerned.

Place and Legends:

Kanihati is located in what is now known as the Kulaura Upazilla, formerly the Kulaura thana under the district of Moulvibazar For people who travel by train roughly it starts around Shmshernagar and continues till the station of Langla where the old Pargana of Langla starts. These names are relics of the old Pargana system of administrative unit. It has been a long time that the Pargana system has been abolished, for reasons that are obscure to me, but the names still persist doggedly indicating peoples love for these names of zonal boundary that defines places. Is there a lesson here for our mandarins?

So why places like Kanihati is important? Since the early days of the arrival of Islamic Missionaries in Sylhet, mainly the disciples of Hazrat ShahJalal, dramatic events occurred in Kanihati and adjoining areas of Langla and Ita that were to be at once historical and legendary. Historical because they created the syncretic amalgamation of Islam and local customs that in the end defined for us a code of conduct and a type of Islam that became very successful in all of Bangladesh. Legendary because it fed peoples imagination of events that created folklore and oral stories that persisted over many millennia turning the mundane places into mythical ones.

A Yemeni saint and a Tippera Princess:

For it was in Kanihati that a man of Yemeni descent, a disciple of Hazrat Shah-Jalal, named Shah Helimuddin came and through dramatic events that changed the place forever established a family that survives even today. He brought with him not only ideas of a new religion but also a love for the lush green land that became his new abode. He created legends through his alleged acts of miracle and had his son marry the daughter of a local Tippera Princess, undoubtedly of Sino-Tibetan origin like many people of Eastern India are. Thus the mingling of Middle-Eastern genes with the east-asian maternal lineage created an admixture that was syncretic as much genetically as the tolerant sufi version of Islam that resulted from their spiritual union. The local princess was known as Kanak Rani and the area became known as Kanak-hati, or Kanihati. So the cryptic name is loaded with historical and anthropological meaning combining transmigration, cultural and religious mutations and finally the genesis of us as a people. A place defined by hundreds of years of history. A name not to be forgotten.

And that was just the beginning. Soon Shah Helimuddins son Daulat malik settled down in the vast tract of land that the Tippera King gave his father. Legend has it that the saintly man was asked to throw an arrow to ask for the boundary of the land that he desired. And he did throw an arrow which landed in a place now known as Tir (arrow) a pasha. The royal donation of the land occurred after the saint impressed the king by two acts of unexplainable miracle. He killed a ferocious tiger with bare hand and one night the king witnessed the departure of the lamp from his house leaving it totally dark, only to see it later enter all on its own the tent of the saint. Thus shaken and unimaginably impressed he donated all his land to the saint and his clan and his daughter to the son of the saint.

Khaja Osman, the lion of Kanihati

And then a lot more history unfolded in that place that became known as Kanihati. The area became the battle ground between Khaja Osman, the last Pathan rebel to take up arms against the mighty Mughals. Khaja Osman built a fort in a place called Patan-Ushar which is very close to Manu station. The area still remains but runs the risk of being encroached and destroyed. If we have even a modicum of interest in our history and heritage the area known as Osman-Garrh, or the Fort of Osman should be declared a site of National heritage. In Bangladesh, a land of cyclones and rain the Fort hasn’t survived the vagaries of nature. But the fort site is still there and so is the history of Osman. A memorial of some sort should be erected there to celebrate the history of such an important part of our land.

The descendants of that Yemeni saint and the local Tippera Princess have been living there ever since. They often shifted their place of abode, digging enormous Dighhis or ponds wherever they went and the whole area is now dotted with these dighhis each with its unique name and history. The dighi of Shuna Thakur, the Dighhi of Nur Kha, and so it goes. Not having stones for timeless memorial these people have left their mark in giant reservoirs of water. Who said memory must be maintained in ossified stones? Descendants of that lineage and the nation as a whole should maintain these Dighhis, make them useful for the benefit of the people. Most of them are in a bad of state these days and need to be maintained.

Learning from Kanihati

The events and legend of Kanihati is a national treasure. Stories emanating from that ancient pargana deserve to be written properly and should become a publicised events of our national history. The arrival f Islam from the Arabian peninsula and other Mediterranean countries to the local people, through gentle conversions, and mingling of genes through marriages in the end defined us by creating a new culture in eastern Indian subcontinent the cultural raw materials that could still be used to freshen our cultural identity. Indeed this cutural synthesis is the historical raison d’etre of Bangladesh. We must nurture and maintain it self-consciously, as a valuable slate on which to chart our cultural future. In this view Kanihati becomes a symbol of much that needs to happen in Bagladesh, a second cultural renaissance on embracing our hybrid history.

Let us make a beginning. Let us learn from the legends of Kanihati, a timeless place of history, migration, religion and spirituality.

Abed Chaudhury

• Location of Kanihati in Bangladesh