A Cancelled Football Match in Kolkata

I was barely in my teens, an aspiring cricketer, when my father took me to the Cooperage in Bombay, to watch a football match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. It is the greatest rivalry in all of the universe, he told me.

Today, in Kolkata, the football match is cancelled. This is because the rival clubs had sought to protest against the gangrape and murder of a young doctor at a city hospital.

This side and that side

In the late-1970s, my parents were film-makers. My father was a professor at the Film Institute in Poona before being transferred to Bombay. In Bombay he was with the Films Division.

In Poona, where he taught direction and my mother was a student many times over (Jaya Bhaduri and Shatrughan Sinha were contemporaries), I remember my Ma taking me by the hand to meet mukti-jodhhas from what was to be Bangladesh to the military hospital. The Poona Military Hospital was considered the best at that time. In particular, when I saw this soldier with his hands tied left and right and his legs tied left and right, I remember asking my Ma, “O paykhana ki kore korey” – how does he shit?

Baba was Ritwik Ghatak’s chief assistant director and the writer from his first film, Nagarik, right till Meghe Dhaka Tara. He is the man smoking away in the first shot in Nagarik. By the time of Komol Gandhar, he had left Calcutta and taken up the government job in Poona.

Ghatak and my Ma both graduated from Rajshahi University. My Ma’s family moved from Dinajpur to Calcutta and she graduated from Women's Christian College, Calcutta University.

In that Cooperage encounter, I was told that the match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, between the Bangal (people from now Bangladesh) and the Ghoti (people originally in what is now West Bengal), between the iss paar and the uss paar, was a match of great significance. It is this match that has been cancelled. There is a tide that is rising up the Hooghly. 

In my paternal family, we are from the Calcutta that sold large tracts to the British, the Duttas of Hatkhola, the zamindars who expended gold to hold weddings for pets.

Back in Kolkata after decades across the world, I am the outsider looking in. The social unrest may have a mismatch with the electoral outcome. You should know that the distance from Kolkata to Dhaka is 372 kilometres. The distance from Delhi to Kolkata is 1400 kilometres.

The distance from my house to to Salt Lake Stadium is 26 kilometres. It is where the Bangals and the Ghotis wanted to come together under one banner. “We want justice”. 

Sujan Dutta is an independent journalist.

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