Deshbandhu...Shooting Star Across Our Skies

Ninety two years after his passing, Chittaranjan Das remains a significant point of reference in South Asian history.

- Syed Badrul Ahsan

There are all the questions which arise with every remembrance of the man known as Deshbandhu to people across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. What if he had not died in 1925, at the relatively young age of fifty five? Would India be partitioned had C.R. Das been alive in the tumultuous 1940s? Would Bengal go for a fresh new renaissance with Deshbandhu around?

In these rather banal times we inhabit across the landscape vivisected into political tribalism, figuratively as well as literally, through the happenings of 1947, it is the electrifying, idealistic nature of Das’ beliefs that is recalled, to jolt us into an awareness of the transcendental calling of politics as it used to be, as it ought to be. Deshbandhu belonged to a generation of political figures that produced the likes of Surendranath Banerjea, Bepin Chandra Pal, Motilal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Aurobindo Ghosh. In Das came together the best that education under British colonialism could offer, which was fundamentally an acknowledgement that India would need to catch up with the rest of the world, that such a catching up entailed a calling forth of nationalism based on sophisticated patriotism among its leadership and its citizens across the varied parameters of thought.