Dawn can make even the ugliest of places look pretty, though for me the magical hour, whenever I am up early enough to witness it, usually means a race against time — a dash to either the airport or the railway station.

The day was just breaking when I stepped out of the suffocating and depressing confines of my hotel room in Malda — and it was the best hotel in town — to hail a cycle-rickshaw for the station. The train to Murshidabad, three hours away, was leaving in about half-an-hour, and I had to buy a ticket and find myself a seat in the general compartment.

The AC coach, it turned out, had empty seats and I asked the TTE for an upgrade. But he seemed to be in no mood for paperwork early in the morning and allotted me a seat by quietly asking me for Rs. 100. Strangers, sometimes, can be kind. I hardly sat in my place though, and spent most of the journey standing by the door, watching the unfamiliar landscape as the train made its way down the swan’s throat.

Standing by the door has its rewards. As the train came upon the barrage across the Ganga at Farakka, the Ganga was no longer a river but an ocean, frightfully large and voluminous, gushing in the direction of Bangladesh, the border barely 15 km to the east, its waters glistening in the morning sun. I pulled out my phone and began taking pictures fervently, not sure how long the river-turned-ocean would remain in view. I need not have hurried: the train took forever to cross the Ganga at Farakka.

It is at Farakka that the Ganga splits into two separate rivers. The broader channel goes east to Bangladesh and gets a new name, Padma. The smaller turns south and flows under the name of Bhagirathi, which becomes Hooghly as soon as it approaches Kolkata. The idea behind building the barrage — the construction began in 1961 and ended in 1975 — was to divert some of the water from the Bangladesh-bound river to the Kolkata-bound river to increase the latter’s flow and therefore reduce sediment-deposition at the Kolkata harbour.

Meanwhile, the Bangladesh-bound Ganga too turns southwards upon touching the border and it flows on the Radcliffe Line for some distance before finally curving into Bangladesh — the curving, if you look at the map, happens at the village of Jalangi, in Murshidabad. Jalangi, therefore, is where I want to go, though there are other places in Murshidabad I want to see as well.

There is, however, no railway station by the name of Murshidabad. It is a large district today, large enough not to have a station named after it. To be in Murshidabad, you will have to alight either at a station called Berhampore Court or Khagraghat Road. My train was headed for the latter.

Presently a man joined me by the door, and I asked him about hotels in Murshidabad. He named some hotels and even briefed me how to get there. Then he asked me, “Where are you from?”

“Chennai?”

“But you seem to be a Bengali.”

“I am a Bengali.”

“So where in Bengal you are from?”

“Murshidabad.”

“What? Then why are you enquiring about hotels?”

“My ancestral house is in Murshidabad, but I have never been there. This is my first visit, and for a different purpose.”

“Who lives in the ancestral house then?”

“A cousin, whom I have never met.”

So, in a way, I was a son of the soil I was soon going to set foot on, and I have always wondered whether my ancestors ever had a glimpse of Siraj ud-Daulah — or for that matter Robert Clive. Murshidabad was the capital of Bengal when Clive, arriving from Madras with a contingent that comprised more south Indians than Europeans, defeated the young Siraj ud-Daulah, who had just succeeded his maternal grandfather as the nawab of Bengal, in a battle of Plassey, about 60 km south of the town.

Clive’s ill-gotten victory—he had bribed Mir Jafar, the commander of Siraj’s army—laid the foundation of British rule in India. Traders had become rulers. Siraj, brutally murdered after his defeat, lies buried in the outskirts of Murshidabad, and it would not be wrong to call him India’s first freedom fighter.

*

I had imagined Murshidabad to be a small place, where everything worth seeing could be covered in a day. But from the hotel, Jalangi lay some 70 km away; Khushbagh, the cemetery where Siraj ud-Daulah and his family members are buried, 30 km away; Lalbagh, the seat of the nawabs, about 15 km away; and Plassey 60 km — all in different directions. And Panchthupi, my ancestral village, 50 km away in yet another direction, so I struck it out from my to-do list.

The location of the Battle of Plassey, which was fought in 1757 and which laid the foundation for British rule in India. ~Photo: Bishwanath Ghosh/The Hindu

I began with a visit to Khushbagh, the Garden of Happiness, which lay, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere: nothing for miles around except a brick kiln and a small railway station by the name of Lalbagh Court Road. It was built as a garden — and still remains a well-maintained garden — by Nawab Alivardi Khan, Siraj’s grandfather, who was buried here.

After the Battle of Plassey, Siraj was buried next to his grandfather and over the years, his other family members were interred there too. They all lie buried at the centre of the garden, in square, flat-roofed chamber. There are other graves too, scattered across the garden, including that of the fakir who had revealed Siraj’s location to the British after he had escaped from Murshidabad following his defeat.

The grave of Siraj ud-Daulah. He is buried right next to his maternal grandfather. ~Photo: Bishwanath Ghosh/The Hindu

Siraj ud-Daula’s grave alone has a tombstone, and the inscription is in Persian. “I am an illiterate man,” the sweeper at the garden, who identifies the graves for visitors in return for some money, tells me, “but I can tell you something that no book will tell you: no one knows what exactly is buried here. Some people say Siraj was cut into four pieces and that one piece was buried here. Some say only a finger was buried here. No one knows the truth — no one will ever know the truth.”

The same could be said about all the 34 graves in the manicured garden, perhaps with the exception of that of Alivardi Khan, which is right at the centre of the chamber and looks stately. Who lies in which grave: that was a knowledge handed down, orally, generation to generation, and over the years the knowledge has become a secret, which very few people know today — such as the sweeper.

*

The man was shouting in Bengali over the phone — he was berating the person on the other end for not delivering a consignment on time. Now, nothing unusual about a man in Bengal shouting in Bengali, only that this man was a Sikh, and at this moment a very angry Sikh.

But his anger melted like butter when he came to ask me, in Bengali, what I would like to have. He ran a dhaba — supposedly famous — on the highway, not very far from Khusbhbagh.

“What’s your specialty?” I asked him.

“Torka-ruti,” he said, referring to the Bengali-style dal-tadka and rotis.

“I will have that.”

In hindsight I regret not having a chat with the Sikh. He would have made a good story. I must have been more preoccupied with the journey ahead.

And so after a lunch of torka-ruti I set out for Jalangi, on the eastern tip of Murshidabad, in the company of the quietest driver I had ever come across. He was a man of about 30, who showed no curiosity about my life, my family, my job, or the purpose of my visit to his town; no information or anecdotes to share; and who answered my questions in monosyllables.

I stared out of the window as we alternated through fields and settlements, the road very often lined by upright bundles of jute stalk. When you see bundles of jute stalk left to stand along the road, you know you are in countryside Bengal.

I braced myself to see the Ganga, at its mightiest self, curving into Bangladesh. I imagined the possible sights that would greet me at Jalangi — and each time I ended up imagining the sea, because images from Farakka were very fresh in the mind.

The Ganga at Jalangi, however, looked like a lifeless pond. And the opposite bank was so elevated that you could barely see the terrain across the river. This side of the river, however, appeared to be lively at dusk. Elderly men sat on cement benches and on circular platforms that are usually built around large trees. Lovers and bunches of boys were just hanging around. This seemed to be the place where people came in the evenings — the Marina of Jalangi.

I approached two men sitting on a bench. They immediately shifted to one side to make place for me. I asked them how a river, which had looked as forceful as the sea barely a 100 km upstream, could look like a pond now. They laughed and told me why. And then I realised that old maps cannot tell you about the new course of rivers — and rivers keep changing their course.

People spending their evening at Jalangi by the Ganga. ~Photo: Bishwnanath Ghosh/The Hindu

This is what happened in Jalangi. Once upon a time, that is until 1994 — the men, both in their seventies, were talking from memory and not about events before their lifetime — the village of Jalangi extended another several hundred metres to the east, and was located on the banks on the actual Ganga, rather Padma, and not this pond. And then one fine day, the river shifted slightly west and swallowed a portion of Jalangi. What the river swept away included jute and food grain godowns, a police station, several shops, several orchards, farmlands — and much more.

“It all happened so quickly,” recalled one of the men, 71-year-old Idris Mondal, a farmer who owned 12 bighas of land in the portion that overnight became water. “I remember it was the time of Muharram, and there was a fair going on. I rushed here because I was told that my land too was being washed away. In 40 minutes Jalangi as I knew it was gone — in just 40 minutes.”

And then, sometime in 1998, the river decided to move eastward — just as dramatically as it had decided to move westward a few years earlier. But before this could happen, a bus carrying schoolchildren plunged into the Padma, just a few metres from where I was sitting the men, in the early hours of January 12 that year. The children, belonging to Murshidabad, were headed for a picnic in the neighbouring Nadia district, and the driver had missed a curve due to heavy fog and instead driven into the river. About 60 bodies were recovered.

As the river shifted away from Jalangi, it left behind a branch on whose banks we sat now. And while it may resemble a pond, the fact is that it remains a part of the Ganga/Padma and is nearly 40 ft deep. Right across this new pond had re-emerged the land of Idris Mondal, who went back to cultivating paddy, wheat and jute in that patch — only that he now has to use a boat to reach there. But he is happier than before: apparently, when a river, especially a Himalayan river the Ganga, drifts away from a piece of land it had submerged, it leaves the land far more fertile.

Mondal’s companion remarked, “Nature dobachhe, nature ee tulchhe” — nature sinks you, and nature pulls you out.

“So how far is the actual Ganga — or Padma — from here?” I asked them.

“Oh, that has drifted away some 10 km into Bangladesh, maybe 15 km,” Mondal replied.

And so, the river is no longer the border between India and Bangladesh at Jalangi. The border now lies in what they call chhar land — the land left behind by a river. I could see men from the Border Security Force guarding the ‘pond’, but I didn’t feel like walking up to them and introducing myself. I was getting tired of doing this.

“The BSF was not so strict here until the attacks on America,” said Mondal, referring to 9/11, “until then Bangladeshis would freely come to Jalangi for their daily needs — grocery, medicines, clothes, fertilisers. Things are much cheaper here. But now they don’t come anymore. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing — I don’t know.”

*

The next afternoon I was at Plassey — or Palashi, in Bengali — standing at a memorial amidst the fields where the armies of Clive and Siraj ud-Daulah had met on June 23, 1757. Back then there were only mango orchards — thousands and thousands of them — today the farmers here grow other things, including sugarcane, which goes to a sugar mill located a stone’s throw from the memorial. Plassey, in fact, looks like Punjab.

The memorial marking the Battle of Plassey. In the foreground is the bust of Siraj ud-Daulah. ~Photo: Bishwanath Ghosh/The Hindu

The memorial, which consists of an obelisk surrounded by a boundary wall, seemed to be the spot when local men converged every evening for their daily dose of adda. None of the men I met was able to tell me when exactly the memorial was built, though a plaque informed me that it was renovated as recently as in 1998. And even more recently, in 2007, a bust of Siraj ud-Daulah was installed there, even though the sculptor wouldn’t have had the remotest idea how exactly the nawab of Bengal looked like. He made Siraj look very Bengali: soft, chubby and vulnerable.

But the local men did tell me something: once upon a time, there were four plaques on the obelisk, each made of brass and reading, ‘Battlefield of Plassey, June 23rd, 1757’. And that the obelisk itself was encircled by a concrete perimeter, implanted on which were brass posts connected by brass chains.

But every single item made of brass was stolen from the memorial. Subsequently the government uprooted the concrete perimeter and split it into segments, which were then installed as benches along the tree-lined path leading to the memorial. It is on these benches that locals sit to have their evening adda.

I didn’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed. Ashamed, because my countrymen could stoop to such levels — or proud because Clive, the hero of Plassey, had plundered India and it was only fair that the memorial be robbed of its riches?