Six Months & Six Days

(1) Like the author, my family was also from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. In one of the largest-ever mass migrations in human history, my parents, like tens of millions of others, were forced to leave their homes as refugees as the subcontinent was divided into two separate nation-states: Pakistan and India. Unlike mine, the author’s family stayed back to experience yet another human tragedy, first hand, that preceded the liberation war of Bangladesh. While I was a young student then, I witnessed a human tragedy – the suffering of the people of East Pakistan. I met Dr. Chatterjee in North Carolina about 30 years ago, and we have been friends since then. His life story reflected my memory of our efforts to house refugees during the Bangladesh revolution. I feel the memoir, ‘Six Months and Six Days:My Struggles during the Bangladesh War of Liberation’ It is not only his memoir; it is the memoir of 3 million dead Bangladeshis and 10 million refugees who took shelter in India and did not have the opportunity or means to tell the world what they went through. I must thank Mr. Chatterjee for vividly describing his life as a lesson for all, lest we forget. Dr. Chatterjee’s articulation of the tragic and chronological events in his memoir provides a clear picture from ground zero. (2) I first met Dr. Chatterjee in July 2007 in the Rayburn House Office Building Foyer in the U.S. Capitol, where, as the Executive Director of the human rights organization, HRCBM, he had organized a visual representation & seminar on the systematic, state-sponsored campaign of religious & ethnic minority cleansing that has relentlessly raged in Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan) since the Noakhali Massacre of Hindus in 1945. I have since had the privilege of working with Dr. Chatterjee on the issue on various occasions. Six Months and Six Days: my struggles during the Bangladesh war of liberation is as much a riveting account of Dr. Amalendu Chatterjee’s own eventful life experiences as it is a poignant chronicle of the colossal human tragedy involved with the partition of India in 1947 and the genocide that the Islamists conducted against the ethnic Bengalis of erstwhile East Pakistan, i.e., Bangladesh, in 1971. Dr. Chatterjee has very clearly articulated his own story of survival as well as those of a few others in order to inform the community of civilized nations of the situation. Readers interested in South Asian politics, particularly those who would like to learn about the colossal human tragedy caused by the splitting secular India to create the Islamic state of Pakistan, and the Bangladesh Genocide, will be amply rewarded by reading Dr. Chatterjee’s memoir. Dwijen Bhattacharjya, Ph. D. Lecturer in Bengali, Columbia University, New York Tushar Ghosh William A. Klopman Distinguished Professor Wilson College of Textiles North Carolina State University | Box 8301 | Raleigh, NC 27606