Nawab Ghani, the Judas of Dhaka, and writer Shahidul Zahir’s unsparing portrait of him

Bangladeshi author Shahidul Zahir rarely chose his characters’ names off the top of his head. Specifically, his razakar characters – people who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War – carry symbolic names. One name that leaps to mind is Moulana Abubakr, father of a camel in Arabic or a goat in colloquial Bangla. Razakar leader Abubakr in “The Thorn” comically calls his minions “Stupid goats!”

But the most evocative one is Abdul Goni. Zahir recurringly picked this moniker for his razakars, in three different stories. “Commanders of the razakars always have the name, Abdul Goni,” the author plays up this reiteration in I See the Face. One Abdul Goni in the novel talks about a pregnant woman like a fox awaiting an opportune moment to break into a chicken coop. Another Abdul Goni in “The Cat-and-Mouse Game” repeatedly sets “the cats” or the Pakistani army on Ghost Lane residents who flee like “rats” when the army arrives. “It seems I must show you the cats again!” he declares. The other Goni in Life and Political Reality faces mob justice in Victoria Park.

My immersion in the works of Zahir as a translator suggests that the name and the location, Victoria Park, are Easter eggs. These breadcrumbs hearken back to the 1857 Lalbagh Sepoy rebellion. They are redolent of old Dhaka lore that counterposes local remembrance against official records. And I say it’s the author’s way of connecting 1857 with 1971.

1857 and 1971

When a rebellion broke out in Jalpaiguri in 1857, now a district in India’s West Bengal, rebel sepoys carried the news with them to Dhaka’s Lalbagh regiment. Before it could ripen, British administrators crushed the Lalbagh rebellion and hanged rebel sepoys from the tree branches in Victoria Park, former Antaghar Maidan. They left the corpses to rot for days to keep future uprisings at bay. For generations, this incident had haunted the people of the nearby localities.

“Many superstitious stories used to be narrated by the people of the surrounding Mahallas,” recounted Hridaya Nath Majumdar, “[about] how the spirits of the departed sepoys used to visit the Maidan during the night and how the groans and awful sounds were used to be heard”. Even the writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias wrote a story titled “The Fugitive” based on these local legends.

By all accounts in old Dhaka, Khwaja Abdul Ghani bore the brunt of public accusation for allegedly tipping off British officials about the ensuing insurgency in the Lalbagh regiment. Although authors like Nazir Hossain, Mizanur Rahman, and Muntassir Mamoon corroborated his involvement, national archives do not recognise these people’s narratives.

Nevertheless, Nawab Ghani’s loyalty to the British Raj is incontestable. Charles Edward Buckland’s account of Bengal (1901) attests that Ghani remained stationed in Dhaka during the revolt. He believed that his presence would inspire his “countrymen with hope and confidence in the British Government” as it would also prevent “the evil-doers from carrying out their wicked designs”.

Ghani supported the colonial government with loans, elephants, boats, horses, and carriages. In the 1870s, he introduced freshwater supply and streetlights to Dhaka. For his European attire, opulent ballrooms, racehorse stables and English jockeys, Arthur Lloyd Clay described Ghani as “a good specimen of the Anglicised native”. Word has it that Nawab Ghani hosted a ballroom party, celebrating the British crackdown on the Lalbagh rebels.

Fact and fiction

One thing’s for sure, old Dhaka residents heaped scorn on the Nawab for sepoy killings. Is it then merely a coincidence that Zahir selected Victoria Park, of all places, to execute the Nawab’s namesake?

Razakar Goni’s trial in Life is both hilarious and horrendous. Caught five days after the end of the 1971 war, old Dhaka people tied him up with a rope to a park bench with his face down and head stuck out. Then they lifted his lungi, shoved in the muzzle of a rifle, and held it against his bottom. All this is to extract information about the people who went missing during the war. Goni’s eventual decapitation in the historical setting speaks of poetic justice.

Life’s trial turns the park into a people’s court. For colonial power, it stood for British sovereignty; for the anti-colonials, national mourning; and for the locals, haunting memories.

In other words, the park’s meaning figured differently for different groups. Its name changed many times with the change of its owners. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Armenians owned the property and called it the Antaghar Maidan or billiard club. “Anta/anda” means egg and “ghar” means house in Hindi, Urdu, and Bangla. Following the Sepoy Revolt, the East India Company transferred power to Queen Victoria in 1858 and the place became Victoria Park. Then, in 1956, the Pakistani government renamed it, “Bahadur Shah Park”, to commemorate the martyred soldiers.

It is said that Nawab Ghani was instrumental in designing the park in 1858. Even so, he is chiefly remembered as a Judas in old Dhaka. Although its historicity is contestable, Zahir’s invocation of this oral history offers a re-reading of the past. It celebrates a multiplicity of narratives.

Shahroza Nahrin co-translated Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas (HarperCollins India, 2022) with V Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy’s translation of I See the Face (HarperCollins India, 2023) came out earlier this year.