Mukti: Free to Be Born Again
Partitions of Indian Subcontinent, Islamism, Hinduism, Leftism, and Liberation of the Faithful
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About the Book
“Mukti: Free to Be Born Again” is a history-based autobiographical nonfiction created on three decades of fieldwork in Muslim-majority Bangladesh and Hindu-majority India. Many strands of real-life drama have been weaved together with 1947 Hindu-Muslim, secular-Islamic, and 1971 Islamic-secular, ruling-minority vs. oppressed-majority partitions of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Because of precarious plight, individual and village names have been fictionalized. The story focuses on transformation of a society by the oppressor, oppressed, Islam, and Hinduism. The story ties Indian and Bengali history, views of Muslims and Hindus, role of Bangladeshi Hindu refugee elites in India, pogroms, devastation of minority communities, role of anti-Hindu Islamism and anti-tradition Communism, life of poor oppressed-caste Hindus left behind in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, and more. Dastidar is the first to break a taboo by writing in 1989 about the poor, oppressed Hindu minority left behind by the Hindu-refugee elites in India.
About the Author
Dr. Sachi G. Dastidar is a distinguished professor of State University of New York. As someone belonging to a family who was cleansed from Pakistan/Bangladesh, partition of India, and subsequent changes in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have been of interest to him. He is a rare individual among tens of millions of Hindu refugees who has gone back to his ancestral home in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. He now helps thirty-three schools for the poor and the orphaned in Bangladesh, West Bengal, Assam, and Mizoram, having built nine schools/dorms in Bangladesh, and one more each in West Bengal and Mizoram states. Several of his books cover 1947 and 1971 partitions—Empire’s Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent’s Vanishing Hindu and other Minorities; Living among the Believers; This Bengal, that Bengal (in Bengali); and This Is My Home (in Bengali). He has authored over seventy-five articles on the issues and has twice testified in Washington about the plight of non-Muslim minorities in a Muslim-majority subcontinent. He heads the Indian Subcontinent Partition Documentation Project (ISPaD).