Mainstream WeeklyMy house in Delhi is called Chandsi Villa. The name itself is something of a misnomer, as the once garden house is now a four-storey apartment building, far removed from a villa that the name evokes. And it is named after a village in Bangladesh which no one in this building has ever visited, not even perhaps its original owners, our parents.
Omniscient Google describes Chandsi as "a historically significant village located in the Gournadi Upazila of the Barisal District in south-central Bangladesh". On digging further, one is informed that "In South Asia (particularly across India and Bangladesh), the term "Chandsi Doctor" or "Chandsi Dawakhana" (pharmacy) is a highly popular household name for traditional or neo-traditional clinics specialising in the non-surgical treatment of anorectal ailments like piles (hemorrhoids), fissures, and fistulas".
Since none of us are (or were) remotely connected to the medical profession, it’s a clinical burden that one has been carrying now for nearly five decades without questioning its provenance.
So, with both cultural curiosity and social anxiety, I delved into the mystical world of artificial intelligence - with some scepticism and trepidation - as I thought what is described the most transformative technology of our time that simulates human intelligence - could help me mine my past and embellish my childhood memory.
Chandsi and Ramchandrapur - the two fairly well-off villages in Barisal (the city and the administrative headquarters of both Barisal district and Barisal division and one of the oldest river ports of undivided Bengal) - where my mother was born pre-independence and lived till her marriage that brought her across the border to the Indian capital 1700 km away - figured often in our growing-up tales and socio-cultural imagination.
Chandsi, we were told, was a place from where a lot of people became doctors and so it was - or that is what we understood - reputed for being home to the medical pioneers of an earlier era. If that was so, why did none of our parents - or even immediate forefathers - follow that noble profession was a question that remained hanging by the neck like a doctor’s stethoscope.
Yet, we carried a certain social pride in naming our Delhi home Chandsi Villa and thereafter inscribed the moniker on an aluminium plaque at the entry to our apartment building - without much knowledge of the place’s geography or history (see pic)
It was only later, when time and curiosity converged to make me deep-dive genealogically with the help of generative AI-era research tools that one found that a distinct non-surgical line of treatment originated in the very village of Chandsi during the 19th century. Local practitioners developed specialised herbal and Ayurvedic treatments that became so well-known that healers from this region travelled across undivided Bengal and India to set up clinics.
Following the partition of Bengal, many Hindu practitioners from Chandsi migrated to various parts of India (especially West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar) and established small clinics under the banner of "Bengali Chandsi Clinics". Even today, I believe hundreds of small-town clinics across India and Bangladesh still brand themselves as "Chandsi Clinic " or "Chandsi Dawakhana" to imply para-surgical expertise in treating these specific conditions or as a trademark shorthand for traditional, affordable, and localised alternative medicine. And, for all one knows, it is being used by unscrupulous practitioners as a trade euphemism for running village or urban-slum quack shops!
The Kadambini Ganguly Story
Chandsi’s medical history, however, is much richer. Kadambini Ganguly (nee Basu), the first Indian and South Asian female physician trained in western medicine, had her roots in Chandsi. She and Chandramukhi Basu were the first two female graduates from India. She was the daughter of Brahmo reformer Braja Kishore Basu, who was from Chandsi, Barisal, who later moved to Bhagalpur, Bihar where Kadambini was born on 18 July 1861. Braja Kishore, even while he was Barisal, was a great champion of women’s emancipation and established the Bhagalpur Mahila Samiti (women’s society) in 1863, the first in India.
Kadambini started her education at Banga Mahila Vidyalaya and while at Bethune School in 1878 became the first woman to pass the University of Calcutta entrance examination. It was partly in recognition of her efforts that Bethune College first introduced FA (First Arts), and then graduation courses in 1883. She and Chandramukhi Basu became the first graduates from Bethune College, and in the process became the first female graduates in the country and in the entire British Empire . Ganguly studied medicine at the Calcutta Medical College and thus became one of the two - Anandi Gopal Joshi being the other - Indian women doctors who qualified to practice Western medicine. Kadambini overcame some opposition from the teaching staff, and orthodox sections of society. She went to the United Kingdom in 1892 and returned to India after qualifying as LRCP (Edinburgh), LRCS (Glasgow), and GFPS (Dublin). After working for a short period in Lady Dufferin Hospital, she started her own private practice . In 1883 she married the Brahmo reformer and leader of women’s emancipation Dwarkanath Ganguly. They were actively involved in female emancipation and social movements to improve work conditions of female coal miners in eastern India. She was one of the six female delegates to the fifth session of the Indian National Congress in 1889, and even organised the Women’s Conference in Calcutta in 1906 in the aftermath of the partition of Bengal.
Paddy, River, Canal - and Hilsa
Chandsi (our father’s ancestral village which he had never visited) and a neighbouring village of Ramchandrapur (my mother’s ancestral village where the extended family of over 100 cousins used to congregate during Durga Puja and witness the traditional buffalo ’bali’ sacrifice on Maha Ashtami) - both in Barisal district - are deeply embedded into our cultural and social consciousness through childhood stories, lullabies, and family anecdotes that our mother related to us, particularly at bed times. So one dreamt - and even dream decades later into one’s senior years - about Barisal and its "Dhan, Nodi, Khal - ei niye Barisal" - paddy, river and canal, and that is what makes Barisal. Barisal was often called "Venice of the East" because you couldn’t go from one para (neighbourhood) to another without crossing a khal (canal).
And, when rice and river are there, fish (feesh, as Bengalis pronounce it with their cultural lilt) cannot be far behind. We were told stories about the two-paise hilsa fish that was bountiful (its now available for Rs 900 to 2500/kg in Delhi); about smaller fish that used to drift into the toilet (a typical zamindar house would have a large courtyard with a toilet at one end, a family Durga dalan or platform where Durga Puja was held and a private pond, or dighi which overflowed during heavy rains); and how bloated guests (this is probably an apocryphal story) who couldnt walk home after a heavy hilsa feast used to float down the town’s many canals with shut eyes and then would find themselves colliding with floating dead buffaloes and mistaking them for people returning from similar feasts in an engorged state.
And then the steamer ghat and the overnight launch to Dhaka fm Barisal, with dinner of dal chorchori, ilish (hilsa) bhaja and begun bhaja on board.
Hilsa stories cannot ever be overexaggerated, for hilsas are a part of East Bengali (Bangals - those who migrated from East Pakistan and now Bangladesh) folklore. My parents’ eye would light up whenever we got hilsa home and dinner-table talk would inevitably go back in time when hilsa cost two paisa and how the very hilsa word had one’s mouth watering in anticipation (jibe te jol ashe, my mother used to exclaim on seeing a hilsa).
The cross-border hilsa cultural connection continues despite the political standoff and diplomatic strains. When I related my old Barisal stories to the Bangladesh High Commissioner in India, the affable Riaz Hamidullah, he promptly sent me photos of the hilsa festival he had and the consignment of "Barisal Hilsa" he had got from Bangladesh for the festival.
Pakha Palli
Chandsi was also known as Pakha Palli, the Village of Fans. Over 150 years ago, a woman named Khodeza Begum came from Faridpur to Uttar Chandsi after marriage and taught locals to make tal pakha — hand fans from palm leaves. Today about 400 people in 50 families still live off it.
They have their own folk songs while working: "Orey o taler pakha, sheet kaletey daona dekha, Grishsha kaley praner shokha" — O palm-leaf fan, you are not seen in winter, but you are the friend of the heart in summer.
A family could make 20-25 fans a day, four types — with handle, without handle, 360-degree swing, and folding pocket fans. In summer and during frequent power outages, traders from other districts came to collect 100-piece bundles straight from the family courtyards.
The Stirrings of Freedom
At a time when female graduation was rare, our mother was one of the early graduates from BM Colllege, founded in 1889 by Ashwini Kumar Dutta. The ancestral house was on Hospital Road, the civil lines around Barisal’s first public hospital, and the road during the tumultuous pre-independence years used to see many processions by Hindus and Muslims singing Bande Mataram, the soul-stirring freedom song penned by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which later became India’s national song.
In one of the processions my impressionable young mother - then in school - and her friends were spotted by shocked elders in one of the processions, demanding freedom and chanting slogans against the British, quite oblivious that her father was being honoured by the British for his past services to the Empire.
My maternal grandfather, Uma Prasanna Guha, was both a zamindar and as well as a member of the colonial civil service (a district magistrate). A postgraduate in English from Calcutta University, he gave his grandchildren English names like Rosie, Baby, Molly, Poppy etc. When his eldest grandson decided to study Chemistry in college, he is said to have remarked poignantly (which we heard from our mother over and over again: "Santu (Santi Ranjan), goodbye, English?"
As my brother Tapan says, all this and much more came from our mother’s oral history archives, which she gleefully dug into for stories at every family occasion, never mind many were repeated ad nauseum.
The first Englishman to visit Bengal, Ralph Fitch, described "Bacola" (Barisal) as: "His country is very great and fruitful, and hath store of rice, much cotton cloth... The houses are very fair and high built, the streets large..." The women wore "a great store of silver hoops about their necks and arms."
What’s in a Name?
So, what’s in a name? Does the name Chandsi Villa really capture who we are or where we com from? Names - of people and places - are mirrors and containers of some reflections of our past, which we ourselves may not have been aware of, and profoundly felt intuitions. They can even be guideposts to our culture we may not have been aware of by connecting us to a cherished part of a family history.
By linking our present to our indeterminate past through memory chains, online research and AI-generated information, one tries to create a cultural continuity where our children and grandchildren find a sense of belonging in a world whose social moorings are being disrupted by wars, disasters and political anarchy. That is where the name of a house becomes synonymous not just with nostalgia for things past but with emotions that link our past, present and future.
(Author: Tarun Basu is a veteran journalist and editor. He was founder editor-in-chief of the IANS news agency and currently runs the think tank Society for Policy Studies that published the digital platform South Asia Monitor. )