Dr. Sachi (Sabyasachi) Ghosh Dastidar is a Distinguished Service Professor of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. He has taught in the U. S., Kazakhstan and India. He has also worked in Florida, Tennessee and West Bengal. Dastidar was an elected Board Member of a New York City School district making him the first Bengali-American to hold a popularly elected position in the U.S.
Sachi Dastidar has authored six books, including Ai Bangla, Oi Bangla (1992), ? Aamaar Desh, (1998), Regional Disparities and Regional Development Planning of West Bengal with Shefali S. Dastidar (1990), and Central Asian Journal of Management, Economics and Social Research (2000). He has written over 100 articles, short stories and travelogues. His awards include Senior Fulbright Award, Distinguished Service Professor of the State University of New York, and honors from New York City Comptroller, NYC Council Speaker, residents of Mahilara, Madaripur and Uzirpur, all of Bangladesh, Assam Buddhist Vihar, and from Kazakhstan Institute. He has travelled to over 60 countries in all seven continents including Antarctica. Probini Foundation (www.probini.org) that his wife and he founded helps educated the orphaned and the poor in 18 institutions in Bangladesh, West Bengal and Assam.
Living among the Believers is a collection of 18 selected stories. It is a by-product of 25 years of field work. Stories are based on life of victims and survivors - mostly minority, oppressed-caste, often dirt-poor, frequently women and unlettered, and of tormentors and protectors - stories told to the author and his family or as he witnessed first-hand down the Ganga River. Stories cover life in post-Partition (1947) Subcontinent. Bangladesh and West Bengal. These stories broadly cover ethnic, women's, human rights and cultural issues. Some stories shadow Bengali articles written for the author Ai Bangla, Oi Bangla (This Bengal, That Bengal; 1991) and A Aamaar Desh (This is my Home; 1998). One article is based on a 2005 Keynote Speech in Bangladesh. Different Bengali versions of a few of the short stories were published in Puja journals in New York City.
These are stories about the effects of another 9/11 that took place almost a century ago and its aftermath a century later in a different continent. Stories are about the victims of that violent act but yet unknown to the humanity. That 9/11 took place in the Indian Province of Bengal in Colonial India on 10/16, October 16, 1905, at the instigation of then British Administration. Imperial Britain partitioned Bengal in to Muslim East Bengal and secular non-Muslim West Bengal Provinces within British India starting the process of intolerant, communal (racist) and extremist groups to rise to power in Muslim-majority East Bengal, now Bangladesh, and in the Muslim-majority provinces of Colonial Northwest India and Punjab, now Pakistan. That divisive process brought the Muslim-non Muslim partition of India in 1947 and the eventualnise of extremist Islamism in Pakistan (and in neighbouring Afghanistan) and Bangladesh and an extremist Communist Party- Marxist to power in West Bengal. But what happened to the indigenous peoples in the Islamized area who did not yet convert to monotheistic faiths, or, those who could not flee to new India? And what happened to those who fled to India? Colonial British rulers wanted to check the aspirations of Indians to be free-of all faiths, ethnicities and linguistic groups-but unleashed a force that they did not and could not control, almost paralleling American and Western support for anti-Soviet Taliban in Afghanistan 90 years later, and then the rise of intolerant bin-Laden and finally 9/11. Under pressure from the pan-Indian nationalists, that 1905 partition was annulled in 1911 and the province was reunited in 1912, but that process of communal divide created a permanent India-Pakistan partition in 1947 and a precarious life for many of its own citizens. How precanous"
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