by Ganesh Mani Pradhan, Kalimpong, West Bengal,
India Chamaerops No.43-44, published online 05-08-2002
In late January of this year my wife Sangita and
I decided to take a holiday from the cold winter of Kalimpong and
spend a week or so in warmer climes. We did not want to travel long
distances and decided to proceed to Shantiniketan in South Bengal.
This would entail driving 3 hours to our nearest railway station
of New Jalpaiguri and catching an overnight train to Calcutta. The
railway station of Bolpur, which serves the Shantiniketan area,
is about 4 hours short of Calcutta. We found ourselves woken up
by a fellow traveler in the sleeper compartment at 4:30 a.m. informing
us that we were about to reach Bolpur station. The train stops here
just for around 5 minutes. Early in the morning Bolpur station is
deserted. Dawn light filtering through the horizon of this flat
land presented a different picture from that of the hills. There
is a definite winter chill early in the morning in these plains
that must be hardly a few hundred feet above sea level. We caught
a rickshaw and proceeded toward the Tourist Lodge where we had made
bookings.
Shantiniketan, “abode of peace”, is a
university town, home of Vishwa Bharati University, founded in 1924
by Rabindranath Tagore, a literary stalwart and Nobel Prize winner
for Literature in the year 1913. He was knighted by King George
in 1915 but renounced his knighthood in 1919 following the Jallianwala
Bagh massacre. The University is well known for its excellence in
the departments of Fine Arts, Performing Arts, Music, and Languages,
among other departments. Our idea of this holiday was to be away
from the daily grind and also to study and photograph the process
of manufacturing khéjur-gur, a coarse sugar made from the
sweet sap harvested from trees of Phoenix sylvestris. There are
vast groves of Phoenix sylvestris in the hot flatlands of Southern
Bengal, and manufacturing gur from the sap of these trees is a major
seasonal commercial activity. We had learned from various sources
that villagers in the area around Shantiniketan made good khéjur-gur
in winter. Khéjur is the general Indian term for dates (fruit
of Phoenix dactylifera) and gur is the term for molasses, whether
a by-product of the sugar industry or that made from the sap of
palm trees. Phoenix sylvestris, the plant, is known in Bengal as
khéjur-gach. The term gach means a tree.
Khéjur-gur
