Ispad Board Members:
M C Das; Board Member
Engineer, IT professional and social activist.
Das belongs to an East Bengali-origin (Bangladesh) Hindu family settled in Kolkata, India. Her father’s family hails from Faridpur and mother’s family is from Mymansingha. Her widowed grandmother and mother grounded then in East Bengali culture through food, stories of our ancestral home, religious practices (including bratha katha, puja alpona, fasting for puja etc.) After my mother and grandmother’s death when Das was still in high school, her connection to East Bengal and Hindu religious practices faded away to a large extent. Her attachment to Hindu religion severed completely when she joined Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India in 1995 and was influenced by Democratic Socialist Federation (leftist) ideology. Das became an anti-Hindu atheist until early 2000s. In 2009/2010 she chanced to read Dr. Sachi Dastidar’s books on East Bengal. It opened a floodgate of memories of stories her grandmother and mother told them. After probing relatives about their experiences and MC came to know that Das’ father had come to Calcutta the day of Great Calcutta Killing on August 16, 1946, when the city and Bengal Province was ruled by pro-partition Muslim League Party, and narrowly escaped death. That experience traumatized him to such an extent that the father never talked about it for 60+ years!
Today Das is a Hindu agnostic. MC has taught their children basic tenets of Hindu religion – but never forced them to follow the religion. Das hopes that Bengalis of Hindu and Muslim faith will reconcile the common heritage share and accept each other’s existence.
the mother of the family, remaining bachelorette forever. Dastidar visited her ancestral home of tens of generations, taken over by a Muslim family, and now has very close connection with her ancestral village, where the small Hindu minority calls her ‘Mother.’ At her village she and her friends have built a brick-and-mortar school-cum-shelter which has grown to be a pilgrimage site with a 300-year old mott (temple).
Georgetown Law Journal. Following law School he clerked for the Hon. Frank X. Altimari, first in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and then in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He practiced law until 2011 when he became a full time academic and arbitrator. He gives frequent presentations on labor and employment law, and has published several law review articles. In 2017 he received the Robert W. MacGregor Labor Relations and Community Service Award from the Long Island Labor and Employment Relations Association.
has established himself to be a community leader and activist for over three decades.
Since the first visit he has visited his homeland for dozens of times, as well as India and Pakistan. Although his parents were highly educated, yet after partition-caused homelessness could not send many of their children to school for few years. Sachi G Dastidar is now engaged in saving a 500-year Bishnu/Vishnu mandir in his ancestral village, while the 300-year old mandir of Black Mother Kali was demolished during a pogrom in 1950s. His grandparents, one of them lawyer, and two uncles spent more than 17 years in British Colonial prison for their pacifist struggle for India’s independence yet had to flee penniless to the Indian side once India and Bengal Province were partitioned. They found shelter in a refugee camp in southern Kolkata, India.
Foundation and Partition Project from its inception.