Word: bengalis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wreathed by a wispy beard, his face reflects an almost otherworldly serenity. As he plays with his grandchildren in a tiny village 60 miles north of the East Pakistan capital of Dacca, Abdul Hamid Bhashani, 86, looks the part of a Moslem maulana or guru, and to millions of Bengali peasants, he is. But the kindly grandfather is also Pakistan's most outspoken advocate of violence...
...Ayub Khan to step down from the presidency. Now Bhashani is the most severe single threat to a fragile peace brought to the troubled and geographically divided land by the imposition of martial law. Under fear of harsh penalties, Pakistan's other politicians, including Bhashani's chief Bengali rival, moderate Sheik Mujibur Rahman, have kept silent. Not Bhashani, who continues to receive newsmen and followers at his bamboo-walled hut. "What have I to fear?" he asked TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin, as he adjusted his soiled straw skull cap and straightened the green sweater that he wore inside...
...government might behave. In 1967, the United Front government ruled for nine turbulent months. On instructions from leftist ministers, the police stood aside while workers illegally picketed, and sometimes pillaged, their plants. In more than 1,000 instances, the workers subjected their helpless employers to a special Bengali torture-the gherao. They kept their superiors trapped in their offices, often without recourse to sanitary facilities, until they acceded to the often unreasonable union demands. Soon West Bengal was in a dangerous state of disorder, with its industry grinding toward a standstill. Indira placed the state under New Delhi...
UNDER the shadow of great wealth," the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore lamented, "starvation moves across the land." So it always has in India. Ten million died in the Bengali famine of 1770, four million in 1877. Shrunken bodies littered the streets of Calcutta in 1943. As recently as 1965 and 1966, when the monsoon rains failed, thousands would have died but for the emergency shipment of 10.5 million tons of U.S. wheat, one-fifth of the American crop. India has always seemed to be dismaying proof of the Malthusian thesis that the world's population must inevitably increase...
...Ganges River came perhaps the strangest group of pilgrims since Chaucer's in the Canterbury Tales. There, near the town of Rishikesh, 53 persons from ten nations gathered in a grove to pay their homage. Prosperous West German businessmen mingled with bearded Scandinavians. A 26-year-old Bengali interrupted his bicycle tour of the world to drop in. Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra's absentee wife, and her brother and sister put in appearances at one time or another. And over in Bungalow No. 6, topping off the list of those seeking wisdom and truth, were ensconced Britain...