Rabin Sengupta is a skilled photojournalist, a great storyteller and a Friends of Liberation War Honour awardee for his contributions in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. His works were published in Ananda Bazar Patrika, Jugantar, Amrita Bazar and Hindustan Standard. He travelled to the erstwhile Soviet Union, Brazil; he was honoured with a membership by the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and won recognition in an exhibition in Brazil in 1959. Sengupta has directed a number of documentary films, authored two books – one of them speaking about the 1971 Liberation War through the camera.

For a man who saw Tripura change with rest of the Indian sub-continent over eighty-four years through the lens, Rabin Sengupta is still an enigma. Highly active with ink and light, as he always was, Sengupta holds a strategically sound and healthy worldview to the day. Speaking to Tripurainfoway.com, he opens up about his take on the way Agartala changed under his watch; the way it changed from a well-planned royal capital to an urban space struggling to manage with overcrowded habitations.

TIWN: You have seen Agartala for years, decades now. How do you find it?

Sengupta: If I talk about the monarchal times, I think people were more alive in their own small social and cultural space. Things were more real, genuine even after the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. How else do you explain a state of 14 lakh population granting asylum to 16 lakh Bangladeshi partition refugees?

But, I feel people have become more showy and phony these days. They go to catch a cultural evening because they could speak about it later or they could accompany their kids who would perform there; not because they would enjoy the performance. Few others go to stay in the good book of ministers, officials or other functionaries. Culture is so about managing yourself now-a-days! I feel sad about it.

TIWN: How do you feel about the current cultural practices that we find around us in Agartala?

Sengupta: Look, it’s hard to answer that way. But from where I see it, much of filthy water entered the state during the influx of 1971 and shortly before that. Nearly everything about the current generation of people, and I don’t mean the youngsters alone, seem rash, obstinate and impetuous to me. Everything appears a means of exhibiting heroism or self glorification to them.

I can recall people used to stay till the curtains dropped in cultural programmes back in the good old days. I find most auditoriums and halls empty with parents leaving after their children are done with their performances. Programmes are more about exhibiting your capacity or your sponsors.

Cultural practices in the royal times had a refinement you hardly find today.

TIWN: Since you speak of the monarchal Tripura, do you feel our way of governance in India as a democratic nation has got to do something with it’s change into what we see today?

Sengupta: I wouldn’t say it has got any connection, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t either. I would like to focus myself on Tripura alone here.

I feel the government is still living off on Tripura’s proud and bright monarchal past.

I remember that the king and his subjects would become one and equal on festivals like Jhulan, Bashanti Puja, Durga Puja, Baisakhi Mela and I don’t know what else. The ambience was highly pure and there wasn’t really anything such as the ruler and ruled divide.

Now you wouldn’t find a single minister, not even a MLA, without a group of officials, secretaries, security personnel flanking them all around. The common people vote for them in the elections. They can’t even reach their elected representative after that. It has been such and it will be.

I feel democracy is a way of developing the society in its own way. But if you can’t speak a couple of words freely in democracy, what is it’s worth?

TIWN: They say Agartala city has developed very fast in the last couple of decades. What is your take on it?

Sengupta: Oh, yes, of course it has.

Agartala used to be a very well planned city. Maharaj Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya Bahadur travelled to Greece and visited Athens in 1938 if I am not wrong. He came back and re-built the city with a fusion of Greek design and his own structural ingenuity.

The city had pillars and roofs covering roadsides of the entire city, right from the last stretch of the Assam-Agartala road to Motorstand. You wouldn’t find any of them today. The city, if you so call it, is filled with roadside hawkers, barging pedestrians off the footpath. Now they are trying to shift the city offices to something they call the north zone because the city is no more a city. Agartala has lost its candour – all for faulty planning and hasty implementations.

They destroyed the magficient Jacksoon Gate.

Instead of showcasing our great past, the government has invited commercial companies to build hotels and luxurious stayaways in the city and they are sucking the water out of it. They do it in two ways – one is illegal landfills and the other is by using up more than permissible amount of water from the municipal drinking water supply system. Common people are the end sufferers.

TIWN: Do you feel the current surface transport system is somewhere at fault?

Sengupta: Oh, it is at fault everywhere.

The streets were all straight, allowing high speed and safe transport in the monarchal times. The Hariganga Basak (HGB) Road, as you know it today, used to be the Mogra Road for transport till Mogra in the Bangladesh of today.

You will still find the relics of the great surface transport system if you look at the straight stretch of roads from Kasharipatti till Akhaura via Orient Chowmuhani, RMS Chowmunani, IGM Chowmuhani etc. You might also look at the stretch of road from Kaman Chowmuhani to Battala or Battala to Durga Chowmuhani.

All roads of the city were straight. And now they have made it an intricate intertwining knot of roads which has reduced the average mobility of Agartala city to 8-24 Km per hour. Half of the roads are no more wide than 8 meter.

Slower mobility has only increased pollution and higher fuel consumption.

TIWN: Would you like to say something about the inland waterways of Agartala city as you saw it in the monarchal times?

Sengupta: Of course. We used to have the ‘harbour’ behind the place you see Maharani Tulsibati school today. It was called the Akhaura khal. I remember it was stated to be 6 ft deep and about 20-30 ft wide. The khal ran straight through the city and traders used to row their own dinghy boats till Akhaura to bring goods for trade at Kasharipatti area, which used to be one of the big marketplaces then.

We often went rowing from the Tulsibati backyard till Brahmanbariya in now-Bangladesh to watch boat races. It usually took a day’s time to go.

TIWN: Do you feel the development of city development of Agartala was uneven or unplanned?

Sengupta: It was both uneven and unplanned.

With the development spree, Akhaura khal became a sewerage canal and now it is a nasty drain. Domestic household boundaries now arch dangerously beside the once great khal.

It is overflooded with all sorts of garbage and the Agartala Municipal Corporation (AMC) authorities have now constructed concrete covers over it in several areas, especially the segment connecting RMS Chowmuhani and Orient Chowmuhani. These are mostly for revenue benefits as the covers are used as parking space and cleaning the drain has become all the more messy.

So, they first transformed a clean water transport canal into a drain, they covered it with permanent concrete covers and thus stopped cleaning it. And then they went to purchase cleaning vehicles to make up for the mistake they earlier committed. And yet, you have the city area flooded with the least bit of rainfall since there is no way for the water to go out through the completely chocked drains.

I don’t call it brilliance in city planning or development.

TIWN: How do you feel about the development of Tripura as a traditional state into an increasingly industrial one? We have industrial growth centers at Bodhjungnagars, Dukli, Dharmanagar, Dewanpassa and other places spread across the state.

Sengupta: Look, I am not an industrialist, nor an expert on industrial ventures.

But I feel things you spoke about are not industries. They are government attempts for industrialization. We need both quality and quantity. And they haven’t succeeded in managing any.

Tripura had a rich bouquet of natural products. We have lost our precious bamboo. And now we are set to lose other forest products.

TIWN: We often find phrases like ‘scarcity of drinking water’ inside the municipal area these days. Why do you think this is happening?

Sengupta: You see, they started expanding the city area without any proper plan.

Agartala was designed as a city to house a maximum number of people if it had to remain a city. You (read municipal authorities) don’t have the resources to supply drinking water to a certain number of people but you include double and then triple sized population inside the same urban space. Now you have to give them water but you don’t have it.

On top of that, you have the hotels and residential apartments draw as much water as they like through electric pumps connected directly with the public water supply system. If you still don’t brace for water crisis, what did you expect?

The municipal authorities are also absolutely silent about landfills in the city area. They have a standing decision to protect waterbodies in the city. And look at the pond of Madhyapara, Shantipara, Amiya Sagar now.

They filled the Ujir Barir Pukur (pond of the minister’s residence). The Najir Barir Pukur (pond of the royal head accountant) was filled up and we have a museum standing on the place now.

The rivers have now dried up and there is no effort of dredging and reclaiming the waterbodies. Instead, the government has now focused on groundwater. Drinking water scarcity was an inevitable outcome, you see.

TIWN: You spoke of a number of faults of the city development. Do you think it is accidental or was it by design?

Sengupta: The kings of Tripura changed the direction of River Howrah thrice to make way for a better cityscape. Maharaj Radha Kishore Manikya made the Katakhal of today for a clean city with a dedicated sewerage extraction mechanism.

You look at the number of slums encircling it today, some dangerously above the ‘khal’ itself. How can a government not succeed in relocating a few slum dwellers? The AMC authorities vacate the space every few years in the name of city development and give them some money. Wouldn’t these poor men come back and recapture the vacated land once the officials are gone unless they find a better place to live in?

And our great inland waterway is gone in exchange of a surface transport that is not even able to carry two-three vehicles together.

I feel these failures are all because of faulty planning, lack of experience and expertise from the engineers and due to lack of goodwill from our present rulers. It is also due to lack of proper vision.

I am speaking about government and I don’t mind which colour it belongs to. There have been many governments since the times I spoke about. I didn’t find any change in policies.

TIWN: How would you like to see Agartala, if you were to dream of it?

Sengupta: I would dream of Agartala as a city with a proper art gallery, proper auditoriums and halls for cultural practices; not those like Muktadhara where the audio suffers reverberation due to faulty construction or the new Rabindra Bhawan which found water seeping inside the building through cracks that developed within weeks of its inauguration.

I dream of a city that gives due worth to all its residents, irrespective of his social status; a city that doesn’t consider if somebody is a slum dweller or a millionaire.

I dream of a city that is learned and knows to enjoy culture.

I dream of a city which has proper streets, a proper safe drinking water system; a city that respects its past and lives on its present.