West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Credit: PTI Photo
Kolkata: Concerned with media reports that the ancestral house of eminent children’s writer Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh city is being demolished, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday sought the intervention of the governments of India and the neighbouring nation.
Upendrakishore, a prominent 19th-century litterateur in his own right besides being a painter and publisher, was the father of celebrated poet Sukumar Ray and grandfather of filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
“I learnt from media reports that the memory-entwined ancestral house of renowned writer-editor Upendrakishore Roychowdhury in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh city is being demolished. The reports say that the demolition process had already begun. This is heartbreaking news,” Banerjee wrote on X.
“The Ray family is one of the most prominent torchbearers of Bengal’s culture. Upendrakishore was among the pillars of the Bengal Renaissance. I feel this house is inextricably linked to Bengal’s cultural history. I appeal to the Bangladeshi government and to all right-thinking people of that country to preserve this edifice of rich tradition. The Indian government should also intervene,” the chief minister added.
According to reports, the property– which was built by Upendrakishore more than a century ago and previously housed the Mymensingh Shishu Academy – fell into a state of disrepair after years of neglect by the authorities. Upendrakishore was a zamindar from Masua in Kishoreganj's Katiadi Upazila (sub-division) when he constructed the house.
“The house has been left abandoned for 10 years. Shishu Academy activities have been operating from a rented space,” Bangladeshi daily, The Daily Star, reported while quoting Md Mehedi Zaman, the district Children Affairs Officer.
The newspaper attributed the same officer to state that a semi-concrete building with several rooms will be built in place of the old house to restart the academy’s activities there.
In June, Banerjee had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking his intervention in the alleged vandalism of Rabindranath Tagore’s ancestral property in Sirajganj, Bangladesh, urging him to ensure that “perpetrators of this heinous and mindless act” are brought to justice.