When did Bangladesh become interested in the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Antara had never read into the history of Bangladesh. It was not taught in Indian schools and colleges.
Antara's mother was a compendium of information on many things but usually spoke about Bangladesh either in terms of its 1971 Liberation War (which cost India as well) or Mujib's assassination (which took place when Antara's parents lived at govt quarters called G2, implying WWII military intelligence.)
As far as Antara knew, Bangladesh had not been a royal empire on its own in recent history. However, it was possible that when East India Company rule was replaced by the British Crown rule in 1858, Dhaka started acting as an envoy of British royalty and began taking an interest in European royal affairs as well.
One of the things Dhaka took an interest in was the Royal Hungarian Honved, commonly known as the Honved, referring to members of the Hungarian land forces around 1848-49, so a decade before the Indian Sepoy Mutiny.
The Honved started off as a volunteer regiment, fighting during the 1848 revolutions in the Continent. It fought against Austria, was defeated at some point but after the 1867 Compromise, it was restored for Hungary.
Not enough information to argue that Dhaka had played a role in raising Honved around the time of the 1848 Revolutions, maybe assisted by the East India Company, what it had intended to do with the Honved and whether Dhaka failed, because Honved remained separate and didn't become part of Austrian forces.
Some clarification (for Indian women) on where Antara stood on conscription: from her early childhood, she was a fanatic when it came to conscription. Antara was a weakling, often fell sick and missed school, never ran fast but gosh if you saw her zeal to carry off everyone's boys and girls and make them serve in the military, minimum five years. Antara spent her childhood on her own, making these plans, else what would save India?
However, neither Dhaka nor Kolkata seemed to have been aware of how Antara felt about conscription, given Antara was always excluded from any volunteer activity around her. (Remember, Honved was a volunteers' regiment.) Whether one had to 'mind' junior students in school or manage the stalls during school fetes and exhibitions or form human chains in Asansol town to promote some cause or clean/rearrange libraries when in college, Antara was never a part of any volunteer activity in India.
It would, therefore, seem that whether Dhaka was successful with Honved in the 19th century or not, it had been chosen as a means, some kind of an elaborate motif, to punish Antara. Why was this so? Antara had no known connection to Austria. Dhaka couldn't be playing a game with her.
Her parents, on the other hand, knew many things about Austria-Hungary, so was Dhaka playing with Antara's parents?
The Honved uniform consisted of blue slacks for pants. "Want to wear slacks, here, wear these," Antara's mother told her in 1987, the year the London-based PR firm was set up.
Antara got a pair of pink slacks and wore it through 1987-88.
The Honved slacks were blue in colour, what Antara's mother called 'peacock blue'. There was no such shade of blue, those who dealt in paints/colours didn't use such a term but Antara's mother did, always excited at the sight of 'peacock' blue. (Had she been around now, maybe she would have called it PeaFowl Blue, given NS Road's activities.)
Who knew what Antara's mother suspected as reasons for setting up the Honved? Easy road to royalty? One moment part of a mercenary militia, next moment imperial army general?
Peacock blue was also the colour of the skirts worn by the students of a girls' school in Selimpur, Kolkata.
But those who have risen so high shouldn't be identified and embarrassed by discussions of Honved and its unmet aspirations in Kolkata and Dhaka, working through the London-based PR firm.
April 11, 2025.
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