On Independence Day newspapers and television channels run all kinds of stories and biographies on people who galvanised the cause for our independence from Pakistan, but I stopped looking for the slightest mention of my great grandfather a long time ago. It seems that if you are Hindu then your story counts a lot less, even if that person was the first person to ever bring up the subject of Bangla being the lingua franca of then East Pakistan; even if that person rejected a position offered by India to be chief minister of West Bengal in 1947 because he believed in Bangladesh. He believed his place was with the people of this land, even though he knew he would be killed for believing in what he did and saying what he did. He still fought till the very last day for a bright beautiful independent Bangladesh.

The first time I really realised who Dhirendranath Dutta was when we had to read about him in our grade school Bangla book. I was 9 or 10 years old. The teacher kept telling the whole class how he was my great grandfather and I remember feeling so embarrassed from all the attention I got. I had nothing to add about a man exactly a hundred years my senior; someone whose actions have shaped my life but I had little or no connection with.

In my house you couldn't escape the ghost of him even if you tried. I would always wonder what the big deal was; they would tell me how he was the first person in parliament to demand Bangla as the state language. As a child I would think it was normal for adults to do the right thing. As an adult now I realise how hard it is to rise to the occasion and do the right thing.

The older I get, the more I realise my great grandfather's contribution to a free independent Bangladesh. I write this not to praise some familial connection to greatness but to remind the country of the many different people who sacrificed themselves for our freedom. People who did not think twice to stand up in Pakistan's parliament and demand that the lingua franca be Bangla and that an oppressive regime needs to end.

March 26 is a particularly difficult time for us all, especially those of us who lived through that night. On the March 29 in 1971 he was picked up by the Pakistani army along with my grand uncle, and we never heard from them since. What little we know is that they gouged his eyes out, broke his joints and then let him be in that state for a day before they shot him. The reason for this cruelty was that he stood up to speak the truth when nobody else would. Rewind to 1948; and in the first constitutional assembly in Karachi my great grandfather proclaimed that Bangla should be the state language of East Pakistan. I shudder every time I think how much courage that took to say that.

Rewind a little further and you come to realise why he was the way he was. Champion of the downtrodden, forever believing David would win against Goliath. He was born in 1886 in Brahmanbaria and began his career as a head master of a school in 1910. Pretty soon though he went to law school and graduated in 1911 and got involved in the quit India movement. Soon thereafter he joined the Congress Party in 1917 and became a freedom fighter. The big one happened in 1930 for leading a massive quit India rally where thousands of men and woman took to the streets to protest. The police came and surrounded them and tried to arrest him when he said: "I refuse to recognise you, you have no power to declare this assembly an unlawful assembly and to ask us to disperse. You are a foreigner. I shall not disperse. Up! Up! The national flag! Down! Down! The Union Jack!" They then beat him up and sent him to prison. For the next twenty years he spent most of his time in jail for defying the British rule. (Who can blame him?!) He later served in the first cabinet as the Health Minister of East Pakistan in 1956 through 1958, after which martial law was declared. 

My family was destroyed when he was killed. Everyone was displaced, and returned only after the war to find everything was looted and gone. My entire family became refugees in India and beyond but my mother, my grandfather and grandmother decided that this was our land, this was what he fought for and this is where we should stay. So we did, and my mother went from nothing to building a career in development to continue to help those who needed help the most. She married my father who, by the virtue of being Muslim, had always been slightly controversial in the family. But she did not care, Dhirendranath's spirit of rebellion made her see things differently. I being a woman have been brought up not to see colour, race or religion, but the contents of one's character. My great grandfather's teachings go far beyond his time. He's travelled with me in how I judge and see the world, through a prism of humanity.

I have realised that the narrative of Bangladesh is changing, it is rapidly becoming a country where one is valued for their money and power, where we are forgetting the core values, the central thesis, of our fight; we are complacent in other's cruelty and violence is no longer something that shocks us. I hope that, one day, my generation wakes up and sees that we must return to a more humane society and the philosophy of men like my great grandfather Dhirendrath Dutta who believed in a just world, even if that meant the greatest sacrifice of all.

The writer is the great-granddaughter of Dhirendranath Dutta.