"What we have done today is the most historic act in our history.
This day we bid good-bye to constitutional methods. Throughout…the British and
the Congress held a pistol in their hand, the one of authority and arms and the
other of mass struggle and non-cooperation. Today we have also forged a pistol
and we are in a position to use it."
Jinnah's statement on the Muslim League’s ‘Direct
Action’ resolution, 29 July, 1946-
"This (The Calcutta Killing) will be a good lesson for the League,
because I hear that the proportion of Muslims who have suffered death is much
larger"
-
Patel writing to CR Rajagoplachari, 21 August
1946 -
Today is the 68th anniversary of the Great Calcutta
Killing of 1946. The fury of this massacre changed the course of Indian history
and made the partition of Bengal and, by extension, the Punjab inevitable. Yet,
paradoxically, the event has almost been forgotten, both in the academic as
well as the popular space. There is no history book exclusively devoted to
the Killing nor is a single movie or novel based it. In fact, so prickly is this
event, that even official histories have mostly steered clear of it.
From what I’ve read, the two most comprehensive summaries of the
event are by Joya Chatterji and Claude Markovits. Both are reproduced below.
The Calcutta Riots of 1946, also known as the “Great Calcutta Killing,” were four days of massive Hindu-Muslim riots in the capital of Bengal, India, resulting in 5,000 to 10,000 dead, and some 15,000 wounded, between August 16 and 19, 1946. These riots are probably the most notorious single massacre of the 1946-47 period, during which large-scale violence occurred in many parts of India. However, the “Great Calcutta Killing” stands out somewhat in the history of Calcutta, given that it was by far the most deadly episode in the recent history of the city. Although it received its name very soon after the events, it remains a very controversial episode, and different views or interpretations of it were put forward from Britain, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While there is a certain degree of consensus on the magnitude of the killings (although no precise casualty figures are available), including their short-term consequences, controversy remains regarding the exact sequence of events, various actors’ responsibility, and the long-term political consequences.
A- Context
The event must be situated in two
different, yet interrelated contexts: firstly the all-India context, and
secondly the Bengal one. The former was marked by growing tension between the
Congress Party, the main Indian nationalist organization with a base mostly
(but not exclusively) among the Hindu population of the country, and the Muslim
League, the main organization representative of the Muslim minority, which
comprised almost 25% of India’s population. Tensions were largely due to the
fact that both groups were gearing up for a transfer of power from the British,
which Prime Minister Clement Attlee had announced in March 1946, without fixing
a date, however. Each group had very different ideas regarding the future shape
of the subcontinent. In 1940, the Muslim League passed a resolution in favor of
the creation of Pakistan. It was not clear, however, whether it was meant to be
a separate Muslim state or a part of a confederation with the rest of India
(Jalal, 1985). The British still hoped that a partition of India could be
avoided and were trying to come to an agreement with both the Congress and the
League. In a statement on May 16, 1946, a British Cabinet Mission proposed a
plan for the formation of an interim government composed of representatives
from the Congress, the League, and other forces. This plan gave the Congress
one more seat than the League. After weeks of behind-the-scene negotiations, on
July 29, 1946, at the prompting of its leader
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the
Muslim League adopted a resolution rejecting the May 16th plan and called on
Muslims throughout India to observe a “Direct Action Day” in protest on August
16.
The announcement of a transfer of power
in the near future had further exacerbated a situation that was already very
tense in India. It intensified a growing polarization between the two main
political parties and the two major religious communities. In the 1945-46
elections, both at the national and at the provincial level, Congress had won most
of the seats in the Hindu majority areas and the Muslim League in the Muslim
majority areas. The League had not, however, been able to gain a majority in
the Punjab, the richest Muslim majority province, and therefore was tempted to
use extra-constitutional means to reach its goals. Given that the country had a
long history of “communal” riots flaring up regularly since 1926 between Hindus
and Muslims, there was understandably great fear of an outburst of violence,
but the presence of the British Army in relatively large numbers, although
resented by most, seemed to offer some guarantee of a peaceful transition.
However, it was not to be, and the August 1946 events in Calcutta were to play
a major role in triggering a whole spiral of violence that would engulf parts
of India for many months.
The situation in Bengal was
particularly complex. In the province, Muslims represented the majority of the
population (54%, as against 44% of Hindus) and were mostly concentrated in the
Eastern part (present-day Bangladesh). As a result of this demographic
structure and specific developments, this province was the only one in which a
Muslim League government was in power (under a regime of provincial autonomy
introduced in 1935), in coalition with Europeans, and in the face of strong
opposition from the Congress Party and from a Hindu nationalist party. The
latter, the Hindu Mahasabha was supported by many members of the rich Marwari
trading community, composed of immigrants from Rajasthan, who largely dominated
the economy of Calcutta and of Bengal (although European capital was still
important). The leader of the Muslim League in Bengal and Chief Minister of the
province was
Suhrawardy. Suhrawardy, a rival of
Jinnah for the
leadership of the League, was a controversial, albeit colorful personality who
became very unpopular amongst large sections of the Hindu population for his
alleged responsibility in the great Bengal famine of 1943, which had resulted
in the death of two to three million people. However, he was idolized by many
Muslims in Bengal, particularly by the Urdu-speaking Muslims from Northern
India, who formed the majority of Calcutta’s Muslim population (Bengali
Muslims, who accounted for the bulk of the Muslim population in the province,
were mostly concentrated in the countryside). Calcutta itself had a clear Hindu
majority (73% of the population according to the 1941 Census) and a significant
Muslim minority (23% of the population). Given the tendency of the population
in urban areas to congregate in neighborhoods dominated by one community, most
Muslims lived in areas of Northern Calcutta, while Central and Southern Calcutta
were almost exclusively Hindu (with a sprinkling of Europeans). Another
characteristic of Calcutta’s Muslim population was that it was largely composed
of poor people, mostly artisans, factory workers, rickshaw pullers and domestic
servants. The Muslim middle class in Calcutta was small, in contrast to the
much larger Hindu middle class. Big Muslim merchants and capitalists were few,
and could not compete with the rich Marwari Hindus. Although Muslims were
clearly a minority in Calcutta and occupied a peripheral position in the
economic, social and cultural life of the city, the capital was the only large
city in the province, and therefore occupied a privileged position in all
provincial politics, whether Muslim or Hindu.
Suhrawardy had
a particularly large following amongst the poor Muslims of the city, and was
also rumored to have close links to the Muslim underworld, which played a
significant role in the parallel economy, based on smuggling, gambling and
prostitution, which flourished in the great port-city.
Jinnah had called for
peaceful demonstrations all over India on Direct Action Day, and most of India,
including the Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab and Sind (in the latter
the Muslim League was part of a coalition government) remained calm. In Bengal,
however, and specifically in Calcutta, the events took a violent turn, and
quickly spun completely out of control.
B- The Instigators
Controversy still rages about the
respective responsibilities of the two main communities, the Hindus and the
Muslims, in addition to individual leaders’ roles in the carnage. The dominant
British view tends to blame both communities equally and single out the
calculations of the leaders and the savagery of the followers, amongst whom
there were criminal elements (Tuker, 1950). In the Congress’ version of the
events (Bose, 1968), the blame tends to be squarely laid on the Muslim League
and in particular on the Chief Minister of Bengal,
Suhrawardy.
The view from the Muslim League side, nowadays partly upheld in Bangladesh, the
successor state to East Pakistan, is that in fact Congress and the Hindus used
the opportunity offered by Direct Action Day to teach the Muslims in Calcutta a
lesson and kill them in great numbers (Rashid, 1987). Thus, the riots opened
the way to a partition of Bengal between a Hindu-dominated Western Bengal
including Calcutta, and a Muslim-dominated Eastern Bengal (nowadays
Bangladesh).
There is an explicit accusation in
pro-Congress accounts (partly upheld in British sources) that
Suhrawardy’s
attitude overtly incited violence. The two main points emphasized are:
- Suhrawardy positioned
himself with his cronies in the Police Control Room, and thus prevented
the Police Commissioner, a British national who was technically in charge
of law and order, from attending to the trouble with a free mind;
- at the meeting held in the Maidan,
a vast open space in central Calcutta, Suhrawardy told
the Muslim League crowd (estimated to have been at least 100,000 strong)
that he had taken measures to “ restrain” the police, which was
interpreted by many in the crowd as a license to loot and kill.
- that his presence in the Police Control Room
was an attempt to get a better hold on law maintenance operations and not
meant as a hindrance
- that in the absence of any transcript of
Suharawardy’s speech (due to the fact that the Police Special Branch did
not have an Urdu stenographer on hand, which in retrospect, seems to have
been an incredible oversight), the accusations regarding his inflammatory
language cannot be substantiated.
The main accusations leveled at
Governor Burrows in pro-Congress accounts are:
- that he allowed Suhrawardy to
interfere with law and order operations while his reserve powers allowed
him to prevent Suhrawardy from
doing so;
- that he took too long to realize the extent of
the trouble, and called the troops in when things had already gotten out
of hand; an earlier intervention by the military might have been able to
save the day.
To these reproaches, Burrows’ answer
was:
- that he could not have prevented Suhrawardy from
interfering without triggering a major political crisis with country-wide
repercussions, at a particularly delicate moment;
- that he called the troops in as soon as he had
enough of them available to make a difference.
C- The victims
Their exact number is not and will
never be known. Authorities have compiled various official estimates on the
basis of a rough body count, but none appear too reliable. The most widely
accepted figure of dead is situated between a minimum of 5,000 and a maximum of
10,000 (Chatterjee, 1991), and the number of wounded is generally put at around
15,000, but it is not clear on what this figure is based, apart from guess
work. In any case, such uncertainty is a common feature of most massacres in
India. The reasons for this uncertainty are complex, ranging from the low
degree of penetration of State institutions in society, to the absence of
reliable registration of deaths. To these structural reasons, we must add a
more temporary factor, the disorganization of public administration in a period
of rapid political change and turmoil.
Three points need to be emphasized. The
first one is the particularly savage manner in which the killings were
executed. Not only were victims brutally killed, they were also grotesquely
mutilated. This kind of grisly “ritual” was very much part of the repertoire of
communal killings in India; what was new in Calcutta was the sheer scale of the
phenomenon. Secondly, most accounts mentioned cases of rape, which were not
part of the usual gamut of communal riots in India, but were to figure
prominently in accounts of communal violence around the time of Partition,
which in retrospect, makes the Great Killing a sad harbinger of horrors still
to come. Though women and children figure among the victims, they were not as
prominently represented as it was the case in the Punjab massacres a year
later, however, and most of the Great Killing victims were adult males. The
third point, difficult to verify, but plausible in view of the general “social
ecology” of massacres in India, is that, while the perpetrators often belonged
to the so-called “underworld,” the victims themselves were overwhelmingly poor
and defenseless. This links with a final, very important point: according to
most accounts the majority of the victims were Muslims; however, due to the
absence of reliable figures this can never be demonstrated. Since most Muslims
in Calcutta were poor, there seems to be a certain coincidence between the
religious and the social content of the massacre. Few rich Hindus or Muslims
appear to have been targeted, although Muslim crowds attacked the houses of
some rich Hindus, from which their owners had absconded. Thus, the massacre
could be described as the combination of one large pogrom against poor Muslims
by Hindu toughs, with one smaller pogrom against poor Hindus by Muslim toughs.
A number of people must also have been killed in the crossfire between the two
communities, and quite a few killed by police and Army fire, adding to the
complexity of the massacre.
D- Witnesses
Many people witnessed the massacre, but
there are few reliable testimonies on which to draw. In August 1946, the
Government of Bengal appointed an enquiry commission presided by the Supreme
Justice of India, Sir Patrick Spens. Although the commission interrogated many
witnesses, its conclusions were never published. These findings have
nonetheless been widely used by a Bengali historian (Das,1991). The memoirs of
Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker, then in command of British and Indian
forces in the Eastern sector of India, provide a fairly detailed, although
heavily biased, first-hand account (Tuker, 1950). These memoirs embody a
British view of the events which tends to distribute blame more or less equally
between the two communities, but nevertheless displays a slight pro-Muslim and
a strong anti-Congress bias. A few other British witnesses have left written
accounts. There is a wide array of personal reminiscences by inhabitants of
Calcutta who witnessed the events, published in Bengali, but they have not been
the object of a systematic study.
Apart from the official enquiry report
that was never published, no effort seems to have been made at collecting
testimony from direct witnesses. It is not too difficult to understand why.
Narratives of the event became very much part of identity politics in a city
which remained seriously divided until the middle of 1947, when
Gandhi’s
“peace mission” brought in a respite which eventually became lasting. Thus,
nobody was interested in a “true” account, and witnesses were considered
necessarily partial if they were either Hindus or Muslims. With regard to the
British, they faded from the scene after August 1947. Rather than comparing
witnesses’ accounts of various origins, it became a question of “our” witnesses
versus “theirs.” In the period between August 1946 and August 1947, if you were
a Hindu, you believed in one narrative that blamed
Suhrawardy and
the Muslim League entirely, and saw the violent acts by Hindu crowds as simply
a matter of self-defense, and you could quote plenty of “witnesses” to support
your claim. If you were a Muslim, you tended to adopt a discourse of victimization
and to point to the fact that most of the victims were Muslims, hinting at a
dark Hindu plot to wipe out Muslims in Calcutta. After independence and
partition, when the two communities had perforce found a way of living together
more or less peacefully (since few Muslims left Calcutta for East Pakistan), a
heavy silence descended on the event, and it remained buried in that silence
for decades.
E- Memories
In a paradoxical way, one could say
that on the one hand, the Great Calcutta Killing is very much an object of
living memory; narratives are handed down from one generation to another within
practically all the families who lived through it. On the other hand, it is
conspicuously absent from the official memory of Bengal, particularly on the West
Bengal side, but also, in a more surprising way, on the Bangladeshi side. The
disjunction between private memory and public and official memory is not unique
to this particular event. This disjunction occurs with most traumatic events.
For example, the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, before the outset
of the era of commemoration in the 1960s, is a case in point.
Given the lack of study on this aspect,
one can only point to some of the possible reasons for the absence of an
official memory of the Great Killing. On the Indian side, political expediency
is the most plausible. Following independence, dwelling on past events was seen
as a diversion from the task of building a new country, free from colonial
shackles. Besides, as already mentioned, most Muslims stayed in Calcutta after
Partition; only some rich merchants and middle-class people emigrated to East
Pakistan; the mass of the poor had to survive in the new context and harping on
the memory of the massacre was likely to bring them no benefit of any kind. In
regard to the Hindus, who had had the better in the fight, they found it
preferable to adopt a low profile and to play the appeasement card. On the
Pakistani side, the question was complicated by the fact that, from the early
1950s onwards, Bengalis in East Pakistan felt increasingly alienated from their
West Pakistan compatriots and were nostalgic for the time when Bengal had been
united. Therefore, they were not interested in reviving old wounds. The same
attitude persisted in 1971 after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan
with the help of India. Although there was a change of regime in 1975 and a
worsening of relations with India, there was no significant attempt at creating
a memory of the 1946 killings. One of the reasons probably was that
Suhrawardy,
who was
Mujibur Rahman’s
political mentor, is considered a kind of national hero in Bangladesh. This
said, his admirers are not keen to dwell upon his role in 1946. Thus, there was
a kind of conspiracy of silence which only began to be lifted in the 1990s,
when the advent of a new historiography in India led to reconsideration of a
whole part of the Indian past, that had previously been believed to be better
off forgotten. Yet the Great Calcutta Killing, or rather the Calcutta Riots of
1946 (the expression most often used) remain a marginal episode in the dominant
narrative of the history of Bengal.
F- Interpretations
In the scholarly literature about the
event, which is scarce (there is no book or article specifically devoted to the
Great Calcutta Killing), two main strands of interpretation can be discerned.
One tends to emphasize continuity, showing that the 1946 riots were mostly a
culmination of trends towards growing inter-communal violence in Bengal, but
did not represent a radically novel development. The other places the violence
more specifically within the context of the Partition and stresses its
instrumentality to the goals pursued by certain actors, in particular Hindu
politicians.
The first strand is represented in
particular in Suranjan Das’s book on communal violence in Bengal, which
includes a substantial section devoted to the 1946 riots. Das’s overall
argument revolves around a distinction between what he calls “elite
communalism” and what he calls “mass communalism.” He argues that communalism
was originally more of an elite phenomenon, born in the intelligentsia and the
middle classes, but that it tended to spread to the masses if certain
circumstances were favorable to that. To him, the Great Killing is a
spectacular instance of the spread of elite communalism to the masses. This
leads him to pay particular attention to the participation of ordinary people
in the violence, using police and court records, as well as some of the
unpublished witness testimonies to the Spens Inquiry Commission (Das, 1991). He
mentions that clashes between the two communities took two different forms: on
the one hand, open street battles between large crowds, and on the other hand,
sporadic acts by small roving bands. The latter often targeted passers-by, and
their acts had a random character which contributed to giving the impression
that things had gotten completely out of hand, while in fact part of the
killings appear to have taken place in large-scale confrontations between
“organized” crowds. Amongst Muslims, Das is able to show that some professional
groups were particularly represented: butchers seem to have been prominent and
they came with their meat-choppers which, in experienced hands, could be a
lethal weapon (this is reminiscent of the original meaning of the old French
word “massacre,” which refers precisely to the butcher’s chopper). Amongst
Hindus, dharwans (janitors), who often had links to criminals, also figured
prominently, giving the violent crowds a plebeian aspect, which is not really
very surprising in the urban milieu of Calcutta. In many ways, this city was
still pre-industrial, even though there were large concentrations of factory
workers in the suburban industrial belt (some of whom also appear to have been
involved in the rioting).
The second strand is represented in
particular by Joya Chatterji’s book (Chatterji, 1995). Her central argument is
that the partition of Bengal mostly resulted from the actions of Hindu elite
politicians, who were opposed to the rule of the Muslim majority. In this
perspective, she instills great importance in the episode of the 1946 riots,
which allowed the Hindus to take physical control of the city. She therefore
tends to dwell upon the role played by different Hindu organized groups (mostly
linked to the Congress Party and the Hindu Mahasabha) in the
violence. She gives particular importance to one such group, called Bharat
Sevashram Sangha, close to the Mahasabha. These groups had many
middle-class members and some of them were very active during the riots.
Chatterji sees elite manipulation of Hindu crowds as an essential aspect of the
violence, but she is less interested in exploring the nature of Muslim
violence.
Both authors stress the active
participation of those more or less criminal elements of the population who are
known in India under the appellation of “goondas.” One particular
difficulty is that there is no generally accepted definition of the word “goonda.”
The term can refer to a local tough, a dada (“elder brother”)
who terrorizes a neighborhood and extracts protection money from it, but who
also does “protect” it against outsiders and the intrusions of State
authorities. This person is often connected to a political party. The term can
also refer to a member of an organized gang of the vast Calcutta underworld
engaged in various dubious activities such as prostitution, gambling or
smuggling. While dadas by and large reflected the religious
composition of their neighborhood (for instance in a Hindu neighborhood, you
had Hindu dadas, and in a Muslim neighborhood Muslim dadas),
the underworld was generally more mixed: Hindu and Muslim gangsters and pimps
are known to have operated largely across religious barriers. It is plausible
nevertheless that, in the atmosphere of extreme communal tension such as the
one prevailing in Calcutta in 1946, even gangsters and pimps felt the strong
pull of religion and community. It is among those “criminal” elements that one
finds some of the few conspicuous participants, who attracted attention because
of their particular efficiency at killing and their capacity to inspire crowds
to violent action.
To the question as to why the killings
took such a savage form, much beyond what had been witnessed in previous
“communal” riots (but less than what was witnessed during the Partition
massacres in the Punjab), none of the authors formulate a very convincing
answer. By default, they seem to settle for a response couched in Durkheimian
terms, stressing anomie and the breakdown of societal links in
a situation of extreme tension between the two major communities of the city.
Although infinitely superior to the standard explanation in terms of the
“animal” passions of the crowds or the innate sadism of the “goondas,”
it seems lacking nevertheless. In fact, there may have been very rational
calculations at work on the side of the instigators and perpetrators of the
killings. It was actually a fight over who was to be master of Calcutta. By
organizing huge demonstrations, occupying the Maidan and using
whatever State power it had at its disposal, the Bengal Provincial Muslim
League was trying to stake its claim to Calcutta as the capital of a Muslim
Bengal, which would be part of Pakistan, whose shape was still hazy at the
time. A massacre was probably not the League’s goal (although one pamphlet
circulating amongst Muslims warned of a “general massacre” of Kafirs,
infidels, i.e. Hindus), but the League’s supporters did not shrink from using
violence on a significant scale to advance their objectives. Although the use
of violence by a minority against the majority could appear irrational to us,
in the mindset of many Muslims at the time it was not so, because they
considered the Hindus cowardly and effeminate, and thought they were no match
for Muslims in an open fight. As for the “Hindu” political parties, both Congress
and the Mahasabha were bent on making a counter-demonstration
of their superior muscle power. Therefore, they were not adverse to large-scale
killings to decisively defeat the Muslim League’s attempts to impose its
dominance. The massacre was the result of the clash of two wills, between which
no compromise was possible.
[Tarikh Par Tarikh note: Joya Chatterji's book, like almost all history on the issue, does not focus directly on the proximate dynamics of the Killing. It does, however, provide a great background to it and, especially, describes the environment which enabled such an event to occur at all.]
The idea that partition might be preferable to Muslim rule had
already occurred at least to some Hindus from West Bengal. When C.
Rajagopalachari had argued in 1944 that Congress should accept a Pakistan comprising
only the Muslim-majority districts, a handful of Calcutta Hindus had welcomed
the proposal. Implicit in the Rajagopalachari Formula was the partition of the
Punjab and Bengal. In 1944, when Shyama Prasad launched a campaign to denounce
the 'C. R. Formula’, one Bengali Hindu from Howrah wrote to him urging him to
see the wisdom of the plan: 'What is the alternative that can meet the
challenge to India held out by the Viceroy? ... [The Formula] has given a more natural
and abiding solution on the basis of Independence for the whole ofIndia'. In
the highly charged atmosphere of the summer of 1946, when talks between the
Cabinet Mission and Indian leaders in Delhi raised speculation to a fever
pitch, Hindus in Calcutta and in the West Bengal heartland began to look with
favour on the idea of partitioning the province and in this way creating a new
Hindu state of West Bengal. As the prospect of remaining under the 'permanent
tutelage' of the Muslims grew increasingly intolerable in the months that
followed this solution found favour with more and more Hindus in the
Hindu-majority districts of western Bengal. More significant, perhaps, than
Suhrawardy's declaration of 16 August as a public holiday (the proposed day of
‘Direct Action ‘by the Muslim League) was his public statement less than a week
before in which he threatened to declare Bengal's complete independence from the
centre. Reacting to the creation of the purely Congress Interim Government at
the centre, Suhrawardy warned:
“A probable result of putting the Congress in power adopting the
tactics of by-passing the League, would be 'the declaration of complete
independence by Bengal and the setting up of a parallel government... We will
see that no revenue is derived by such [sic] Central Government from Bengal and
consider ourselves as a separate state having no connection with the Centre.”
The Hindu press reacted by interpreting this statement as a threat
to Pakistanise' the whole of Bengal forthwith. 'Pakistan' had come to mean, for
Hindu Bengalis, the permanent loss of political sovereignty and their
subjection to the will of the Muslim majority. The crude and heavy-handed
measures adopted by Suhrawardy's ministry in its first months in office ensured
that this was a future that many Hindus were determined to avoid. Calcutta
Hindus saw Direct Action, therefore, notes a mere tactic in the long drawn out
and distant negotiations at the all-India level to do with interim governments
and constituent assemblies, but a threat much closer to home against which they
were ready to fight to the death.
This was the context in which the Great Calcutta Killing took place.
The rioting, in which at least 5,000 died, was not a spontaneous and
inexplicable outburst of aggression by faceless mobs. Both sides in the
confrontation came well-prepared for it. Four days after the killing began, The
Statesman informed its readers:
“This is not a riot. It needs a word from mediaeval history, a
fury. Yet 'fury' sounds spontaneous and there must have been some deliberation
and organisation to set this fury on its way. The horde who ran about battering
and killing with 8 ft. lathismay have found them lying about or bought them out
of their own pockets, but that is hard to believe.”
Another eye-witness saw that the Calcutta Killing was 'not a riot,
but civil war':
“There was cold-blooded killing on both sides. The riot was
well-organised on both sides. Suhrawardy organised the riot ruthlessly to show
that... [the Muslims] will retain Calcutta. On the Hindu side, it was part of
the campaign for the Partition of Bengal. Its organisers included members of
the Hindu Mahasabha and the Congress, particularly old terrorist Congressmen
who had not joined the Communists. The Marwaris helped a lot, they gave finance
and collected funds for the campaign for partition. The campaign hadn't then
officially started, but everybody knew it was for that.”
Direct Action Day in Calcutta was not a flash in the pan but a product
of developments which had long been coming to a head. In part it was the
outcome of the growing arrogance of the leadership and rank and file of the
Muslim League, heady with their success in the recent elections and confident
of their ability to get for Bengal some form or other of Pakistan; and in part
it flowed from the determination of Hindus to resist what they regarded as
'Muslim tyranny'. Suhrawardy himself bears much of the responsibility for this
blood-letting since he issued an open challenge tithe Hindus and was grossly
negligent (deliberately or otherwise) in his failure to quell the rioting once
it had broken out. By the time order was restored, thousands on both sides had
been brutally slaughtered; ten days after the killings began, more than 3,000
bodies lay on the pavements of this City of Dreadful Night. The city's normal burial and cremation
services could not cope with the number of corpses, and the government had to
hunt out low-caste Doms to collect bodies and dump them into mass graves.
Suhrawardy's culpability is by now a well-established tradition. But Hindu leaders were also deeply
implicated, a fact which is less well known. More Muslims than Hindus died in
the fighting, and in characteristically chilling style, Patel summed up the
hideous affair with the comment; ‘Hindus had the best of it.' The preparedness of Hindus in 1946 for
this ugly trial of strength is not surprising if it is recalled that since the late
thirties and early forties, Calcutta and the mofussil towns had seen the
establishment of a plethora of Hindu volunteer groups, whose professed aim was
to unite Hindus but who devoted much of their energy to encouraging physical
fitness and pseudo-military training among bhadralokyouths. Perhaps the largest
and best organised among these was theBharat Sevashram Sangha, the volunteer
wing of the Hindu Mahasabha. Ostensibly a society for social service, from the
start the Sangha adopted a martial style and urged Hindus to train themselves
in the arts of self-defence. At a meeting of the Sangha in September 1939, at
which Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee presided and which was reportedly attended by
2,600 people,
“the speakers referred to the Communal Award, which was designed
to curb the Bengali Hindus and stated that they should organise Akharas with
the help ofPulin Das and Satin Sen, ex-convicts, and develop their physique[s]
and raise a thousand of lathis if the Hindus were attacked. ... Posters in
Bengali were displayed of which one was entitled 'Give up the idea of
non-violence now, what is required is strong manhood (pourasha)'”
At another meeting of the Sangha two months later, Bengali placards
with the inscription, 'Hindus, wake up and take up the vow of killing the
demons', were displayed in the pandal. The following year, this theme was
developed with the use of Saivite religious imagery
On the 7th [of April, 1940], a Hindu Sammelan ... was held at
Maheshwari Bhawan under the auspices of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha. Mr B. C.
Chatterjee presided. A large picture of Siva with a trident was exhibited ...
Speeches were delivered urging the Hindus to develop a martial spirit ... Swami
Bijnananda observed that Hindu gods and goddesses were always armed to the
teeth in order to destroy the demons. Swami Adwaitananda ... remarked that he
came with a lathi to serve the Hindus. The enemies of the Hindus should be
beheaded, he said. Pointing to the picture of Siva with a trident he stated
that his followers should come forward armed at least with lathis ... Swami
Pranabananda wanted to raise a defence force of five lakhs ... he appealed to
the Marwaris to help with money... Harnam Das urged every Hindu to become a
soldier. A resolution [was passed]approving the proposal of the Sangha to form
a defence force of five lakhs of Hindus, noting with satisfaction that 12,000
had already been recruited.
From the outset the Bharat Sevashram Sangha was closely associated
with the Mahasabha. But in the forties, the Sangha, and other organisations
like it, began to attract wider bhadralok support. Members of the Calcutta
bhadralok intelligentsia, including Mrinal Kanti Ghose of the Amrita Bazar
Patrika, Hemendra Prasad Ghosh, the editor of the vernacular paper, Dainik
Basumati, and Ramananda Chatterjee, the editor of the Modern Review, were
present at its meetings. By 1947, even establishment figures made no secret
of their association with the Sangha. It was announced that Sir Bejoy Prasad
Singh Roy, who had been a member of the Indian Civil Service and a minister in
government would open the session of the Hindu Sammelan organised by the Sangha
and that P. N. Banerjee, Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, would preside. The Congress Party, which had several volunteer organisations of its own, often took part in the Sangha's programmes. In May 1946 when the Sangha
organised a public meeting to 'protest against the desecration of the
Chandranath Shrine', it was presided over by Sasanka Sekhar Sanyal, a Congress
member of the Central Assembly. The following year, at a procession organised
by the Sangha to celebrate the birth anniversary of Swami Pranabananda, a
Congress contingent was conspicuous ‘clad in white shirts, shorts, Gandhi caps,
. . . they carried a Congress flag [and] ... posters urging Hindus to unite and
to gather strength following the ideals of Shivaji [and] Rana Pratap'. Moreover,
organisations such as the Sangha, with their programme of militant and
aggressive Hinduism, were able to attract the remnants of the old terrorist
organisations which had stayed outside the communist movement. Pulin Das and
Satin Sen, both former Jugantar members who had been arrested in the past for
'terrorist' offences, now became the Sevashram Sangha's experts in 'martial'
arts, and in Madaripur the local branch of the Jugantar Party took over the
training of the Sangha's volunteers in1941. Another prominent member of the
Madaripur Jugantar group,Kalyan Kumar Nag, who later was known as 'Swami
Satyanand' and founded the 'Hindu Mission' in 1926, was an active member of the
Sangha and of the Hindu Mahasabha in the thirties.
In the early forties, Hindu volunteer groups proliferated in Calcutta.
Some of these, such as the Hindu Sakti Sangha, another 'active' wing of the
Mahasahba, were large and well organised, with over500 members scattered in
branches in different parts of the city, and were financially sound. Others were
smaller para ('neighbourhood') groups such as the 'Yuva Sampraday' of Behala started
in 1943 by Nirmal Kr. Chatarji with some young boys and girls at P.S.Behala. It
functions as follows: 1. Bratachari and dagger play for young boys and girls.
2. Dramatic section. 3. Football section. It also has a library. In all there
are50 members, 30 young school boys and girls and 20 young men. They also
perform Durga Puja and Saraswati Puja. At the time of Durga Puja they stage
dramas. Similar neighbourhood organisations included the Baghbazar Tarun Byayam
Samiti with twenty-five members, and the Arya Bir Dal in the Park Circus area
with sixteen members. In greater Calcutta, active volunteer societies of this
sort included the Entally Byayam Sangha(Physical Training Society), the Salkia
Tarun Dal in Howrah, the Hindu Seva Sangha in Hajinagar in the 24 Parganas and
the Mitali Sangsad in Serampore.
The larger volunteer organisations were frequently well funded.
The Bharat Sevashram Sangha, for instance, enjoyed Marwari support. In1941, the
Special Branch intercepted a letter from the Secretary of the Burdwan branch of
the Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha to Jugal Kishore Birla, thanking him for
his offer to finance 'training and physical culture for the Hindus of
Burdwan'. Another organisation which enjoyed the patronage of the Birlas was
the Bengal branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS). The Calcutta
headquarters of the RSS was reportedly housed in 'Mr Birla's Shilpa Vidyalaya
at [the] Harrison Road and Amherst Street Crossing'. By the mid-forties, the
RSS had expanded from Calcutta to the interior, where it had the support of at least
one big Hindu zamindar. An intelligence department report revealed that
“at Rajshahi, Pabna, Salap (Pabna district) Mymensingh, Susang
(Mymensingh district) and in other parts of Bengal there are many branches.
Babu ParimalSingha of [the] Susang Raj family is a staunch devotee of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha. It is said that in Bengal there are about a lac
[sic] of members of this Sangha.”
Organisations such as these were effective in mobilising large
sections of the Hindu bhadralok youth of Calcutta and the mofussil towns behind
the communal ideology and politics of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Hinduised
Congress of the forties. Although the authorities regarded most of them as
harmless (see the last column in table 8), this was more a reflection of the
Government's curiously tolerant attitude towards communal politics and
organisations than a measure of the seriousness of their intentions. The
'physical training' that the Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangha offered its young
recruits included training in the use of firearms. In 1939, V. R. Patki of the
Bengal branch of the RSS wrote to a friend in London:
“The charts of the Lee En-field Bayonet etc. sent by you were
received ... There is a well-known firm in London known as 'Parker Hale' where
Arms requisites are sold. Can you get an 'Aiming Rest' in that firm? This instrument
is used for taking aim by resting the gun on it. This can be utilised by
recruits before they are allowed to fire.”
After the War, demobilised servicemen and military employees were
induced to procure firearms and ammunition for Hindu communalorganisations.
A police report in May 1946 revealed that both the Anushilan and Jugantar
groups were involved in collecting arms and it was rumoured that their
activities were being financed by the Hindu Mahasabha:
“Members of the Anushilan Party are reported to be trying to
obtain arms through military employees ... On May 11, the house of Shyam Sunder
Pal, a member of the Anushilan party was searched at Calcutta and 108 rounds of
ammunition were discovered. The Jugantar Party, also engaged in obtaining
illicit arms, is said to be financed by a prominent leader of the Hindu
Mahasabha in their efforts to obtain arms and ammunition.”
The Mahasabha had been active amongst demobilised soldiers since the
end of the war, attempting to organise soldiers 'and released INA men under the
banner of the Mahasabha and also to arrange for the military training of Hindu
youths by ex-servicemen'. And at least in Burdwan, these efforts paid off. In
an impassioned letter to Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, the 'Hindu Ex-Army Personnel
of Panagar' declared that
“We the Ex-Army Hindu Personnel of Burdwan District look forward
eagerly for a retaliation against our dangerous enemy the Muslim in the Hindu
majority district... We are prepared and will follow your commands ... We have
taken oath and will not refrain from fulfilling our heartiest desire. We are
armed and are fully aware of the war tactics ... We consider that by this way
of revenge we can stop the uncivilised moslim of this province and their leader
the half cast notorious Suhrawardy and Nazimiddin will understand the Hindu
spirit of taking revenge[sic].”
Given that the Hindu Mahasabha had fought the 1945-46 elections quite
openly on the platform of resisting Muslims tooth and nail, it is hardly a
matter of surprise that Hindu volunteers a few months later were ready for this
test of strength in Calcutta. B. R. Moonje, firing the first shot in the
electoral campaign for the Mahasabha, had declared:
“Hindu Mahasabha wants Independence but does not believe that it
can be achieved through non-violence. It therefore wants to organise violence
on the most up-to-date western scientific lines ... It would be wise if
Congress were to take up ... to meet the [Muslim League] threat of a Civil War,
the Mahasabha slogan of Train the Youths in Horse riding and Rifle Shooting'.”
When civil war became a reality in Bengal, Mahasabha volunteers were
ready and eager to act upon their leader's advice, even if bamboo staves,
knives and crude country pistols had to do service for cavalry and artillery.
Hindus, as much as Muslims, were prepared for battle on 16August; both sides
were armed and Hindus appear to have had the bigger battalions.
An analysis of Hindu rioters reveals the extent to which volunteer
organisations had been successful in mobilising middle-class Bengali Hindus of
Calcutta behind the increasingly virulent communalism that characterised
bhadralok politics in the forties. While the Muslim rioters consisted mainly of
up-country migrants, a surprisingly large number of bhadralok Hindus were
arrested on charges of rioting. Discussing the composition of the Hindu crowds
in the riots, Suranjan Das observes
“Bengali Hindu students and other professional or middle-class
elements ... were active. Wealthy businessmen, influential merchants, artists,
shopkeepers ... were arrested on rioting charges. In central Calcutta,
bhadraloks joined others to disrupt a Muslim meeting being addressed by the
Chief Minister himself. Again, a large portion of the crowd which killed Dr
Jamal Mohammed, an eminent eye-specialist, consisted of ‘educated youths'... It
was not surprising that many of them spoke English with police officers.”
Indeed, one of the Hindus arrested for hurling a bomb into a Muslim
crowd in the unrest that continued after the Killing was a prominent doctor, Dr
Mahendranath Sarkar of Burdwan, who admitted, 'I am now a Congressman. I was
previously a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. I joined the movement favouring the
partition of Bengal'. Also involved on the Hindu side were released INA
soldiers and Marwari businessmen. It was this improbable alliance between
students, professional men, businessmen and ex-soldiers, Congressmen,
Mahasabhaites, shopkeepers and neighbourhood bully boys, that led the Hindu
crowd to its bloody victory in the streets of Calcutta in 1946. It was also to
be the basis of the Hindu movement for the partition of Bengal and for the
creation of a separate Hindu homeland.
But Hindu culpability was never acknowledged. The Hindu press laid
the blame for the violence upon the Suhrawardy Government and the Muslim
League, and the Killing was held up as a dreadful portent of the fate of
Bengali Hindus if they remained under 'Muslim rule'. In the months that
followed, the Calcutta Killing - cloaked in recrimination byte Hindu press -
became a powerful symbol which was used to rally Hindus behind the demand for a
separate Hindu state in West Bengal. The riots in Noakhali and Tippera, in
which local Muslims, reacting slowly but ferociously to rumours of how their
fellow-Muslims had been massacred in Calcutta and Bihar, killed hundreds of
Hindus in reprisal, gave Hindus the excuse they wanted to put themselves
unashamedly on a war footing:
“Make Shurawardy (I hate to utter his name) [know] that Hindus are
not yet dead and that neither he nor his vicious lieutenants can terrorise the
Hindus ...Shurawardy has sown the wind and must reap the whirlwind very soon.
It is he who has made the Hindus rebel. Rebel and take revenge is our only
motto from now on. Come and let us fight with the Muslim League brutes. We
should notecase fighting so long as Bengal is not partitioned and Leaguers are
kicked out from the homeland of the Hindus.”
Sentiments such as these fed a growing determination among many
Hindus that, come what may and regardless of the cost, Bengal must be
partitioned.
