In 30 Seconds
Story
On the night of 18 April 1930, Good Friday by deliberate choice of the Irish parallel, the revolutionaries of Chittagong did what no Indian underground had attempted since 1857. They did not assassinate an official or rob a treasury. They rose, as an army, against the government of a district. The Indian Republican Army, Chittagong branch, some sixty five members strong and much of it teenaged, seized the police and auxiliary force armouries, cut the telegraphs, isolated the town from the railway, and before the burning armoury their commander, a thirty six year old schoolteacher named Surya Sen, Masterda to his soldiers, took the salute of a provisional revolutionary government proclaimed in the nation’s name. The rising held the town for a night, fought a pitched battle within the week, and sustained a guerrilla resistance for three years, and though it ended on a gallows, Chittagong shook the Raj in Bengal as nothing had in a generation.
Surya Sen had built the organisation through a decade of patience, a national school teacher and Congress district secretary whose open respectability covered the recruitment of the young, Ananta Singh, Ganesh Ghosh, Lokenath Bal and their schoolfellows, drilled in secret upon the model Sen preached from the Easter Rising of Dublin, whose anniversary the raid honoured, the doctrine not of individual action but of insurrection, sacrificial if need be, to prove that the empire’s power could be broken in its seat. The night itself half succeeded, the armouries taken though the ammunition stores were missed, the European club, a target of the plan, found empty for the holy day, and the band withdrew to the Jalalabad hills above the town, where on 22 April the pursuing troops found them. The battle of Jalalabad hill killed a dozen of the young army, some sixteen years old, and cost the military casualties it did not soon publish, and the survivors, dispersing on Sen’s order, carried the war into the years, the underground sheltered by the villages, Kalpana Datta and the network of women couriers and safe houses sustaining it, the actions continuing, raids, executions of informers, the attack of September 1932 on the Pahartali European club led by Pritilata Waddedar, the young philosophy graduate who, wounded in the withdrawal, swallowed her cyanide by the roadside rather than capture, the first woman martyr of the era’s armed struggle, her farewell manifesto defending a woman’s equal right to the field of sacrifice.
The state’s reply matched the challenge. Chittagong district lived for years under punitive police, collective fines and the internment of hundreds, the special tribunals sat, and the manhunt for Masterda, protected by a peasantry that paid dearly for it, ran three years until the treachery of a kinsman, Netra Sen, delivered him in February 1933, a betrayal the underground answered, before trial could reward it, in Netra Sen’s own house. Tarakeswar Dastidar’s attempt to storm the jail failed, and on 12 January 1934 Surya Sen and Dastidar were hanged in Chittagong jail, the record and the survivors’ testimony agreeing that Sen was brutally beaten before the rope, his teeth broken, and the bodies given to the sea, no grave permitted. His last letter to his comrades, written on the eve, left the movement its benediction, the vision, he wrote, that had pursued him always, of a free India, and the charge never to lose heart.
Chittagong’s echo ran far beyond its district. The raid electrified a Bengal entering the Civil Disobedience year, recruitment to the underground surged, and the participation of the young women of the movement, Pritilata, Kalpana, and the schoolgirls Shanti and Suniti who shot the Comilla magistrate that December, remade the revolution’s very image. The Andamans received the survivors, Kalpana Datta lived to write the band’s chronicle, and the republic’s memory has kept the rising close, in film and textbook, the schoolteacher’s army holding its place beside the movements of the mass and the deeds of the singular as the freedom struggle’s one true insurrection, the night a district of the empire was, for some hours, free ground.
