The heroes of Chittagong

Manoshi Bhattacharya

The first page ends with the line Chatga was in the news again. Chatga. The word ended with a nasal sound. With this 'nasal sound' Manoshi Bhattacharya takes you to Chittagong in the summer of 1930.  The book revisits, and also dares to relive one of the most glorious chapters in the independence struggle of British India- Master Da' Surjya Sen's Chittagong Youth Rebellion and the four-year long insurgency shaking the foundations of British India and leading to its ultimate partition through 'freedom at midnight'.
Master Da's story is well known to the people of Chittagong and Bangladesh; and also throughout Paschimbanga and Tripura Rajya. Master Da and his band of merry men and women—Pritilata Waddedar, Binod Bihari Chowdhury, Kalpana Dutt, Ambika Chakraborty, Tarakeshwar Dastidar, Ramkrishna Biswas, Ananta Lal Singh, Ganesh Ghosh, Lokenath Bal, Ananda Prasad Gupta and Suresh De—have all become larger than life historical characters and folklore forming a part of common history that is shared and passionately loved throughout the Bangla speaking world.
Writing the history of an event still fresh in the minds of the descendants of its participants and the people of its region is a challenge.  Stripping away myths to get to the facts is more difficult. In Chittagong: Summer of 1930, Manoshi Bhattacharya does all the above, and goes a few steps ahead. That 'nasal sound' of Chatga makes the book special and a must read in Bangladesh and the Bangla speaking world.

Chittagong: Summer of 1930
Manoshi Bhattacharya
HarperCollins India

The author gives voices to eight heroes from Chittagong and eight British officers who were in Chittagong at the time. Drawing from their writings, the author crafted dialogues putting the scenes together in a master jigsaw puzzle. This has created a series of skillful translations and transcriptions linked by a minimum of fiction. The author does not speak herself. Each storyteller speaks. Each picks up the thread where the previous storyteller left off.  Endnotes to each chapter validate the sources and family interviews that were used to clarify what may seem as creative writing.
The story tellers present a discourse of colonization from the perspective of both the colonized and the colonizers. The former is characteristic of post colonial literature, but it is because of the latter that the book breaks new ground presenting also a view of the colonizers.  Police Commissioner Sir Charles Tegart and his wife Lady Kathleen Tegart; Police Superintendent JR Johnson; Collector and District Magistrate of Chittagong during the Armoury Raid, HR Wilkinson; District and Sessions Judge, John Younie; and Sgt Morsehead; and police officers Hem Gupta and Ramani Majumdar present their accounts of Chittagong and the summer of 1930. This adds a new dimension that until now had been explored by only historians and the academia.
The different Bengali and British worlds and their perspectives and styles have been presented such that the reader moves between them smoothly and identifies with them both.  For example, revolutionaries talk of Chattogram or Chatga and Kolkata.  The British speak of Chittagong and Calcutta. Master Da is presented as Surjya Sen (the spelling he himself used) and not as Surya Sen. A careful reading reveals: the British speak in Victorian English. English translations of revolutionaries' dialogues follow the style of Bangla sentence construction. Nuances, idiosyncrasies and expressions exclusive to Bangla have been captured in the translation. For instance, instead of 'go away' the revolutionaries say 'you may come' (tumi ashte paro).
Master Da started the largest organized civilian armed uprising in the struggle for the independence of British India. It was second only to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, which was led by professionally trained soldiers. That a simple schoolmaster from a remote Noapara village at Raozan, Chittagong, and a group of boys and girls, some of whom were only 14 years old, could achieve an uprising on this scale- sealing Chittagong off for three days- not only shook British India, it sent tremors to the British Parliament and beyond.  Chittagong was put on the map.  Master Da's Youth Rebellion (Chittagong Armoury Raid) and the subsequent insurgency featured in the newspapers of Britain, Australia, Canada and the USA.  What baffled the British was not only its meticulous planning and execution, but also that the operation was conducted right under their noses!  Master Da and his boys and girls never knew the impact their operation had on the British psyche. Letters of John Younie and testimonials of Sir Charles Tegart dug from the archives of Cambridge University and narrated in the book validate many of the claims made by the revolutionaries in their memoirs, but denied by historians and the official British 'Eurocentric' view.
Master Da's success was based on water-tight secrecy and a strict hierarchy.  Master Da, Nirmal Sen, Ambika Chakraborty, Ganesh Ghosh and Ananta Lal Singh were the Top 5. They were the only ones who knew the entire plan.  The next tier included Team Leaders and a chosen few like Ananda Prasad Gupta (one of the story tellers).  Master Da's ingenuity was that Ananda knew only his team members and plans only of his team.  He was not aware of what his brother Deboprasad Gupta or even his best friend Jibon Ghoshal (Makhon) would be doing, let alone the actual date of the Chittagong Armoury Raid.  Also, not all first rankers were team leaders. Ananda and Jibon were not team leaders, but they were first rankers.  Second rankers like Suresh De (storyteller) knew nothing at all except they would have to respond when the call came, to which they did blindly.  Because of this segregation in information, Ananta Lal Singh's stories have more depth and are more enlightening.  Suresh De's stories are simplistic and more romantic.
Why did Master Da' plan like this? If the police or their agents caught one of the boys from the first tier and he failed to hold up under torture, then he would give away names only of his group and details of the single task he and his team were to perform.  The rest of the plan would not be jeopardized. Ingenious! The British were kept guessing.
By the time the revolutionaries started writing their memoirs, two features became evident. First, everybody knew Master Da's 'master' plan by then. Second, the revolutionaries were writing from memory unlike the personal home-letters and diaries of the British officers written at the time.  Errors entered in the sequencing of the events.  Researching her sources, the author had to address this to make each storyteller's saga become non-fiction within the time and space of the summer of 1930.
The book wonderfully captures the summer of 1930 in a holistic historical context. It also contains rare and unpublished photos (between pages 218-219). However, it has its shortcomings.  Master Da does not feature as a storyteller.  Despite help from Shri Gautam Mohan Chakravarty, Police Commissioner of Kolkata, the author could not unearth Master Da's notebooks from the archives of Lalbazar.  This does not diminish the beauty of the book because through the eyes of his boys we learn about Master Da's many qualities, sense of humour and sagacity.  The book is thus a good historical document that preserves and presents what is left of the writings of the heroes from Chittagong.  The book ends with a hint that a sequel is in the offing. I have been told the forthcoming Part II deals with the four-year long insurgency that made greater history in the words of Master Da himself. It will cover the highly publicized Chittagong Armoury Raid trial with its very controversial outcome; the women's movement; and Master Da's hanging.  In between, the two volumes capture the history of armed revolutions in the provinces of British India and stories of older Bengali revolutionaries, like Shri Aurobindo, Bagha Jatin, MN Roy and Khudiram, to name a few.
If reading a conventional history book is boring, then Chittagong: Summer of 1930 is the book to get.  The characters soon come to life, and before one knows it, they become a part of you.  A Bangla translation of the book and its sequel will make it more relevant to Bangla speaking people. It has all the elements to rank alongside Purbo Paschim by Sunil Gangopadhyay from Faridpur, Bangladesh, as one of the finest non-fictions that address the agonizing experiences of Bengal leading to partition or was a consequence of the partition of British India.
(After graduating from AFMC, Pune, Manoshi Bhattacharya became a physician in the Indian Navy. She is now a general practitioner at Gurgaon, Haryana, India. She is also the author of The Royal Rajputs: Strange Tales and Stranger Truths, published by Rupa & Company in 2009).

Asrar Chowdhury teaches economic theory at Jahangirnagar University. He can be contacted via [email protected] and www.asrarchowdhury.com