Churchill's Secret War (17 page)

Dhara’s route lay through the town of Mohisadal, and past the home of the very police officer whose life he had just saved. It was 11 P.M. when he was striding by, and he spied a forlorn woman, clearly the officer’s wife, staring out of the window. She called to him, asking if he had seen any trouble on the road. “A wicked idea came into my head,” Dhara related later. Pretending to be just a passerby, he told her of having seen a large crowd holding a police officer hostage and threatening to burn him alive. A Congress leader named Sushil Dhara, he said, had been firing up the crowd by saying all kinds of angry things. Leaving the poor woman close to tears, he went on his way. Whatever the morals of this prank, it was the last time Dhara would do anything playful. As for the villagers, thirteen of them would serve up to two years of hard labor each, on charges of looting.
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ON THE NIGHT of September 28, thousands of men armed with spades, shovels, saws, and axes slipped out of their huts to gather in darkness on the arterial roads of southern Midnapore. According to a history of the insurgency written by one of its participants, Radhakrishna Bari, they dug gaping holes in the road surfaces, broke through culverts, and sawed laboriously through ancient roadside trees—dropping them,
branches and leaves and all, onto the path. “One guy told me he was bitten by a snake, but he threw it off and just kept on felling,” recalled Kumudini Dakua. “Fortunately it wasn’t poisonous.” There were no electricity poles to worry about, but the men snapped telegraph and telephone poles and slashed all wires within reach.
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Through a network of informers, word reached the local police that the people were about to take back the government. Discovering that all communication lines were down, they used the wireless set at a military observation post outside Tamluk to warn the district magistrate in Midnapore town, to the northwest. Two truckloads of troops set off toward Tamluk, only to find the road impassable. Soldiers descended from the trucks, got people out of nearby hamlets, and set them to work at gunpoint, repairing breaches and removing trees.
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Dawn found three processions, from the north, northwest, and south, making their way toward Tamluk town. (The Rupnarayan River flowed along the eastern side of Tamluk, blocking approach from that direction.) The people sang, shouted slogans, and waved green, white, and orange Congress flags; no one had weapons. “We’d hoped that the soldiers wouldn’t make it. If so, we had word that the police would surrender,” Bari would later recall. The son of a poor farmer, he had just left his Calcutta college to join the Midnapore insurgency and would become its chronicler.

But when the crowd from the northwest detoured into a soccer field to listen to instructions, the military trucks pushed past it to reach Tamluk at 2:30 P.M. The demonstrators, arriving at the town’s police station half an hour later, found themselves facing rows of constables with
lathis
—bamboo rods, lethal in trained hands—and, behind them, soldiers with guns. The police charged into the crowd, but because it continued to edge forward, the soldiers fired, killing three. At about the same time, the southern procession reached a twenty-foot bridge spanning a canal, and sepoys stationed on the north side fired without warning. Many of the wounded started crying out for water: most of them were Hindu, and they believed a sip of holy water before death ensured salvation.
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From a lane to the right came a prostitute, Sabitri Dasi, with a
ghoti
, or small brass vessel, from which she began pouring water into the mouths of the injured and dying. Sepoys raced forward and shouted at her to stop. Dasi withdrew to her hut and emerged holding aloft a
boti
, a fearsome two-foot knife set into a wooden board, which she normally used to chop straw for her cow.
“Ek hatey ghoti, ar ek hatey boti”
—in one hand she held a bowl, in the other hand a blade—remembered Krishna Chaitanya Mahapatro, a teenager who was jammed into the panicked crowd at the back. Dasi looked like an avenging goddess. Behind her came a train of fisherwomen brandishing their own bloodstained botis. Perhaps stunned at the apparition, the sepoys left them alone.
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The third procession, from the north, had set its sights on Tamluk’s courthouse, which the marchers regarded as a seat of institutionalized oppression. They approached the building by a narrow road, between the steep bank of a pond on one side and a row of shops on the other. The policemen and soldiers raised their lathis and rifles and charged. Seeing the youths ahead hesitate, a woman in the middle of the procession, seventy-three-year-old Matongini Hazra, took charge. An ardent follower of Gandhi, she had once spent six months in jail for displaying a black flag of protest to a visiting viceroy. Now Hazra grabbed the largest tricolor Congress flag and climbed onto a nearby porch. “Cowards!” she shouted at her compatriots. “Return home, I will go on alone. I will not look back to see if anyone came.” Then she strode forward, along with several women who were blowing conch shells. Their summons reminded the crowd of its mission, and it re-formed. Those at Hazra’s side would later report that the first gunshot hit her left hand, and that she took the flag in her right and kept on walking; a second shot hit her right hand, and she grasped the flag against her chest with both arms and kept on walking; the third shot passed through her temple. She died along with several others, including three teenage boys.
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AT SUTAHATA, TWENTY miles southeast of Tamluk, the protesters arrived at the small police station to find three constables standing in front, their hands folded in supplication. Their superior officer had left
for Tamluk to seek reinforcements but had failed to return, so the three had decided to surrender, while three other constables had gone off to hide. The leaders of the march took them into custody along with their guns, while the people set fire to the straw-thatched station, its records, and the bundles of cash they found inside.

“As we were leaving, two fireballs suddenly appeared in the sky,” Kumudini Dakua remembered. The authorities, unable to send reinforcements by road, had dispatched two aircraft to drop incendiary bombs on the crowd. “We were so excited at that moment, we didn’t care,” she said. The bombs passed over the police station and fell into a flooded field nearby, exploding in a shower of fire and water. Later that day the elders gave their police captives homespun cottons to wear, handed them a little money for passage, and put them on a ferry toward Calcutta.
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At Mohisadal, ten miles southeast of Tamluk, Sushil Dhara led his fifty youths, uniformed but unarmed, toward the police station. A crowd of people followed the cadets—as did volunteers marked with red crosses on their white garments, who were to aid any people who might be wounded by gunfire and convey them on makeshift stretchers to a schoolroom where two doctors waited with supplies. Dhara had heard that the small police force in Mohisadal expected to be overwhelmed and planned to surrender. But when he was still a mile away, he learned that a smaller procession from the east side had already neared the station and was being shot at.
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Sixteen-year-old Chitto Samonto of Kalikakundu was in the front lines of the eastern procession. He had signed up with the Congress six months earlier, and had been asked to round up the people of Kalikakundu and its small neighboring village, Boksichawk, for the march. Chitto’s mother came from Boksichawk, so the youngster was de facto nephew to all of its male residents, whether they were related or not. A villager named Bholanath Maity had offered to come along. “Don’t know what emotion came over him; he said, ‘Nephew, I will go,’” recalled Samonto. “He was a very poor man, quite illiterate. Some days he got some food, other days nothing. He bought and sold bananas in
local markets.” Srihorichandro Das, from the border of Kalikakundu, “said, ‘I too will come. Who cares what will happen!’ As if, living in such hardship, he didn’t place much stock in life. Sometimes he’d lie around drunk” on date palm brew, Samonto remembered.

Most of the two villages had marched, including Chitto’s mother, elder sister, and uncles. His brother was attending the march in Sutahata (southeast of Kalikakundu), while his father had stayed home. People from several other villages had joined them, so that a procession of about 2,000 had passed the elephant stalls of Mohisadal’s palace and approached the police station from the southeastern side. They were about one hundred yards away when the first bullets hit.

Bholanath Maity fell. “He was right in front of me. I saw he was all bloody,” said Samonto. “We were terrified, ran off in all directions. I hid inside a bamboo thicket by the lane.” Sheikh Surabuddin, Sheikh Kumaruddin, and Sudam Chandra Das of Kalikakundu got bullets in the knees and thighs. Seeing that his flock had fled, one of the leaders, Manoranjon Bhoumik, somehow obtained tin roofing sheets from the bazaar and called to the youths to try again. Chitto and others emerged from the bushes and, holding the sheets ahead like shields, tried to move forward. He was scared, Samonto confessed, but he felt obliged to obey his leader: “I was a cadet by that time, not like the other villagers.”

Bhoumik exhorted his forces, shouting, “Look, the police station is taken, see they set fire to a building there!” Smoke was indeed curling into the western sky, over Mohisadal town. A few of the cadre tried to press forward, but the bullets pierced the tin. “Only one person was shooting at us,” Samonto said. “You could see him—he was running this way and that.” It was the commander of the Mohisadal raja’s private force. As a staunch supporter of the British Raj, the zamindar had bolstered the police with his personal guard of Gurkha soldiers, led by a retired military man known as G Sahib.

After they heard of the shooting, Dhara and his boys sprinted a mile until they were close to the police station, approaching from the south. Immediately they came under fire from the Mohisadal palace guards, and a few of the youths fell. Someone brought doors and tin roofs; hiding behind
these, the unarmed attackers tried to crawl forward. But the guards continued to fire, and G Sahib himself shot at Dhara several times. Through all this, the volunteers—marked with their red crosses—gathered the wounded and bore them away, although they, too, came under fire.

Dhara knew that police records had been secreted at the home of the same police officer whose life, just three weeks earlier, he had used his influence to save. Now he did not feel generous. He ordered that the house be burned, and an enormous flame rose into the sky. The bizarre battle at the police station lasted until sundown, when the rebels retreated, having failed to occupy the building. The crowd had managed to unfurl the tricolor at other government offices in Mohisadal. But twelve had died, and at least two people were unaccounted for—left behind where they had fallen, in front of the police station.
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One of the wounded, Subhas Samanta, fought all night to regain consciousness. A bullet had entered his chest and emerged through his arm without killing him, but he had lost much blood. Hearing his groans, a police sepoy lifted him off the pile of bodies outside the station, splashed water on his face, laid him on a cot, and fed him some bread. In the morning the sepoy’s shift ended. A police officer arrived to find Samanta on the cot and kicked him off onto the dirt, where he lay all day without food or water. That night the sepoy again tended his patient. Three days and nights thus passed, after which Samanta and another wounded man were removed to the hospital in Tamluk. The other man died, but Subhas Samanta would recover and spend two years in jail. Astonishingly, the sepoy, Sinhara Singh, was transferred to work as a guard at the same prison, where he continued to protect the man whose life he had saved.
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After the debacle, stretcher-bearers had borne a grievously injured boy, Bonkim Maity, to the makeshift clinic in a schoolhouse. A bullet had entered through his belt into his lower stomach and lodged against his spine. It would take a major operation to save him but the police could be coming at any moment. Volunteers carried the rebel to a village, where the clinic doctor operated to remove the bullet. For a week the schoolboy bled heavily through the anus; but then, almost by a miracle,
he started to recover. He was spirited from hut to hut for months to evade the police, who never caught up with him or his rescuers. As a result of his injuries, he would suffer from cramps and complications for more than a decade.
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Chitto’s uncles brought the banana-seller’s body back to Boksichawk. “He had a wife and two small sons, they had a terrible time afterward,” remembered Samonto. “Later, after independence, they got some pension. Srihorichandro Das, how he died I don’t know, we never found him. He went missing. We heard some bodies were lying around and the police dumped them into the Rupnarayan.” Sheikh Surabuddin, made lame by his injuries, could no longer earn a living and begged for his food until, after independence, Samonto was able to get him a freedom fighter’s pension. Sheikh Kumaruddin never received that pension, and he would beg for the rest of his life.

Nandigram, in the southwest corner of Tamluk subdivision, had been in turmoil since the middle of September 1942, because police teams searching for Congress volunteers had killed six villagers. To give tempers a chance to cool, the region’s leaders had put off the march until September 30. On that day, a procession tried to approach the town’s police station, and five fell to bullets.
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The events of the two days were disastrous, not just for the rebels themselves but also for the credibility of their creed of nonviolence. Just several dozen soldiers and guards with guns had easily upheld the British Raj against perhaps 100,000 marchers—15 percent of the Tamluk subdivision’s population. At least 36 villagers had died, and hundreds had been injured. Nonviolence could perhaps take credit for keeping the death toll down: no doubt the defenders would have fired more rounds, or aimed more carefully, if the people had targeted them rather than the institutions they guarded. Surely it was also true that if the crowd had harmed the sepoys and officers, most of whom were their own countrymen, the fight for freedom would have degenerated into a civil war, which in turn would have portended a bitter future for India’s people. And even as people mourned their dead, counted their blessings, and pondered the next move, their situation was about to get very much worse.
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