A study of the massacre of Calcutta, 1946

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Direct Action Day, 1946 A Study on the Great Killing 9/24/2013 Aritrika Das

2. Introduction
Direct Action Day – 16th of August, 1946. A day in history, remembered by the citizens of Calcutta as a day of violence, bloodshed and carnage. Muslim League leader Mohammed A. Jinnah had declared August 16, 1946 to be the Direct Action Day in order to explain the Muslim League’s attitude towards the cabinet mission’s offer to and to condemn the behavior of Congress which rejected the idea of dividing the British Raj into a Hindu- dominated India and a Muslim-dominated Pakistan. In Calcutta, the day began with public demonstrations, closing of shops and hoisting of the Muslim League flag but the tension quickly escalated. Before nightfall, a communal riot of unthinkable ferocity, brutality and barbarity engulfed Calcutta with killing, looting, burning and maiming. Thousands of people got killed and thousands more were wounded. Pandemonium reigned supreme.
Background
On the 29th of July, 1946, Mohammed Ali Jinnah called on the Muslims to observe ‘Direct Action Day’ on the 16th of August 1946. Jinnah concluded his speech with the couplet “We want peace. But if war is forced upon us, we accept it”. The Direct Action Day started out as a rally which intensified into the biggest Hindu-Muslim riot in contemporary history. To completely understand the gamut of the situation, we have to understand what the factors that led to the massacre were. We have to understand why India would tear herself in two, along religious lines, when Hindus and Muslims had struggled side by side for years in the fight for independence.
The events of that time, especially the ones that led to Jinnah calling for direct action, should be looked at from two different, yet interrelated contexts: One being the all-India context, and the second, the Bengal context.
The Indian Context
The Muslim League and the Indian National Congress were the two largest political parties in the Constituent Assembly of India in the 1940’s. The political scene at this time was

3. marked with growing tension between the two parties. From 1940 onward, at a very elementary level, the propaganda of the Muslim League and that of its leader Jinnah was becoming more and more viciously communal, anti-Hindu and anti-Congress. In 1946, the Cabinet Mission came to India with the aim of discussing and planning for the transfer of power from the British Government to the Indian leadership, providing India with independence. Both the parties started gearing up for the transfer of power promised by the Cabinet Mission, formulated at the initiative of the then prime minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee. The main problem was, as it had been for quite some time now, the Hindu-Muslim partition. Congress wanted a unified India and the Muslim League wanted Pakistan. What was not clear however was whether Pakistan was meant to be separate Muslim state or a part of a confederation with the rest of India (Jalal, 1985). The British wanted to avoid a partition of India and so they spent weeks on lengthy discussions with groups of all major political parties of the country, the Indian States, the Sikhs, the minority castes, but failed to come to an agreement between the parties. It finally proposed to possible solutions, one of which was the plan of the formation of an interim government composed of representatives of the Congress, the Muslim League and the others. This plan gave Congress one more seat than the League. On the 16th of June , under the pressure of the League, the cabinet mission placed another proposal of creating two nations. This was summarily rejected by the Congress. This provoked Mohammed Ali Jinnah who then decided to boycott the Constituent Assembly and declared a Direct Action Day on the 16th of August, 1946.
The Bengal Context
The scenario in Bengal at that time was quite complex. Muslims represented more than half of the population and they were mostly concentrated in the eastern part of Bengal. This demographic structure led to this region being the only province where the Muslim League government was in power, in coalition with the Europeans and against strong opposition from the Congress party and from a Hindu nationalist Party, the Hindu Mahasabha. The latter was formed and supported by the rich Marwari trading community, who were essentially traders from Rajasthan , who largely dominated the economy of central Calcutta. Calcutta itself had a very clear Hindu majority and a significant Muslim minority.

4. Given the tendency of urban population to congregate in areas belonging to one community, Northern Calcutta was filled with Muslims, while the central and southern parts of Calcutta were almost exclusively Hindu. An important characteristic of Calcutta’s Muslim population was that it was largely composed of poor people, mostly factory workers, rickshaw pullers, artisans and domestic servants. The Muslim middle class was markedly smaller than the huge Hindu middle class. Big Muslim capitalists and merchants were few and far in between and even they could not compete with the rich Marwaris. Calcutta was the only large city in the province and therefore, occupied a privileged position in all provincial politics, whether Muslim or Hindu. Calcutta, by then, was divided into two highly antagonistic entities on the basis of religion. This is the backdrop, against which, the protest that Jinnah called for, triggered massive riots where in less than 72 hours, more than 4,000 people lost their lives in one of the most brutal instances of communal riots the country had every seen.
Direct Action Day
The declaration of the Direct Action Day by Jinnah propelled the Muslim League chief minister of Bengal Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy , to request the Governor of West Bengal Sir Frederick Burrows to declare a public holiday on the 16ty of August. Governor Burrows agreed and there was hope amongst the government officials that the risk of conflicts, especially those of picketing and arson would be limited or minimized. Bengal Congress protested the declaration of the holiday as it would enable the opposition to successfully enforce hartals where their leadership was uncertain. The Muslim League had majority in very few areas of the city and a chance of them pulling off a successful hartal was little. Congress argued, that if a public holiday was observed, its own supporters would be forced to close down their shops and offices and inadvertently support the Muslim League’s hartal. Mr. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, the Congress leader in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, urged the Hindus to keep their shops open and to not submit to the hartal.

5. Media Influence
The Star Of India, an influential Muslim newspaper, published a detailed programme of the day. The programme called for a complete standstill and general strike of all commercial, civic and industrial services except essential services. The idea was to have processions from various parts of the city and Howrah, Hooghly, Metiaburuz and 24 Parganas , which would congregate at the Ochterlony Monument, now known as the Shaheed Minar, and that joint rally would be presided over by Suhrawardy. The Muslim League branches dispatched members to every mosque in every ward to explain in detail the plan of action. Special prayers were held in every mosque for the freedom of Muslim India. The notice highlighted the fact that it was in the month of Ramzaan that the Quran was revealed, that permission of jihad was granted by Allah, that 10,000 Muslims conquered Mecca under the Holy prophet and established the Kingdom Of Heaven. The notice claimed to draw divine inspiration from the Quran and emphasized on the coincidence of the Direct Action Day with the month of Ramzaan. They emphasized that this was the day their battle for independence would begin and they would win.
Akhand Hindusthan, was the vessel that mobilized the Hindu sentiment. Bengal leaders of the Congress imbibed in the Hindu population a strong sense of Hindu identity, especially in the face of apparent threat from the possibility of them being marginalized as a minority against the onslaught of the movement for a free Pakistan. Understandably, there was a lot of communal propaganda around which was made successful party due to a propaganda campaign which focused on communal discord and seemingly resulted in legitimizing communal solidarities.
Riots and The Great Killing
News of trouble was being reported even before 10 o clock in the morning. The Lalbazar police department reported that there was excitement and that shops were being forced to close and brawls had broken out in certain parts of the city. These were mainly concentrated in the Hindu dominated North-central parts of the city like Rajabajar, Kelabagan , College Street, Harrisson Road and Burrabazar.

6. The league’s rally at Ochterlony Monument started at 12’o clock exactly. The gathering at the Maidan, where the monument is situated was considered to be the largest ever Muslim congregation in Bengal , at that time. The numbers attending, were estimated differently by different sources. A Central Intelligence Officer, who was a Hindu, estimated the number of people to be 30,000 whereas a Muslim Inspector of the Special Branch of the Calcutta police estimated the crowd to be 500,000 strong. This number, apparently is highly unlikely. A large number of participants were armed with lathis and iron rods. The mood of the crowd was further intensified by the speeches of Khwaja Nazimuddin and Chief Minister Suhrawardy. Nazimuddin preached peacefulness in his speech but countered the entire effect by asserting that all the people who were injured were Muslims and that the Muslim community had only retaliated in self-defense.
There is not much clarity on what Suhrawardy’s instructions to the police and military were, but the police did not receive any specific instruction to hold the crowd back. Now what the Chief Minister actually meant by this is a debatable issue, but to an largely uneducated crowd, what the minister said to the police was construed to be an invitation to turn violent, in fact , many of the participants are reported to have attacking Hindus and looting Hindu shops as soon as they left the meeting. There are subsequent reports of Muslim men in trucks, armed with brickbats and bottles, attacking Hindu-owned shops.
Before the day was over, blood soaked the asphalt of Calcutta’s violence ridden streets. Rioting Moslems went after Hindus with guns, knives, and clubs, looted shops, stoned news papers offices, set fire to Calcutta's British Business districts. Hindus and Sikhs were just as fierce as the Muslims in the beginning, it is said. Parties of one community would lie in wait, catch unsuspecting victims of some other community and cut him into pieces. Hindus in Calcutta soon started retaliating with attacks on Muslims. The death toll of the Muslims started increasing as the Hindu retaliation gained pace. The amount of hatred in the collective consciousness of the city was evident from the level of mutilation inflicted during the kill. Victims were hacked into pieces, not only killed. Establishments and houses were burned down; people were hunted down like prey. Thousands of homeless roamed the streets. Police blotters are filled with stories of women and children raped, mutilated, and burned alive. Skirmishes continued for over a week. On 21st August, Bengal was put under

7. Viceroy’s rule. Five battalion British troops, four battalions of Indians and Gurkhas were deployed in the city. When the streets of Calcutta were finally being cleaned by the police and military, vultures were already tearing into the rapid putrefying bodies of the victims, many of them chopped into pieces. According to a police officer, “All we can do is move the bodies to one side of the street.”
The Victims
The exact number of the people affected by this holocaust can never be known. Even though authorities have compiled official estimates on the basis of body count, none appear to be very 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 mostly put around 15,000 but on what these figures are based is difficult to ascertain. However, any massacre in India has such an uncertainty of body count. There are a lot of complex structural and institutional reasons for this form of uncertainty. Apart from these structural issues, we have to remember that those were times of turmoil and rapid political change and hence there was a lot of disorganization in the political administrative sector.
Certain things stand out in the massacre that happened that day. The savage manner in which the killings were executed was very much a part of the repertoire of communal killings in India, but in Calcutta it stood out in the sheer scale of the phenomenon. Also, there were a lot of accounts of rape, which was not prevalent in the earlier communal violence, but were to figure prominently in accounts of violence during the Partition, which in retrospect, makes the Great Killing a sad harbinger of horrors still to come. Also, though women and children figure in the victim list, the main target seemed to have been adult males. There is another aspect to the Great Killing that cannot be properly verified. Massacres in India usually are perpetrated by the so called underworld, but here, the victims themselves were overwhelmingly poor and defenseless. This seemingly links with a very important point, that according to most accounts, most of the victims of the massacre were Muslims. However, due to absence of reliable figures, this can never be demonstrated.

8. Witnesses
Many people witnessed the massacre, but there are very few reliable testimonies. In August 1946, the Government appointed an enquiry commission presided over by Sir Patrick Spens. The conclusions of the commission were never published, although they interrogated many witnesses. There are some like Lieutenant general Sir Francis Tucker, then in command of British and Indian forces in the Eastern sector of India, who provide detailed, but biased firsthand accounts of the event. The British view of the events tend to distribute blame equally on both sides , but nevertheless displays a slight bias against Congress. There is a plethora of personal accounts by inhabitants of Calcutta in Bengali that have never been taken into account for a systematic study.
It is noteworthy that apart from the official enquiry report that was never published, not a lot of effort had been made to collect testimonies from the affected. However, this fact makes complete sense. Narratives of this horrific event remained very much a part of the identity politics in a city ravaged by communal strife. It was only after Gandhi started the “Peace mission” that the city saw some respite which eventually became lasting. After the British left, comparing accounts of various origins became more difficult. It became a question of pitching Hindu sentiments against the Muslims. If you were a Hindu, you believed in one narrative which blamed Suhrawardy and the Muslim League entirely and could substantiate your claims with various ‘witness reports’. If you were a Muslim, you adopted a stance of victimization and point out that most of the victims were Muslims , all the while hinting at a plot by Hindus to eradicate Muslims in Calcutta. After independence and partition, when the two communities had found a way of living together a silence descended on the event and it remained buried for decades.
Memories
I am a Bengali who was born and brought up in the city and yet did not know about the massacre that rocked Bengal before the partition. I started asking around and found that it is very much an object of living memory where narratives are passed down from generation to generation in practically all the families that lives through it. This struck a

9. deep chord in me. How could something so horrific and so obviously important to the people involved be so blatantly missing from the official records of Bengal?
More investigation revealed that this is prevalently the case with most horrific events. This disjunction between the public and the official memory is not unique to this particular event.
However, the stories that I heard, were mostly from Hindu families that still greatly victimize themselves and blame the Muslims for the entire massacre. Even after all these years, after all the information about Muslim killings, victims and their families choose to have a black and white take on the entire subject rather than understanding the multitude of grey that surrounds the Great Killing.
Instigators
Controversies still rage about the respective responsibilities of the respective responsibilities of the two communities, the Hindus and the Muslims, in addition to individual leader’s 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).
Aftermath
During the riots, thousands started fleeing the city. For days Howrah Bridge and the station were packed with refugees who were evacuating to escape the mayhem of the city. Many of

10. them did not escape the aftermath of the violence that spread out into the region outside Calcutta. The Direct Action day was condemned heavily from all corners of the country.
The Calcutta holocaust was followed by riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad, which spread to different cities, towns and villages in UP, Bihar and Tamil Nadu. It is of significance that all the earliest outbreaks were in Hindu dominated areas. In spite of the severe brutality, this event could not condemn the League and restrict its political ambitions. Instead, it spearheaded the ideal of Pakistan and the political importance of the League.
The Direct Action resolution has sparked revolutionary activity amongst the Muslims. If this momentum had not been created, they would probably never have launched the civil disobedience movement in Punjab, Frontier and Assam. The Muslims in the minority areas would not have been able to face death, disaster and destruction of all they cherished and rise to heroic sacrifices which unnerved even the aggressive Hindus. The ideal of Pakistan, used these martyrs to grow, germinate and become self sustaining at this critical moment, and made Pakistan inevitable.

11. Bibliography
Jalal, A., 1985, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Rashid, H. Ar, 1987, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim Politics 1936-1947, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 1987.
Tuker, F., 1950, While Memory Serves, London, Cassell & Co.
Bose, S.C., 1968, I Warned My Countrymen, Being the Collected Works 1945-50 of Sarat Chandra Bose, Calcutta, Netaji Research Bureau.
Chatterjee, P.K., 1991, Struggle and Strife in Urban Bengal, 1937-1947, Calcutta, Das Gupta.