Calcutta (34 page)

It is irrelevant for a brave Westerner to wonder why a man in such a predicament doesn’t charge the mob and try to battle his way through them; the man knows perfectly well that they would beat him to death without hesitation with their fists if they had nothing else handy. The only thing you can do if you are
gheraoed
is to sit tight with as much calmness as you can manage, and hope for the best. When a newspaper in this city reports that a car, a bus or a lorry knocked someone down in the street the day before, it frequently adds, without explanation, that the driver fled. Every reader in Calcutta knows that a driver in such a mess who doesn’t fly, stands an excellent chance of being lynched on the spot. Tram-burning is almost a auricular activity among students in Calcutta; and the trams, like most other
public-service
vehicles, are increasingly provided with heavy wire mesh round the drivers cab, to protect him from mob violence. People are quite often found decapitated round here, or stabbed or axed to death.

There are several reasons for the terrible violence of Calcutta. One is the anger of excessive poverty confronted by excessive wealth, and all the complex and sometimes cynical things that follow from it. Another has something to do with the fact that there are so many men without women in this city. Another has traditionally been a clash of religions. Another has come from frictions of cultures and sub-species of people. Even in 1857, Girish Chandra Ghosh was writing that ‘Calcutta contains a fusion of races as antagonistic to each other as the tribes of American Indians’. There has been a much greater fusion since then; and much, much more violence. Apart from the violence offered the British in the cause of nationalism, which was
considerable 
and which lasted almost until the Second World War, the most common cause of brutality and bloodshed in Calcutta during the first half of this century was the bitter communal
differences
between the Muslims and the Hindus. Curzon’s
partition
had given the overwhelmingly Muslim population of East Bengal a sense of freedom they had not felt since the rise of the Hindu bhadralok, and they had deeply resented the Hindu
agitation
which had led to Partition being revoked. It was thus typical of local feeling that, when a festival procession passed a mosque during Durga Puja in 1924, the Hindus should clap their hands in a mixture of high spirits and provocation. The Muslims attacked the procession at once with ballast from the nearby railway line and six people were wounded, one of them fatally. That sort of thing became so commonplace that it was barely worth reporting. There were more serious communal riots in 1918 and 1926.

In 1926 there was tension on several fronts in Calcutta. There had been years of terrorism directed against the British and the British had reacted vigorously, which is to say brutally as often as not. They had also been playing off Muslim leaders against Hindu leaders, in their efforts to maintain a balance of power themselves. On the Hindu side, the bhadralok had almost totally lost the support of their own lower castes, who quite properly suspected them of self-interest; Chitta Ran jan Das, recently dead, had made notorious use of
Calcutta
Corporation as a patronage machine during his mayoralty. On the Muslim side, their leader, Sir Abdur Rahmin, had long
since
decided
that Islam came
before
India and had just told the All-India Muslim League
conference
that the time had come for an organized fight for Muslim rights. Apart from a few Muslims in the Swaraj Party there were, by now no groups of Muslims and Hindus working together within the legislative body of Bengal. This was the climate when the Hindu Arya Samaj held its annual procession in North
Calcutta
on 2 April 1926. It was led by a band, it had the usual police escort and it had marched a couple of miles when it reached the Dinu Chamrawalla’s mosque in time for azan, the Muslim call to prayer at four p.m. A Muslim ran out of the mosque and asked the band to stop playing till it was out of
earshot
.
The inspector of police with the procession advised the Hindus to do as they were asked. One drummer alone kept up his beat. At once a crowd of worshippers rushed out of the building and began to pelt the procession with garbage. The procession began to hit back. Instantly, Hindus and Muslims from
surrounding
streets began to pour into the confusion and the
fighting
spread across that part of the city; mosques and temples alike were desecrated by mobs. For the next fortnight the riots
continued
throughout Calcutta, shops were looted, places of worship were burned down, fifty people were killed and seven hundred were injured. It took troops with armoured cars to stop the
fighting
, and even that was only a short relief. Three weeks later a drunken brawl in Central Calcutta started a fresh riot which lasted a fortnight, killing seventy and injuring four hundred. The most frightening thing about these collisions was the suspicion afterwards that they had been deliberately engineered by leaders on both sides. Almost from the start, leaflets had appeared on the streets, exhorting both Hindu and Muslim to combat. One said; ‘Moslems Beware! Otherwise the Hindus will eat you up.’ Another said ‘Rise up, O Hindus! girding up your loins, and stand up steadfast on the arena of the fight … Let all the higher and lower castes unite and exhibit the glory of the Hindus.’ Yet this, with the intermittent riots which followed during the rest of the year and the ones that occurred in the thirties, was merely a small rehearsal for the horror that came a couple of decades later.

At the turn of the century Muslims had outnumbered Hindus throughout Bengal by ten per cent, and they at least maintained the distance between them in the years ahead. They were always a minority in the towns, though; even in Dacca and Chittagong, in the middle of an enormously Muslim area, Hindus were able to outweigh them. By the end of the war the Muslims formed no more than twenty-three per cent of Calcutta’s population, yet they had dominated the political affairs of the city and state for several years (as the Marwaris had started to dominate native commerce) under the patronage of the British, who found them slightly more reliable than the insubordinate Bengali Hindus. The first Muslim Vice-Chancellor of the University had been appointed in 1930 and Fazlul Huq had become the first Muslim
mayor in 1935. Since 1927, moreover, successive ministries in Bengal had been headed by Muslims, dependent for existence upon the combined votes of Muslim and British members of the legislative body.

In April 1946, Mr H.S. Suhrawardy – the same Suhrawardy who had underplayed the seriousness of the Bengal famine in 1943 – formed a new Muslim League administration. By this time it was quite clear, though the intention had not yet been officially declared, that British rule had not much longer to go in India. The wrangle was now between Mr Nehru and Mr Jinnah about a division of the country into Hindustan and Pakistan when government was eventually relinquished by the Raj. Stoutly backing up Jinnah from Calcutta, Suhrawardy at once
threatened
to declare Bengal an independent state if the British
eventually
handed control of all India to the Hindu Congressmen in Delhi. ‘We will see that no revenue is received by such central Government from Bengal,’ he said, ‘and consider ourselves as a separate state having no connection with the Centre.’ July came, with Jinnah and Nehru locked in acrimony and Jinnah calling upon all Muslims to make Friday, 16 August, a Direct Action Day. In Calcutta, one strike after another marked the restlessness there and on 13 August Suhrawardy declared that Friday would be a public holiday; at which all Congressmen in the state
assembly
promptly walked out. One of Suhrawardy’s ministers said the holiday had been declared because the provincial
government
feared there might be communal troubles that day. It is doubtful whether even he realized what his government had just deliberately let Calcutta in for. Even amidst the atrocious
insincerities
of local politics at the time, it is not conceivable that the Muslim League could have been prepared for anything on the scale of what followed.

In Bombay, that Thursday, the two national leaders met for over an hour, at the end of which Jinnah said, ‘There will be no more meetings between me and Pandit Nehru.’ In Calcutta, it was announced that bank employees would demonstrate on Saturday against a police lathi charge that had taken place during a bank strike the day before. Rita Hayworth was appearing in
Gilda
at the Tiger Cinema that week and on Friday the Elite was
due to start showing
Intermezzo
, with Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman. Marie Desty, French dressmaker, was going to reopen her showroom and make the best of holidaymaking shoppers. The Calcutta Stock Exchange had just had a quiet day. On
Friday
morning the temperature was 88 degrees, the humidity was 91 per cent. And for the next few days, Calcutta became hell.

It began where trouble has almost always begun in this city, in North Calcutta, with stabbings and lootings and bombs of soda-water being thrown. Mobs made for wine shops and got drunk on the spot. Then they went in search of more plunder and both Hindu and Muslim shopkeepers were clubbed and stabbed to death trying to defend their property. Goods worth Rs 7 million were taken from a store in Dharamtala
Street.
All
this was just a preamble. On Friday afternoon there was a mass meeting of Muslims at the foot of the Ochterlony Monument, part of the Direct Action Day strategy. They streamed in
procession
from every direction, and when their demonstration was over they streamed off again into streets where men were now rushing about with shouts of ‘Jehad’ (Holy War). An old man walking down a lane with a small bundle was tripped by one of a gang coming in the opposite direction; as he fell, the lot of them set upon him and beat him with lathis (which are staves of bamboo, usually iron-shod at the tips) until he was still; a moment or two later he stirred, whereupon one of the gang ran back and stabbed him until he would never move again. Four men walking down another street were attacked by another gang and, when they appeared senseless, they were picked up and hurled into an open sewer. A mob surrounded a bustee and, when some of the inhabitants rushed out, these were hacked to death with axes; the mob then set fire to the shanties, and the slum-dwellers who remained in their homes were burnt to death, until nothing of the bustee and its people was left but a pile of ashes.

A curfew was imposed on Friday night, but Calcutta had only just started to tear itself to pieces. At dawn on Saturday, the atrocities were still mounting. The 36 Down Parcel Express train was stopped just outside the city and looted, its crew
butchered
. Defenceless people were now sheltering together in the hope that this would make them more secure. The families of
four houses gathered in one, when a crowd appeared bearing lathis, spears, axes and blazing torches. They battered the doors down and rushed in shouting ‘Plunder and kill’. The families took refuge on the roof while the mob ransacked one room after another, taking away everything portable; then they set fire to the rest and one man survived the wreckage to tell what
happened
. In some parts of the city, where Hindus and Muslims lived close together, pacts were made to keep the peace and to
protect
each other from mobs. A Muslim family in a predominantly Hindu district on the banks of Tolly’s Nullah were saved when a large crowd was marching upon their house; their neighbours hustled them into a boat and got them away down the canal. In a Muslim district, a Hindu family were about to be attacked with iron bars and daggers when three or four Muslim women rushed in, stood between the two groups, and warned the mob that it would be necessary to kill them first.

Just after noon on, Saturday the police decided they could no longer contain the massacre and the military were at last called in to help; there had been one Indian, one Gurkha and four British Battalions in the city, together with a few tanks, when Friday began; a week later another battalion from each source had been summoned in reinforcement. For the city was now berserk and the garrison could not at once subdue the madness. By Sunday morning even the politicians were appalled at what they had started and local Muslim and Hindu leaders began peace talks; they proposed a joint procession the following day through Central Calcutta. Both Muslim League and Congress supplied sixty marchers bearing their party flags and white banners, and they met in Dharamtala Street while bystanders clapped and there were cries of ‘Hindu Muslim ek ho’ (Hindus and Muslims unite). Then the procession stopped, its leaders apparently
uncertain
which way to go next. Three men shouldered their way into the middle of the procession and hauled one of the marchers out to where five other men were standing. Together, the eight began to beat the marcher until he fell down, while the rest of the procession and the bystanders fled. The beaten man was left on the ground looking dead. One of the goondas suddenly turned round, ran back to him, and was seen to plunge a knife into the
body three times. Then another goonda ran back and beat the corpse with a lathi. Not far away, a man who looked as though he had been thrown through a shop window was sitting on the pavement alongside the wreckage, his back streaming with blood, very carefully tying a triangle of broken glass into the cleft of a stick, to make a sort of axe.

The stench of rotting bodies now began to wrap itself around the city. A reporter who went out with a military detachment wrote that ‘in an open plot of land surrounded by dwelling houses in Upper Chitpore Road, near Shampukur, about fifty bodies had been thrown haphazardly in two heaps and were being devoured by vultures. Adjoining them was an abandoned lorry containing about a score of corpses … at the junction of Syed Ameer Ali Avenue and Circus Market Range, the former a main thoroughfare of Park Circus … beside the burnt and looted remains of a two-storeyed house, lay the bodies of two men and a dog. Vultures had attacked the former, leaving the dog alone’. The British military commander, Brigadier J. D. C. Sixsmith, wanted to burn all corpses where they were found, to prevent the possibility of a cholera epidemic; he was firmly told that neither Hindu or Muslim religious susceptibilities would permit anything less than customary rites in every case.