Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (6 page)

Then there were Aurobindo Ghose, Shyamsundar Chakrabarty, Subodh Chandra Mullick, all associated with
Bande Mataram
, and Bhupendranath Dutt, editor of
Yugantar
who openly professed violence as the way to fight the British decision to partition Bengal.

Of all the Congress politicians, Poddar’s most enduring relationship was with Malaviya, both ideologically and personally. He would also build a close relationship with Malaviya’s second son Radhakant whose failure as a commission agent resulted in a huge financial loss that he attempted to offset with money that his father had collected from the Birlas for the Congress. As a result, the equation between the father and the son became tense and the two communicated with each other through Poddar.
¹³
Malaviya and Poddar worked closely on several issues concerning the protection of the rights of Hindus. Even in a minor matter of funding for a gaushala (cow shelter) at Barhaj (in Deoria district, United Provinces), Malaviya would ask Poddar and Baba Raghav Das for help.
¹⁴

Poddar also counted the mercurial Panchkouri Banerjee as one of his friends. After the demise of
Bande Mataram
,
Sandhya
and
Yugantar
, Banerjee kept the strident anti-British tone alive through his daily
Nayak
.
¹⁵

Poddar’s personal life, meanwhile, had been unfortunately eventful. Mahadevi had died during childbirth in 1909 followed, within a few days, by her infant. In 1911, Poddar got married again to Subtibai, daughter of Seth Mangturam Saraogi, but she too died in childbirth in 1916. The same year, Poddar was married for the third time, to Ramdei Bai, daughter of Sitaram Sanganeria, a rich businessman from Assam. Hanuman Prasad, who had joined the Swadeshi movement and already switched to wearing khadi, would try his best to influence his new wife to discard her foreign-made clothes.
¹⁶

The heady world of Bengal’s politics, in which violence played a defining role, did not leave the Marwari locality of Burrabazar—engrossed in its business and community matters, profit and philanthropy—untouched. In the wee hours of 21 July 1916, the neighbourhood was rudely awakened when a British sergeant, an Indian inspector and seven or eight policemen raided the house on Zakaria Street where leading Marwari businessman Ghanshyam Das Birla lived. Birla himself could not be found, but in the next few hours, a house in Sutapatti was raided and Omkarmal Saraf was arrested. By afternoon, a raid in Clive Street resulted in the arrest of Hanuman Prasad Poddar and Jwala Prasad Kanodia.

The next day’s
Calcutta Samachar
reported the raids, but in a muted tone, expressing ignorance about the cause of the arrests. The highly editorialized news report said, ‘This incident has created a big wave among Marwaris of Burrabazar . . . It is not clear for what crime these young men have been taken away by police. Whatever it is this incident is new to Marwari world. We cannot think of anything these young men could have done. The entire Marwari society is surprised. We expect government to take a well-considered decision.’ The paper continued in a reverential tone: ‘We do not for a moment doubt the justice of government, but at the same time we cannot give up our well- established notions about the innocence of our young men. We hope that the Bengal government will, at an early date, consider the case of the young Marwaris who have been arrested, and do justice to them.’
¹⁷

Two days later,
Calcutta Samachar
, either unaware of the facts about the arrests or withholding these from its readers, was still lamenting: ‘Who would not be surprised to find jowar grow in a farm that has never seen that crop? There is not a single case of sedition by Marwaris who are the original inhabitants of the land of Rajputs.’
¹⁸

Calcutta Samachar
was not alone. Other newspapers too expressed bewilderment at the arrests and speculated about the reasons. These varied from the murder of a deputy superintendent of police Basanta Kumar Chatterji (
The Englishman
) to the killing of police officers in Calcutta and constables in Mymensingh (
Sanjivani
).
Hitavadi
said the arrests had caused ‘great public surprise’, while
Marwari
, like
Calcutta
Samachar
, emphasized the apolitical nature of the community, how they had been extremely loyal to the government and had never been found to be implicated in any crimes, let alone political ones.

Burrabazar was rife with rumours.
¹⁹
One was that the arrests had been made to extort money from the Marwaris. It was said that the son- in-law of a rich Marwari had been arrested and that the government would release him if Rs 30 lakh were paid, which would be transferred to the war fund.

The raids of 21 July led to the recovery of thirty-one pistols, and soon it was revealed that the arrests related to the Rodda Arms Robbery case of 1914. The Sedition Committee of 1918 headed by Justice Rowlatt described this as an ‘event of the greatest importance in the development of revolutionary crime in Bengal’.
²⁰

Calcutta-based R.B. Rodda & Company was one of the largest firms importing firearms and ammunition. On 26 August 1914, company clerk Sirish Chandra Mitra had collected a consignment of 202 boxes from the customs clearance office. He came to the company’s godown with only 192 and left saying he would return with the rest, but never did. The ten missing crates contained fifty Mauser pistols of .300 bore and 46,000 cartridges. Every pistol was numbered and these numbers existed in the records of Rodda & Company. The Sedition Committee report claimed that forty-four of these pistols had been immediately distributed among nine revolutionary groups and had been used in fifty-four cases of dacoity. ‘After August 1914, probably there was not a single revolutionary act in Bengal in which pistols of Rodda Company were not used. With great difficulty police managed to recover 31 of these pistols,’ the report said.
²¹

The Poddar Papers include a large number of documents related to the case, including those of the Bengal government’s political department and Poddar’s detailed 1955 interview to the Akhil Bharatvarshiya Marwari Sammelan that was involved in contributing to the large book project on the freedom struggle to be brought out by the Government of India. In the interview, Poddar denied that G.D. Birla had anything to do with the Rodda Conspiracy, saying that memory failed him about the whereabouts of G.D. Birla on the day of the police raid. Maybe he had been in Bombay or Ootacamund, Poddar said. Authoritative accounts of Birla’s life corroborate the claims of his innocence but state that he had been packed off by the family to Mukundgarh in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan.
²²

In the interview, as well as in various published accounts, Poddar revealed the inner world of Marwari youth and how a number of their social and literary organizations were actively involved in subversive activities and had close links with revolutionary leaders and groups that were active during the Swadeshi movement. G.D. Birla was integral to these groups, and Poddar, in his interview, while underlining that his memory could be failing him, said he himself had been a member of the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti. This fact is not corroborated elsewhere, and Medha Kudaisya refers to Poddar as a member of the Anushilan Samiti, who regularly funded and attended its meetings.
²³
Poddar’s own interviews and correspondence contain references to his close relationship with another member Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, a Marathi scholar proficient in Bengali, who wrote
Deshe
r Katha
, a best- seller on the Indian economy.
²⁴

The foremost society for Marwari youth was the Marwari Sahayak Samiti, with four subcommittees that worked secretly, dealing separately with national issues, social reform and revolutionary activities. The Marwari Samiti was modelled on the lines of the Anushilan Samiti where members had to take a vow to put the country before self and maintain secrecy at all costs. The meeting venues changed frequently—from Birla Garden in Liluah to the residence of Phoolchand Choudhury or the family garden of Nagarmal Modi. The majority of its members were Marwaris, some of whom would dominate Indian business later in colonial and post-colonial India. Among its members were Hanuman Prasad Poddar, Banarsidas Jhunjhunwala, Jwala Prasad Kanodia, Rameshwar Prasad Morarka, Ghanshyam Das Birla and many others. The entire list of members was not available to any one of them. Poddar himself admitted that there was a ‘huge difference between the public work and secret aspect of the society’.
²⁵

Throughout his life Hanuman Prasad Poddar maintained that his association with the Gita dated back to his revolutionary days. The Sahitya Sambandhini Samiti, another of the secret committees run by Marwari youth under the patronage of Jugal Kishore Birla, elder brother of Ghanshyam Das, had published
Tikawali Gita
, one of the earliest Hindi translations of the Gita by Baburao Vishnu Paradkar. What drew Poddar to it was its cover showing Bharatmata with the Gita in one hand and a sword in the other. The book had become an instant success, selling in the thousands and adding to the growing influence of religious revivalism on revolutionaries. In an article for
Kalyan
in 1938, Paradkar wrote of how
Tikawali Gita
was banned by the British for its influence on revolutionaries and the Sahitya Sambandhini Samiti was put under a close watch.
²⁶

With such an elaborate arrangement of secret societies and serious resolve to act, all the young Marwaris needed was a chance to showcase their valour. The Rodda Conspiracy proved to be their single moment under the revolutionary sun. In the aftermath of the arrests, the Marwari elders of Calcutta would regret the incident, viewing it as a grave act of digression from the path of business and loyalty to British rule.

There were slight variations in the Marwari accounts of the Rodda Conspiracy. New names cropped up as many of those who carried out the act—notably Hanuman Prasad Poddar and Prabhu Dayal Himmatsingka—were out to prove themselves as reluctant revolutionaries, or at least to minimize their role.

After the disappearance of the ten boxes along with clerk Sirish Chandra Mitra, the problem was finding a safe house for the arms and ammunition. The Poddar Papers state that Hanuman Prasad’s domestic help Sukhlal played a major role, as did Baburao Vishnu Paradkar.
²⁷
The boxes were spread across various locations in and around Burrabazar: Harrison Road, Nai Tola, Kannulal Lane, the gaddi (business establishment) of Banarsi Prasad Jhunjhunwala on Chitpur Road, two boxes to Omkarmal Saraf’s house at Sutapatti that eventually got transferred to Poddar’s gaddi on Clive Street. Some of the stuff were sent to Chandernagore. Himmatsingka, then a student of law and actively involved with revolutionaries, helped transfer two boxes to Poddar’s business establishment from Saraf’s. A cache of ammunition was kept in G.D. Birla’s house as well for some time.

Poddar said in an interview that his shop was searched immediately after the incident but no action was taken due to his father-in-law’s contacts in the police. He also disputed the version that a few pistols had been recovered from his shop. ‘All the pistols were given away to Bengalis (revolutionaries),’ he stated. The residence of Sirish Chandra Mitra, already under surveillance for his alleged involvement in the murder of two British men, was also searched but nothing could be found. In fact, Mitra’s role in the Rodda case could never be established. He went underground.

The police laid a trap to identify those behind the Rodda Arms Conspiracy. Phoolchand Choudhury was approached by a CID inspector with the information that a Bengali revolutionary had named him, Birla, Himmatsingka, Poddar, Kanodia and Saraf as ringleaders. He is said to have been asked by the inspector for a bribe of Rs 10,000 to bury the investigation. The group discussed the inspector’s proposal and decided to report him to his superiors. Choudhury, a government employee, reported the matter to his boss, an Englishman and the brother-in-law of Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart. The commissioner acted swiftly and dismissed the corrupt inspector. After due diligence, Tegart was convinced of the involvement of Choudhury and the others, and arrest warrants were issued under Section 120 of the Indian Penal Code. Himmatsingka was the first to be arrested and externed for two years from Bengal in March 1916 under the stringent Defence of India Act. A few months later, all the others, except Birla, were arrested.

Poddar and his friends were kept for a fortnight in Dullanda House, a former mental asylum.
²⁸
They first refused to eat the pitiable jail food. Jhavarmal Sharma, the editor of
Calcutta Samachar
, stepped in to organize home-cooked food for the Marwari revolutionaries. Saraf was the first to be let off on 3 August 1916 for lack of evidence.

Various explanations have been suggested for Birla’s absence on the day of the raid and the subsequent deletion of his name from police records—ranging from a prior tip-off to his growing clout in business world of Calcutta that helped the family deploy the best resources. Poddar’s private papers claim that Baijnath Kedia, an important member of the Marwari Sahayak Samiti, was sent to meet Birla in Bombay to apprise him of the developments, while Hindu Mahasabha leader Ashutosh Lahiry’s version is that the Birla family had to spend Rs 1 lakh to escape the police dragnet.
²⁹
Another version is that the family approached Sir Kailash Chandra Bose, who was close to the British establishment in Calcutta and was a friend to Marwaris. Bose is believed to have stood surety for G.D. Birla with the Lal Bazar police, and Tegart too helped the family in good measure, forging a long-term relationship that led to his heading Birla’s London-end of business after retirement.
³⁰

After a fortnight in Dullanda House, Poddar, Choudhury and Kanodia were sent to Alipur Jail. Poddar said they were not tortured there, but Choudhury was sent to his native Punjab where he suffered at the hands of the local police. Their arrest under the Defence of India Act allowed the British government to keep them in jail without trial. By an order of 21 August 1916, Poddar was interned in Simlapal, a nondescript village 38 kilometres from Bankura town.