The Struggle For Independence
We’ll leave to scholars of history the task of writing the long and complex story of the struggle for independence of India with its ups and downs – complex, because of its interconnections with the industrial and political developments in Europe, where two devastating wars were fought. The world saw the colonies escaping the claws of the British and other “empires”, and, the emergence of two super powers trying to conquer zones of influence and markets on the planet – through the same violence but with far superior technologies.
Our interest here is to recall some events that were happening in India in the 1930s by way of flashing on the atmosphere in which people were living in a city like Calcutta in Bengal. Our Baba was among them as a young man in his 20s, with his curiosity and his receptivity, and feelings for his country and its people.
The massacre of Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar was in 1919 : on order of a British general police had opened fire on a peaceful crowd of some thousand citizens gathered on the occasion of new year in April. However its memory had not faded. Horrified by that criminal act, Rabindranath Tagore got rid of the title of Knighthood in protest. Similar atrocities were being committed by the British in Ireland in those years, and the Irish resistance inspired our revolutionary freedom-fighters to take to arms.
In the 30s Mahatma Gandhi had launched active civil disobedience ; hundreds of Indians were demonstrating against the govt. in the country, being arrested, beaten and shot at by police and military forces. In April 1931 Gandhiji marched to the coast by Dandi in Gujarat and made salt to defy the law. The group was brutally beaten up and the survivors thrown in the jails.
The printed media were not silent. Daily papers like Amrita Bazar Patrika in English, Ananda Bazar Patrika and Jugantar in Bengali voiced the call for total independence to bring the British to quit India. Aurobindo Ghosh was writing in Bande Mataram (founded by Bipin Chandra Pal), at the same time he was secretly organizing a group of young patriots, training them for armed actions against the British.
Revolutionaries in Calcutta made bomb attacks targeting police commissioner Tegart and other officers in Dhaka. One of the officers being a Muslim, communal riots broke out in Dhaka, where the Hindu population was duly massacred while police forces stood looking on.
On 18 April a group led by Surja Sen, a radical revolutionary, raided the govt,’s armoury in Chittagong. Needless to say, the govt. retaliated fiercely by massive arrests and executions. Many were deported to the Andaman Islands, deprived of all rights and tortured. Few could escape and went into hiding.
In September 1931 as young prisoners in the Hijli jail in Medinipur were killed by the guards, Rabindranath Tagore addressed a huge meeting in the Maidan in Calcutta condemning the administration.
I take it for probable, that our Baba was also amidst that audience of about 100,000 people attending the meeting.
In Peshawar demonstrators were bombed upon by the military. In Bombay and Sholapur textile-workers’ strikes were repressed with extreme violence.
Gandhiji’s negotiations with viceroy Irwin, in which he had agreed to suspend the disobedience movement to obtain concessions like the liberation of prisoners had miserably failed, as the country received the shock of the execution of brave patriots, Bhagat Singh, Shukdeo, and Rajguru in Lahore jail in March 1931.
Hindu and Muslim fanatics rioted and killed in the cities of U.P. – in Kanpur and Benares among others.
In the same years Rabindranath Tagore realized his project of rural development in Sriniketan besides a new concept of education opening the minds of the youth to the values of truth and beauty. His songs were with young and old, they were sung in the courtroom in Alipur by the revolutionaries receiving the death-sentence. The period saw other song composers like Nazrul Islam, Rajanikanta Sen, Atulprasad and others.
Eminent theatre directors and actors like Shishirkumar Bhaduri, Girishchandra Ghosh were producing their plays and stars like Sadhana Bose, Kanan devi, Devika Rani were rising.
I imagine that many Bengali families like ours migrating to different provinces of the country were carrying with them something of those ideas, melodies, and images as food for life and legacy for future generations.
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