Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  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.7

  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.8

  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.9

  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.10

  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.11

  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.12

>   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.13

  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.14

  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.15

  THE POLICE ESTABLISHED camps in rural Midnapore and began to hunt for fugitives and set fire to their homes. Rather than determining the innocence or guilt of certain individuals, the government imposed fines on entire Hindu communities for political subversion. Often, when they were raiding better-off Hindu households, the police encouraged poor Muslims from neighboring villages to come along with them and loot—with the apparent intent of stirring up communal hostilities. All over the country, criminals were being released from prison to make room for Quit India activists. According to Kumudini Dakua, many violent offenders returned to their former village homes and began to prey on the people and inform for the police.16

  Nature, too, began to prey on Bengal. One morning in October 1942 it started raining fiercely. Sushil Dhara, who had been lazing with friends under a flimsy open-air thatch, attempted to seek refuge at a nearby house. The wind lifted him and deposited him in a pond. He tried crawling along the path. Alternately flattened and knocked sideways by the gusts, he had ventured some ninety yards when “it was as if someone picked me up and smashed me” against a massive tamarind tree that had fallen earlier. Dhara clung to the trunk, dazed and shivering, until he gathered enough strength to sprint to safety. He could not return to fetch the others from under the thatch, who included an elderly couple who were not strong enough to brave the cyclone.

  At midnight the wind abated, and Dhara emerged with a lantern to find that his earlier shelter had been pounded into the ground. His companions were safe; they had submerged themselves in a ditch to evade the wind and had waded and swum to a neighbor’s house. But the banks of the Rupnarayan River had burst and the ocean had swept in. Salt water covered the entire landscape. The cyclone had destroyed virtually every tree and house on the horizon.

  THE DAY AFTER the Mohisadal palace guards shot up his cadre, Dhara had organized a retaliatory looting of one of the royal storehouses, five miles north of Kalikakundu. Chitto Samonto and his brother had each managed to carry off a sack of rice. From part of this stash their mother had made muri, or puffed rice, for the festival of the goddess Durga. During the storm, they stored the muri in a tin, placed Chitto’s six-day-old nephew inside a trunk (so that if water overwhelmed their two-story mud house, the boy would float away), and huddled with the baby on the attic floor. Chitto and his brother tied the beams with thick rope and took turns holding the roof down against the wind. “We had a knife to cut a hole in the straw thatch if the house collapsed,” Samonto recounted. “Then we would all climb onto the roof and float to safety.”

  The neighbors came over after their hut had collapsed. “So much screaming and wailing, it was awful. Someone was saying, ‘My cow was swept away’; someone else was saying, ‘Where is my mother-in-law, I couldn’t find her!’” All through the night they had tried to see how high the flood had reached. “You could tell it was sea water—it was glittering in the dark,” Samonto said. In the morning dead cows and uprooted trees floated by, as well as a wooden bridge; strangers had fought the brothers for it and taken it away. They had all eaten the muri and “caught a huge carp right there, off the porch.” After the ponds overflowed, the fish the villagers reared were enjoying a brief spell of unbounded freedom.

  A few days later the water receded—revealing a layer of sand that squashed the rice plants. The new crop, due to be harvested that winter, was gone. People began to loot, Samonto said: “Forty to sixty of them would go to a landowner’s house and demand rice.” The Samontos’ own plot was small, but the family also cultivated a large field belonging to the Mohisadal rajas, receiving a share of its yield. Still, the landowner’s minions took away all that could be salvaged. “We managed to sweep up some scattered grains and keep it for seed,” Samonto remembered. The rice from the looted storehouse lasted them another month.

  No more cereal was going to be available for upward of a year—until the next crop could be sown in the monsoon of 1943 and harvested at the end of that December. Everyone in Midnapore dates the famine from the day of the cyclone, October 16, 1942.

  ON THE NIGHT of the storm, villagers of coastal Midnapore had sheltered the wounded pilot of a small aircraft that had fallen near Sutahata, as well as soldiers whose encampments had been devastated by the cyclone. But the subdivisional officer in Tamluk, the most senior civil servant present, had refused to lift the town’s nighttime curfew so that refugees from the flood could seek shelter there, or to release government boats for rescuing people stranded on rooftops and in trees. In the following days, Midnapore’s district magistrate asserted that any cyclone relief should be “withheld from the disaffected villages until the people hand over the stolen guns and give an undertaking that they will take no further part in any subversive movement.” A British police officer protested that prompt government aid might win back an estranged populace. But the first relief workers to arrive, from a Calcutta-based private charity, were arrested and no other succor came for weeks—on orders, it seemed, from Sir John Herbert, the governor of Bengal.17

  In Calcutta, an army general summoned Ian Stephens, editor of the city’s leading newspaper, The Statesman, and asked him not to report on the devastation, in case the Japanese should guess that the coast was undefended. (The cyclone was scarcely a secret to the Japanese, who were repeatedly broadcasting that it had killed more than 100,000 in its first hour alone.) And the Bengal government reported to New Delhi that the calamity had left the “rebel spirit unbroken”—impl
ying that the task remained to be finished. Two weeks after the storm, a group of ministers from Calcutta arrived in Mohisadal to survey the damage and, from the palace rooftop, saw plumes of smoke rising in the distance. The police had been hunting for fugitives in Kalikakundu; having failed to find them, the keepers of the law had set their homes on fire.18

  At the time of the storm, Nirmala Kuila of Kalikakundu and her family were better off than most and had grain stored in two golas, she recalled. The rice had escaped the flood. But on October 30, 1942, a police team led by a feared superintendent named Nolini Raha had arrived in search of Kuila’s nephew. They had not found him, and had instead arrested her husband and brother-in-law. Wartime shortages of fuel allowed few villagers to light lanterns at night, but the police had kerosene, which they had sprayed onto the thatch and fired with flaming torches. They burned down all fourteen huts of the extended Kuila family—the entire hamlet of Kuilapara—along with all the rice.19

  At the time Kuila had an infant, less than six months old. With the men gone to prison, her sisters-in-law saved her and the baby by finding enough food to allow her to produce milk. They had continued to live in the charred remains of their hamlet, which was open to the sun and rain. “Where else will we stay?” she asked. “When there were storms, I would clasp my baby in my arms and cry.” Not until the politicians who toured Midnapore had returned to Calcutta and threatened to publicize the extent of cyclone damage did the government relent. Eighteen days after the event, on November 3, 1942, The Statesman briefly noted that a storm and tidal wave had killed an estimated 11,000 in Bengal. The unofficial count was 30,000. Most of the dead were from a coastal area of Midnapore known as Contai, southwest of Tamluk subdivision, which had borne the brunt of a twenty-foot storm surge.20