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A year before colonial rule in the subcontinent ended, Calcutta (now Kolkata) witnessed a bloodbath which claimed thousands of lives. The ‘Great Calcutta Killings’, which went on from August 16 to 19, were the single most violent massacre in the lead-up to Independence and Partition. Here is a brief history.
By August 1946, relations between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress had frayed beyond repair. After the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 1946, which had proposed a loose federal structure for post-colonial India, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had called for ‘direct action’ on August 16.
“On that day, meetings would be held all over the country to explain the League’s resolution [for a separate Muslim state],” H V Hodson, at the time an adviser to Viceroy Wavell, wrote in his book The Great Divide: Britain, India, Pakistan (1969). “These meetings and processions passed off… without more than commonplace and limited disturbances, with one vast and tragic exception,” he wrote.
The political context of Bengal, and more specifically Calcutta, facilitated the violence in the city.
Muslims represented a majority in Bengal (54 per cent of the population compared to 44 per cent Hindus, according to the census of 1941) but were largely concentrated in the countryside in eastern Bengal (what is today Bangladesh). Calcutta itself was predominantly Hindu (73 per cent vs 23 per cent), with Muslims occupying a peripheral position — socially, economically, and even geographically — in the city. The relations between the two communities had been tense since the turn of the 20th century, with periodic instances of communal violence breaking out in Bengal, including in Calcutta.
Huseyn Suhrawardy, the foremost leader of Bengali Muslims and somewhat of a rival to Jinnah in the League, was the Chief Minister of Bengal in 1946. He was a revered figure among Muslims, but much much reviled by Hindus who held him partially responsible for the Bengal famine of 1943 which killed an estimated three million people (he was the Minister for Civil Supply at the time). Suhrawardy was also notorious for his off-the-cuff inflammatory statements.
Many historians believe that Suhrawardy’s actions and attitudes were primarily responsible for things taking a violent turn in Calcutta on August 16. Two main points are emphasised to support this claim.
First, in the leadup to the violence, Suhrawardy gave a number of speeches which seemingly indicate his tacit, if not active, support to any violence. On August 16, in a massive public gathering in Maidan in the week leading up to the massacre, Suhrawardy reportedly said that he had taken measures to “restrain” the police on Direct Action Day. This, his critics say, was effectively an open invitation to the masses to go on a rampage.
Second, once the violence erupted, Suhrawardy indeed “restrained” the forces. Suhrawardy himself stayed inside the Police Control Room, and according to eyewitnesses, prevented the Police Commissioner from acting independently. A British officer based at Fort William at the time of the riots wrote: “… my own private opinion is that he fully anticipated what was going to happen, and allowed it to work itself up, and probably organised the disturbance with his goonda gangs…” (based on a document accessed from the UK Archives).
Historian Joya Chatterji wrote: “In part [the violence] was the outcome of the growing arrogance of the leadership and rank and file of the Muslim League, heady with their success in the recent elections and confident of their ability to get for Bengal some form or other of Pakistan; and in part it flowed from the determination of Hindus to resist what they regarded as ‘Muslim tyranny’. Suhrawardy himself bears much of the responsibility for this blood-letting since he issued an open challenge to the Hindus and was grossly negligent (deliberately or otherwise) in his failure to quell the rioting once it had broken out” (Bengal Divided: Hindu communalism and partition, 1932-1947, 1994).
While exact numbers are not available, scholarly estimates put the number of dead in the Calcutta riots at 5,000-10,000. Some 15,000 people were wounded.
Historian Markovits Claude, in ‘The Calcutta Riots of 1946, Mass Violence & Resistance’ (2007), pointed out that the savagery of the violence was remarkable. “Not only were victims brutally killed, they were also grotesquely mutilated. This kind of grisly ‘ritual’ was very much part of the repertoire of communal killings in India; what was new in Calcutta was the sheer scale of the phenomenon”.
He also points out that the event also saw the deployment of rape as a political tool, which till then, had not been too common in communal riots in India. “Most accounts mentioned cases of rape, which were not part of the usual gamut of communal riots in India, but were to figure prominently in accounts of communal violence around the time of Partition”.
In retrospect, the Great Calcutta Killings became a sad harbinger of horrors still to come.
