Vivek Agnihotri’s Bengal Files: Who was Gopal ‘Paantha’ Mukherjee, and what did he do on Direct Action Day?

Between 5,000 and 10,000 people are believed to have been murdered and some 15,000 wounded in the “Great Calcutta Killing”, which witnessed perhaps the worst single episode of Hindu-Muslim violence that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent.

The Great Calcutta Killing was followed by bloody riots in Bombay, Noakhali (in today’s Bangladesh), Bihar, Garhmukteshwar, and several places in Punjab over the next few months.

Gopal Mukherjee, known by the moniker Gopal ‘Paantha’ (or Gopal Patha) because his family owned a mutton shop in central Kolkata’s College Street (paantha is goat in Bangla), was a leader of one of the major street gangs that were active during the Direct Action Day violence in the city.

Gopal Mukherjee and his group, supposedly comprising more than 800 young men, took it upon themselves to protect Hindus in their area from gangs of Muslim rioters.

“We have no problem with a film being made on Gopal Mukherjee. But the vulgar way in which he has been depicted is very offensive… The director did not consult us even once while making the film,” Shantanu Mukherjee told The Indian Express.

In the official trailer of the film that is now available on YouTube, an actor in a beard and wearing long hair piled on top of his head apparently in a manner preferred by Gopal Mukherjee, declares that India is a nation of Hindus, blames Gandhian non-violence for the “victory” of Jinnah, and is shown hacking frenziedly at people in the street with a sword.

What was the political situation in India and Bengal in 1946?

British Prime Minister Clement Atlee had announced the transfer of power in March 1946, although no date had been fixed. In May, the Cabinet Mission proposed a plan for an interim government, which both the Congress and Muslim League rejected.

The League had committed itself to accepting nothing short of Partition and the creation of Pakistan. Its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, proclaimed that there would now be “either a divided India or a destroyed India”.

In a public address, Jinnah declared that “One India is [now] an impossible realisation… It will inevitably mean that the Muslim will be transferred from the domination of the British to the caste Hindu rule… Freedom must mean freedom… Hundreds of millions of Muslims will never agree merely to a change of masters.” (cited by Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (2025))

On July 29, the League called on Muslims across India to observe August 16 as Direct Action Day, with strikes, hartals, and protests. But in Bengal, and Calcutta specifically, the situation went totally out of control.

A crowd assembled at the foot of the Ochterlony Monument (now known as the Shahid Minar) in Kolkata, to attend a meeting of the Muslim League on the Direct Action Day (16 August 1946). (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Bengal as a whole was Muslim-majority, but most of the 54% Muslim population of the province lived in areas that would become East Pakistan and subsequently, Bangladesh. The city of Calcutta was 73% Hindu. Muslims were concentrated in North Calcutta and in the Metiabruz area by the Ganga, and were mainly part of the city’s underclasses.

In the provincial elections of January 1946, the Bengal Provincial Muslim League, a provincial branch of the Muslim League, had emerged victorious, and H S Suhrawardy – a future Prime Minister of Pakistan and an early mentor of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Bangladesh – became prime minister (chief minister) of the province.

Almost all members of Suhrawardy’s cabinet belonged to the League. In his book, A History of the Bengali-speaking People (2001), historian Nitish Sengupta wrote that Suhrawardy’s cabinet without a single upper caste Hindu was a “strong message to them that the government was determined to rule Bengal without associating with the bhadralok class”.

“For them (upper-caste Bengali Hindus) this was a foretaste of what was likely to happen to them if the whole of Bengal went to Pakistan,” Sengupta wrote.

What happened on Direct Action Day in Calcutta?

Suhrawardy announced a public holiday in Bengal on August 16. The air in Calcutta was thick with apprehension and foreboding.

“The 16th began as an anxious day for everybody. No one knew what was going to happen. [The Muslim League Leader, Khwaja] Nazimuddin’s statement that the Muslims did not swear by non-violence did not lead us to anticipate that active preparations for looting etc. had been going on… No police men were visible anywhere, and even the traffic police had been withdrawn,” the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose wrote to his friend, the writer Krishna Kripalani, in Delhi. (Cited by the historian Ramachandra Guha in a 2014 column in The Telegraph, Calcutta)

There were reports of Hindus putting up barricades to stop anticipated Muslim processions, and of Muslim gangs forcing Hindu shopkeepers to down their shutters. “There was going to be a very big Muslim meeting at the Maidan (a vast open space in central Kolkata) at about 2, and Muslim crowds began to pour in from towards Cossippore [in North Calcutta] about 12. Every one noticed with some anxiety that the processionists carried lathis and brick bats in hand,” Nirmal Bose wrote in the letter cited by Guha.

The meeting, attended by an estimated 1,00,000 people, was addressed by Nazimuddin and Suhrawardy. What Suhrawardy told the crowd remains disputed — it is said that he announced he had taken steps to restrain the police, which was understood as an invitation to loot and murder — but his speech was followed by a massive outbreak of violence in the city.

Suhrawardy himself “spent a great deal of time in the Control Room in Lall Bazar [police headquarters], often attended by some of his supporters”, Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal Presidency, wrote to Viceroy Lord Wavell on August 22. (Cited in Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947 (1983)). His presence at headquarters presumably prevented the police from taking action against the rioters and killers, who ran amok across the city using knives, rods, firebombs, and pistols.

Through August 17 and 18, the violence intensified. It was only on August 19 that the military was called in. The chaos and bloodshed continued sporadically, and on August 21, Bengal was put under Viceroy’s rule.

Bose, the anthropologist quoted by Guha in his column, wrote that he saw “dozens of corpses lying about,… the air became foul, and vultures for a whole week littered the roofs of Calcutta, and feasted on the corpses until they could do no more”. The American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White covered the riots for Life magazine, and her pictures of vultures lining the roofs of homes as the rotting bodies of riot victims littered the streets below present some of the most shocking recollections of the violence.

For a long time, Calcutta remained divided between Muslim and Hindu zones with very little movement between them. Historians of Bengal believe that the Calcutta riots of 1946 were by far the most cataclysmic event leading to the partition of the province a year later.

And what role did Gopal Mukherjee play in the violence?

Much of the street violence during the Great Calcutta Killing was “a pogrom between two rival armies [of Muslim and Hindu and Sikh] of the Calcutta underworld”, Burrows wrote to Wavell in his official note mentioned above. “Murder”, Sarkar wrote in his book, “was the primary objective…, not – as often in earlier communal outbreaks – desecration of temples or mosques, rape, or attacks on the property of relatively privileged groups belonging to the opposite community”.

What is known of Mukherjee and his role in the violence comes primarily from a book on the “Calcutta underworld” published in 1996, and an audio interview that Mukherjee gave to Andrew Whitehead of the BBC in 1997.

According to The Goondas: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld by Jayanta K Ray and Suranjan Das, Mukherjee was born in 1916 – which would make him 30 years of age in 1946 – and lived in Malanga Lane in the Bowbazar area of central Kolkata. He was “5 feet 4 inches in height, wore long hair like ladies, sported a moustache and long beard”, Ray and Das wrote.

In his interview to Whitehead, Mukherjee, who spoke in Bangla and said he was 83 years of age, said that on August 16, 1946, he was sitting at his meat shop when he saw a party of Muslim League volunteers marching with sticks in their hands and raising slogans of ‘Lad ke lenge Pakistan’ (We will fight and snatch Pakistan). Soon afterward, Mukherjee said, there was news that a couple of milkmen had been slaughtered in Beleghata [in North Kolkata].

The news sparked riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mukherjee’s area, Bowbazar. He shut his shop and gathered some “boys” in order to protect the residents of the neighbourhood, Mukherjee told Whitehead.

As news of more attacks in the Chandni Chowk area [in Central Kolkata] came in, Mukherjee decided to go there, leaving his boys in charge at College Street. “There were two houses where a large number of Muslims resided. If the violence spread, there would be massacres, so I went to see what could be done,” Mukherjee said in the interview.

He then described scenes of looting and arson, of himself taking on rioters with a sword, and of brickbatting.

Mukherjee said that he had told some of his Muslim friends that they had been living as neighbours for years and should not be rioting. But when he failed to stop the violence, he decided to fight back.

“I realised we had to save the country. If the whole area went to Pakistan, there would be more torture and bloodshed,” he told Whitehead. He said that he instructed his boys to retaliate ferociously. “If you come to know of one murder, you should commit 10 murders, that was my order to my boys,” Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee said that he and his boys had used whatever weapons they could lay their hands on – knives, sticks, rods, and guns. They had been stocking up on some weapons over the last few years, he said. “I had two American pistols. We got some weapons during the 1942 movement. Then during the Second World War, the American army…were in Calcutta. If you gave them Rs 250 or a bottle of whisky, they would give you a pistol and a hundred cartridges. That way we secured all these weapons, and we used them during the troubles,” Whitehead wrote in an account of his conversation with Mukherjee, which was published in The Indian Express at the time.

In his interview to Whitehead, Mukherjee did not give a count of the number of people he or ‘his boys’ had killed during that period. But he claimed that he had ensured that his group attacked only the attackers, and not any ordinary Muslims on the roads. He also gave strict orders to his boys to not misbehave with Muslim women, Mukherjee told Whitehead.

Shantanu Mukherjee told The Indian Express that his grandfather “came from a revolutionary background and was inspired by the life and work of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He was part of the Atma Unnati Samiti (Self Development Association) which was one of the revolutionary nationalist groups in Bengal like Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar”.

Gopal Mukherjee, Shantanu Mukherjee said, “attacked only those members of the Muslim League who were spreading violence. He did not attack anyone from their families, women, children or the elderly… Had he not attacked the rioters from the Muslim League, this (Kolkata) would have been Bangladesh. The whole map of India would have been different.”

Asked by Whitehead during the interview if he felt proud of his actions in 1946, Gopal Mukherjee said: “It was not about pride. It was about duty. I believed that I had a duty to help people in distress.”

Was there any connection between Mukherjee and the Indian National Movement?

A year after the Great Calcutta Killing, Mahatma Gandhi visited Calcutta and appealed to people to surrender their arms. Mukherjee told Whitehead that several of the rioters surrendered their weapons, but he refused to meet Gandhi despite being called twice. He finally allowed himself to be persuaded by some local Congress leaders after he was called for a third time, but he still refused to surrender his weapons to Gandhi.

“I went there. I saw people coming and depositing weapons which were of no use to anyone – out-of-order pistols, that sort of thing,” Whitehead quoted Mukherjee as having told him.

“Then Gandhi’s secretary said to me: ‘Gopal, why don’t you surrender your arms to Gandhiji?’ I replied, ‘With these arms I saved the women of my area, I saved the people. I will not surrender them.’”

Whitehead wrote that Mukherjee had told him that he told the people around Gandhi: “Where was Gandhiji, I said, during the Great Calcutta Killing? Where was he then? Even if I’ve used a nail to kill someone, I won’t surrender even that nail.”

Shantanu Mukherjee said his grandfather had established a revolutionary organisation called Bharatiya Jatiya Bahini, and had participated in the Quit India Movement. “Due to some difference of opinion he had stopped working for the nationalist cause for a while after the Quit India Movement. His organisation resumed their activities in 1946,” he said.

Ray and Das wrote in their book that following the riots of 1946, Mukherjee and his associates were pushed into a life of crime and lawlessness. They received liberal financial help from prosperous Calcutta Hindus during the riots, and were hailed as saviours. After the situation returned to normal, however, they were ostracised and looked at with contempt.

“This probably induced Gopal Mukherjee and his followers to take recourse to organized ‘crime’ as a means of livelihood. Their involvement with ‘lawless acts’ now ranged from armed dacoities like the Sonarpur Dacoity case and the Guinea Mansion Dacoity case, to armed hold-ups, house burglaries, smuggling, petty snatching and thefts,” Ray and Das wrote.