Revealed: how the British police kept tabs on Tagore

The documents cover the period between 1901-30. They show the Intelligence Branch kept an eye on Tagore’s guests in Shantiniketan. ‘‘Tagore was visited by Kalimohan Ghosh, who organised a group that sang swadeshi songs. This man was suspect in the eyes of the police. Also, there are at least 25 songs written by Gurudev during this period, which were shortlisted by the British as dangerous and inflammatory,’’ says Basudeb Chattopadhyay, director, West Bengal State Archives.

In 1905, the viceroy of India, George Curzon, divided Bengal into a Muslim-majority east and a Hindu-dominated west. This was the genesis, some have argued, of the two-nation theory. Prominent Indians protested, Muslims and Hindus tying rakhis on each other. ‘‘The documents reveal,’’ Chattopadhyay says, ‘‘that when Tagore was conducting the rakhi meetings at the Town Hall in Calcutta, the police was keeping watch.’’

The documents may also help historians look at Lord Curzon in a new light. Often cited as the villain of 1905, Curzon, a man who once spoke of the ‘‘sacredness of India’’ and was very alive to its heritage, comes across in the IB records as a fair-minded administrator.

‘‘Lord Curzon believed the Empire should stay in the interest of the people of India. So when he heard that the 9th Lancer regiment had committed atrocities on an Indian cook, he went out of his way to get a thorough inquiry done,’’ says Chattopadhyay, referring to the papers.

Writer Nityapriya Ghosh, who has just released a centenary volume, Partition of Bengal: Significant Signposts, agrees. ‘‘We all tend to villainise Curzon,’’ he says, ‘‘but some of his writings during that period proves otherwise. The average man on the street, interested in the history of the period, should have access to these documents.’’

The IB records also show how the Swadeshi Movement, initially confined to Calcutta (now Kolkata), slowly spread to smaller towns and villages — through popular literature, handbills, posters, pamphlets, folk theatre (jatra).

‘‘The IB has given us a huge collection of proscribed literature from those years,’’ points out Chattopadhyay, ‘‘it has also given us a methodical, district-wise list of potential agitators, ‘agent provocateurs’ and their history sheets. If history books say poor Muslim vendors were opposing swadeshi, our documents prove that small Hindu traders didn’t want to give up white sugar for brown (jaggery) sugar in Kishoregunje, Mymensingh.’’

At the IB itself, officials say the ‘‘documentary evidence’’ surrounding the Bengal Partition deserves to be in the public domain. ‘‘This is very important,’’ says Sandhi Mukherjee, IG (IB), ‘‘since this is also the centenary year of the Bengal Partition.’’