[werkeeque]

CHITTAGONG: Summer of 1930 is a novelised account of the Chittagong raid by Manoshi Bhattacharya.

The bomb & pistol wallahs

The author of this painstaking and novelised account of the Chittagong armoury raid of 1930, Manoshi Bhattacharya, is a former Indian Navy doctor who continues to practice in the National Capital Region. She chronicles, replete with a great deal of melodramatic Bengali idiomatic colour, the doings of a schoolmaster who led 65 of his students in an insurgency to sack the police armoury at Chittagong in 1930.


The idea of the ring leader Surjya Sen, or “Masterda”, was to inspire similar insurgencies elsewhere in British India with a view to hasten the end of the Raj. The armoury was indeed sacked, but most of the insurgents were tracked down over several years thereafter and either hanged or jailed by the British. And yet — and this is the point of this book — it was incidents and actions such as this that finally saw the British “Quit India” in 1947. We are presented with dollops of Subhas Chandra Bose-style militancy, complemented by the backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi’s difficult-to-fault nationalism, ahimsa and diplomacy.


And yet, to read such a book in today’s context is not a very comfortable experience. Terrorism is all too real and unpredictable in our lives today. The Palestinians, for example, cry themselves hoarse that the Jewish state was born out of the most blood-curdling terrorism against British administration. This does not stop the state of Israel from playing simultaneous bully and victim with lashings of the Holocaust to bolster its brio.


It is difficult to read Bhattacharya’s book as history in 2012, though it describes events that took place 80 years ago, when exactly the same justificatory coloration is being applied to the terrorism/freedom movement, depending on your perspective, to the protracted goings-on in Kashmir today.


Today, Al-Qaeda and its satellites and fellow travellers, such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba or the Taliban, are a menace to the entire Judeo-Christian-Hindu world, with their perpetual insistence on jihad and their chilling sophistication. Their blood-thirstiness, growing out of fundamentalist religious fervour, is considerable, and seeks to be received as legitimate grievance. It also extends, even-handedly, to all whom they consider apostate within the Islamic world itself.


But this Chittagong insurgency, described in Bhattacharya’s book, has more in common with a Biggles-like derring-do combined with a Hardy Boys innocence, than the calculation and fanaticism of a modern 21st century terrorist outfit, including the well-trained and outfitted Maoist insurgents.


Masterda and his pupils get the guns from the Chittagong Armoury alright, before indulging in some crackling arson, but not, alas, the bullets, which are stacked, cannily enough, elsewhere and out of harm’s way. And they also don’t get to kill any of the British Officers in town, rushing in on their lair on Good Friday, to find they’ve gone home early.


The prose in Chittagong is a little turgid, suffering from its attempts at fictionalisation. And after the horrors routinely perpetrated in recent times by the LTTE under the late Prabhakaran, the Maoists, the Northeastern insurgents, the ISI, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and so on, the thesis of the book seems to suffer from a degree of moral hazard. One finds oneself siding with the British, who stand-in for the Indian authorities in the mind’s eye. And I find myself hoping all the miscreants are rounded up and put out of their misery at the earliest.


Unfortunately, to further compound the disengagement, there is little or no characterisation of all the dramatis personae, and so no identification with them for the reader. They come on and off the stage as so many clones of each other, fuelled either by a lofty nationalism and frequent, if somewhat creepy bouts of “Anondo” or joy at perpetrating some minor damage.


The British in the book, too, are faceless caricatures, with their references to “natives” and their impenetrable stiff upper lip. Also, there is absolutely no love interest, or even a woman featured in this book full of would-be tragic heroes. Though there is much male camaraderie, hugging, and congratulatory back-slapping, this too is not the stuff of engaging historical fiction.