The February Riots
(Calcutta, 11th to 14th February)

Sir Francis Tuker

Courtesy: While Memory Serves
(London: Cassell, 1950), pp. 99-110
 

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war.

Learning those lines at school in England I used to suppose that they were of' old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago '.

Today they are all too familiar, real and ghastly.

After these Calcutta riots¹ of which I am now to tell, the leading Calcutta newspaper came out with a condemnation of this exhibition of mob fury and referred to it as spoiling the fair name of Calcutta. Without being in the least cynical, it did seem to us at that time that the record of the previous month or two had only been the warning siren of fearful happenings yet to Come.  Within the agitation against the British we had seen the gnawing growth of communalism. We knew full well and for certain, and we said So at the time, that this growth was the one reality of the whole body- politic and that the anti-British symptom was artificial and only exhibited to sight by quack politicians in order to Cover the fatal disease hidden beneath. They knew it was there and they passed it by lightly, saying that with a change of air from that of Britain to the balmy vapours of India the patient would soon cast out such a trivial and only temporarily incommoding malady. They announced this from the housetops and from the hustings  whenever they found it convenient to issue a bulletin on the patient's health.

It had been a comparatively pleasant cold winter in Calcutta and by mid-February in this year the sun was only uncomfortably hot in the small hours of the afternoon. For Some days the Muslim League had been advertising its intention of holding a meeting to protest against the sentence of seven years R.I. passed on Abdul Rashid, formerly of the 1/14th Punjab Regiment and late of the I.N.A. He had been punished by Court martial for abetment to murder and for cruelty.

The Muslim case was that whereas this man had been given a fairly heavy punishment, others, Hindus of course, had escaped more lightly.

Against such discrimination the Muslim was in honour bound to protest. Despite the tension in Calcutta it appeared that the demonstration was likely to pass off quietly, for the Muslims were not in a mood just then to start a disturbance. But we did note that within the protest against the Government was the more stinging emotion against the other community.

And so, on the bright forenoon of the 11th February 1946 the sons of the Prophet began to collect in little bands making their peaceful way to Wellington Square at the centre of Calcutta city, to hold their meeting and to protest against an injustice. An appeal had been made to students of all communities to join in the protest. An appeal to the students of India which means a day off from their studies and a chance of prodding their own vanity by slinging mud at the constituted government, is certain to be answered with a fairly full muster. And so the most teeming and volcanic population was added to the crowd.

The meeting started in orderly fashion at 1 p.m.

At 3 p.m. five hundred of our youthful hotheads formed a procession and set out, catcalling and gesticulating, away from the meeting at Wellington Square just as it was breaking up, heading through some of the most crowded thoroughfares of commercial Calcutta towards the bottleneck of Howrah Bridge which crosses the Hooghli River. To reach their destination they would probably march through Dalhousie Square; and Dalhousie Square, in which all the government offices are situated, had always been a prohibited area for meetings and processions. This fact was well known to the students, and their action in taking this route was wilfully designed to provoke the police into opposing their progress.

The procession turned along Strand Road and then headed for Dalhousie Square. Our Military Police patrols, who had been observing the situation, and those of the U.S. Army, followed in jeeps, keeping contact with the procession and reporting back to their headquarters by radio. The civil police at once formed a cordon in front of the now excited procession to keep it out of the prohibited area. The riposte of the students was to squat on the road and pavements in front of the police, both with the object of wearing out the police and stopping all traffic so that the police would in turn be compelled to move them by force, and also in order to put the public to the greatest inconvenience possible. They hoped thereby to enrage the public, always ready to side against the police, until they too took up the cudgels on behalf of the squatters. This is a good example of what the Congress Party was pleased to call non-violent action; any impartial observer could see that it was wilfully designed towards compelling the authorities to take forceful measures. The non-violent elements could then go back, pose as martyrs and display themselves as heroes, and write in their diaries and in newspapers of the merciless and vicious beatings they had experienced and of the low form of life of all police, particularly the British an Anglo-Indian sergeants and inspectors compared with their own Innocent selves.

Sensing a scene and piling up against the road block of students, an excited crowd of about three thousand now started to gather close by near Charnock Place (pace Job, its founder).² Armed police with tear-gas hurried to the scene. As yet there had been no violence and the police had avoided using force but the atmosphere was unbearably tense and tragedy was in the air. The hot afternoon sun poured down on the angry scene, the sun that always ferments the emotions of India's people. The crowd was buzzing, a low heavy noise as of hornets. These headstrong boys now represented the cause of suffering Abdul Rashid, and the police the authority which had condemned him.

Showers of stones came flying from the crowd at the silent, motionless police.

The police at once sprang into action and delivered charge after charge with their brass-bound staves and within half an hour, before 5 p.m., the crowd was hurriedly dispersing. Soon afterwards the city was quiet and it seemed that the trouble was done with. But there was not the usual feeling of relief that comes after an explosion of this size. We felt, rather than knew, that emotions were tenser than ever.

Word of the police's forceful actions spread, and lurid rumours of all sorts and kinds were wafted like wildfire about the city. Sunset found it still peaceful and it seemed unlikely that night would bring trouble. We were mistaken.

The lights of the city twinkled up but the streets were silent and traffic was not running.  Rumours were having their effect. There was fear about, and fear in India means trouble. By 7 p.m. there were men, ragged and half-naked, their shoulder blades glistening as they slipped past the dim lamps of Calcutta's by-roads, walking swiftly towards the north and as swiftly the crowd was collecting, till at 8 p.m. it became apparent that we were in for a night of rioting. Two U .S. lorries were stopped, the occupants thrown out and the vehicles set alight. Calcutta goondas were coming into action.

Our radio patrols were pumping back news to Brigadier H. Gibbons, the Fortress Commander, at his headquarters in Fort William. Military Police jeeps streamed out of the gates of the Fort and out from Barrackpore in the north, to head off all Service traffic, British and U .S., from the storm centre.

Meanwhile the disturbances were spreading, crowds swarming down from the troubled north setting alight any vehicle they met. In a short time about a dozen or so cars and lorries were blazing and the mob was barricading the main arteries in the centre and north of the town. The police arrived and cleared Central Avenue with tear-smoke, now concentrating their forces towards the vital centre, and there at about 10.30 p.m. the constabulary were compelled to open fire in order to repel a big and now wildly riotous mob lest they themselves were overwhelmed and trampled under foot.

Luckily the south of the city remained quiet though deserted, enabling police and military to pass freely on their duties and the police to concentrate their forces farther north. Another mob attack soon developed, heaving and surging towards the same area of the town, directed this time on Hare Street Police Station itself. The men turned out at once and drove the rioters off with tear-gas and bullets.

Those Who saw these happenings had a queer sensation of something monstrous moving with barely human intelligence in the half-Iight of the narrow, canal-Iike streets. By midnight the crowds had melted to lick their wounds and to sleep. An hour later the streets were completely silent, the only signs of conflict being the dustbins and tar barrels which the rioters had used as road blocks and barricades. These were cleared.

The rest of the night passed serenely by.

I had been in Delhi for a conference and was flying back to my headquarters at Calcutta on the afternoon of the 11th. Whilst still in the air I learnt of the state of affairs in Calcutta and that my 'plane must land at Barrackpore near the river and not at Dum Dum which was then cut off from Calcutta by the crowds. In the late afternoon we circled Barrackpore and landed. I was met by an armed A.D.C. and escort and told of developments. Military traffic could not traverse the town to my headquarters at Tollygunge in the far south of the city. Accordingly, we drove off to the landing stage at the old Government House at Barrackpore where Alfsea H.Q. had been during the war. There we were met by a launch driven by a veteran major of the Inland Water Transport. And so, as a thief in the night with the dusk falling on the river and over the afflicted town, or as a Tudor prisoner bound for the Tower, I slipped down the Hooghli for Prinsep Ghat. My journey took nearly two hours. At Prinsep Ghat I landed and with an escort drove to Fort William, there to confer with the Area Commander about the city's eruptions ; thereafter, escorted by an armoured carrier, to my house at Tollygunge.

At 8 a.m. on the second day of tumult, the 12th February, crowds began once more to collect at the north end of Central Avenue. By 10 a.m. the rioters were at it again, but the police seemed to be likely to be able to settle the business in their own way. Calcutta had a considerable force of Gurkha armed police who usually came in and used their weapons whenever things were getting beyond the power of the ordinary constabulary .The Gurkha police were now much in evidence. In the northern part of the arena about Vivekananda Road, detachments of the crowd were presently stoning vehicles and burning them. The mob gradually swarmed in towards the centre of the town down Central Avenue, pelting buses and trams and forcing passengers to alight. Like scared partridges bus and tram ran to shelter at their depots and were soon off the roads altogether, the trouble-makers following them southwards into Bhowanipur using the same tactics.

By midday the whole place was rich with trouble, Europeans being molested wherever they were found in and about the business quarters. Virtually all the roads leading into the centre of the city were blocked by violent crowds and their barricades.

The soldiers were now turned out and brought on the spot in case they were needed, the York and Lancaster Regiment disposing strong piquets at nodal points in the north, east and south of the central focus of trouble, ready to prevent more of the population entering the scrimmage where police were engaging the mob. The roar of enraged and hysterical thousands overcame the dwindling clatter of the city's traffic.

However, the police were holding their own and preventing the crowd from uniting, thus the acts of violence were still sporadic and still isolated from the general vortex of disturbance. It still looked as though the mob would wear out their enthusiasm before the police wore out their own physical resistance. And so the tussle went on till after dark that night when the mob was to unite and police control to be lost. At that time we still, and rightly, placed great trust in the police to deal with these commotions and, although ready to intervene, we left them to their job as long as humanly possible. It was the right policy and by it we, civil and military, upheld the reputation of the police and maintained their confidence in themselves and their pride in their justly-earned reputation. In later days, with the whole edifice of administration crumbling, we stepped in far earlier to offer our help.

That night my next-door neighbour found his sweeper thrashing a small urchin of ten. The sweeper was beating his own son for throwing stones through Shop windows in the city, a feat for which a Hindu political tout was paying him a rupee a shot. Easily-earned money, thought the gamin. And So it was, but what of the sneak Who paid him? He got away scot free, as he intended. There was a lot of paid window-smashing by small boys during these turbulent days. Children were being used quite unscrupulously to further the ends of Congress agitators. That afternoon a procession of some thousands of school children marched in towards the maelstrom about Dalhousie Square, paraded shrilly bawling round that place, but was peacefully dispersed by the police. Open lorries with yelling schoolchildren, hired at a few annas each, were dashing around allover the town adding to the bedlam of their elders.

Bit by bit throughout the afternoon gangs were uniting and the police were being thrust back by sheer weight towards Wellington Square. Now they were using tear-smoke freely but by 4 p.m. both north and south Calcutta were out of their control, large crowds milling about, brickbats flying all over the place and goondas smashing windows and breaking in and looting shops.

Meanwhile a plump, small figure, Mr. H. S. Suhrawardy, later Chief Minister of Bengal, led a Muslim procession from Wellington Square to the prohibited Dalhousie Square where the police very sensibly let it pass. But that procession also became excited until finally it was quietly dispersed by its leader.

In the evening the police had a short-lived success, managing to open the southern arteries of the city to let through a U .S. convoy. But the mob soon closed them again and it was  apparent by dusk that they had for certain the upper hand of the police, working between the police cordon and the tear-smoke, heavily stoning the constabulary, bursting into shops and throwing their contents allover the road. At last the crowd got into Chowringhee, Calcutta's Oxford Street. They started to stone Europeans and to molest both male and female, and finally broke into one of the gunsmiths' shops but by some miracle forgot to loot the stock. Private residential houses were attacked and entered by force. Chaos now reigned all over the stricken area with the police tired out and fighting back in small parties, their co-ordination breaking down. Vehicles were burning in many places.

The government now asked for military help.

At 8 p.m. British infantry and tanks left Fort William, and the Green Howards drove in post haste from the north at Barrackpore, clearing the way as they went into the heart of the metropolis and to Fort William. Simultaneously the 4/3rd Gurkhas lorried in from the south and cleared Russa Road, the southern artery, arriving at Kalighat Post Office in the nick of time. The mob had assaulted the Post Office, throwing its contents in the road where they burnt them and then set to work to burn the building itself. The Gurkhas jumped from their lorries and charged straight into the mob which fled incontinently. However, before the Gurkhas could reach the tram depot at Kalighat the mob had burnt nine trams which were in the yard. Police and Gurkhas again arrived just in time to prevent them from destroying the depot itself and to get the fire brigade in to deal with the incipient blaze.

Rapidly the troops permeated the town, clearing roads, shooting where necessary as they went, and sweeping the rioters out into the suburbs, through the dust of the combat and the oily smoke of flaring lorries. By midnight the city was quiet and remained quiet throughout the hours of darkness. Many roads were still blocked by burnt and blazing vehicles, by barricades and by broken glass, refuse and brickbats littered on pavement and highway.

That night the York & Lancaster Regiment, the Green Howards, and the 4/3rd Gurkhas were combing out the city with the help of the police, while the 25th Gurkhas, who had just arrived by sea for despatch up country, were in reserve at the Transit Camp. A composite battalion of five companies made up from details in the Transit Camp had been formed ready to operate in the suburbs.

At dawn on the 13th the mobs returned to the counter-attack. The 4/3rd. Gurkhas found  themselves stretched beyond their limit to keep the Kalighat area quiet. The northern suburbs out towards Barrackpore now started to get out of  control, with the mill hands on strike and therefore idle and spoiling for trouble. The Composite battalion was sent in to deal with this, and the North Staffords, who had been standing by to move, were ordered in from Ranchi by road.

We contacted the Muslim and Congress leaders and they induced most of the strikers to return to work. The disturbance were, as usual, now in control of the goondas who were stopping and burning trams and buses and stealing the spare parts. The Gurkha armed police were in action all over the town, to be ostracised later on by all Indian communities for  quietened their areas of the rioting city with their rifles!

The arrival of troops was beginning to have a general effect whole area. Congress lorries were soon going round carrying loudspeakers urging the crowds to disperse, warning them that the military had taken over and were shooting.

From one cause and another disturbances were becoming more sporadic and isolated again, although a tense moment came about 1 p.m. when crowds started to converge again towards the centre of the town. There was much brickbatting, particularly from the housetops, and efforts were made, some successfuI, once more to barricade the roads. Troops and police came in from close by and dispersed the mob.

In afternoon the northern mill areas again blew up; trains were stopped by dense crowds massing on railway tracks and lying down in front of engines. Buildings at Naihati station were burnt along with coaches and trucks of a train standing at the platform and other acts of sabotage were perpetrated against trains at different places. The railways diverted their traffic round the danger spots.

By 6 p.m. the worst of the crowds had been broken up but they tended as ever to collect again after military and police patrols had passed. The echoes of frequent firing were heard from most parts of the city. Government had promulgated a ban all processions and assemblies.

A little later rioters broke into the Methodist church at Dharmatolla Street in the middle of the town, wrecked its contents, burnt the church and then attacked a girls' school which was only saved by the timely arrival of one of our patrols. A U.S. convoy coming in from the north was stoned and suffered nineteen casualties. Civil telephone exchanges were now no longer  functioning, So all traffic went over military and R.A.F. exchanges and police and military wireless nets.

Later in the night crowds in the north attacked the houses of Anglo-Indians.

By midnight, as on the two previous nights, stuffed to repletion with brawling and destruction, the city relapsed into silence.

During the 14th February the situation gradually improved, chiefly owing to the free use of firearms on that day and the day before. Outbreaks were confined to the suburbs. The North Staffords that evening drove into Barrackpore. With this reinforcement control was regained over the whole city during the 14th and Isth and by the 16th nearly all activities were back to normal.

Had it not been for our bitter-minded, hysterical friends, the university students, all this destruction and suffering would never have occurred. Nothing whatsoever had been gained by the rioting. If students had hoped to see Europeans beaten up they were disappointed, for only a meagre handful suffered from the mob. It is hardly surprising that the Bengali student makes such a poor impression on the mind of a foreigner.

The riots started as a defiance of constituted authority, of a nominally British government; they developed into mad fights between all and sundry accompanied by wholesale brigandage, arson, and devastation on the part of the Worst elements of Calcutta. The embitterment of feelings, the widespread resort to violence in these hostilities was to lead to something far worse in August of this same year. Dr. Banerjee, Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University , must look back with remorse to the 11th February when the conduct of the boys for whom he was responsible set a match to the fuse which detonated its charges with such fearful violence a few months later not only in Calcutta and Eastern Bengal, but far afield in Bihar and into the United Provinces at Garhmukteswar and finally into the Punjab.

These riots showed us that the efficiency of the Calcutta police was ever failing as they lost their British officers. They were not working at full capacity through these days; for one thing their intelligence system, so excellent in the past, was now neither so quick nor so reliable. We in the Army were always admirers of the Indian Police and believed that no other police force of its kind could have stood up for so many years with unimpaired efficiency to the storm of calumny and abuse that that force had had to endure. Any other force would have collapsed long before. In these pages henceforth will be noted the steady deterioration of the force through causes outside the control of its devoted European staff.

The Sikhs were much in evidence throughout the disturbances and even when things were  getting better it was the Sikhs, connected with the Communist party, who kept fanning the blaze in the outlying streets of south Calcutta.

We owed a great deal to the R.A.F. at Barrackpore and Dum Dum, who at once took control of the whole situation in the north of the city, and it was due to them that we managed to restore order so quickly when it broke out in their quarter after we had got the upper hand in other parts.

Much to my pleasure I learnt that Indian soldiers were now saying that it was high time we stopped dealing with civil disturbances solely with British and Gurkha troops and that it was their business as much as anyone else's, if not before anyone else, to come in and handle disturbances which threatened the maintenance of law and order. On hearing this I replaced one of the Gurkha battalions in Calcutta with an Indian battalion and from then onwards used Indian soldiers equally with all others to handle my troubles. Right well they did their job too, as we shall later see. Without their impartial and completely loyal help we could never have kept India going So that His Majesty's Government could in the fullness of time hand over control to its new rulers. The admiration of the British officer for the Indian soldier has always been great; it was immensely enhanced by the manner in which they fought in this last war, until by 15th August 1947 our respect for these men was unbounded. I suppose that some laymen would misunderstand me when I say that the fountain of the fine spirit and  incomparable behaviour of the Indian soldier in the terrible stress of all these months lay in the discipline which he had been taught. If the English civilian will misunderstand me then how much more will the Indian civilian, and how little likely is he to take a lesson for himself and for his own people from this simple statement? More than one Indian soldier had said to me of late that Hindustan's weakness lay in its lack of discipline and that it was the discipline imposed by the British, loose though it may have been, which kept the wheels of administration still turning and which prevented ill humour from changing at the smallest pretext into violent action. Self-discipline is better than an imposed discipline, but the latter is better than none at all, for through it in time may develop the former.

An amusing incident that took place during these riots was the arrival of some French officers in Spence's Hotel. They said, "Oh we was stopped by big crowd on Howrah Bridge. Zey say, "You shout 'Gin Hai' " so we shout "Gin Hai" (Jai Hind). Zey say, "Good fellows, now you can go on."

Notes: 

1. See Map No.2, p. 155.
    
2. Job Charnock, an English merchant, founded Calcutta in 1690 at a small village on the Hooghli River.

Home
Index of My Writings
Have you visited my other sites?
Kazi Nazrul Islam Page?
Genocide 1971 Page?
Hadith Humor Page?
Economics-Finance Page?