Surya Sen, a Chittagong Schoolteacher Known as Masterda, Led About 65 Raiders Against Two Armouries on 18 April 1930 and Kept the Fight Going Until His Arrest in 1933

At 10 on the night of 18 April 1930, about 65 members of the Chittagong branch of the Indian Republican Army attacked the police and Auxiliary Force armouries in Chittagong, disrupted the town’s telephone and telegraph links and the trains. Their leader, a schoolteacher named Surya Sen and known as Masterda, then stood outside the police armoury in a white khadi dhoti, took a military salute, raised the national flag and proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government. That is the account in Bipan Chandra and his co-authors’ India’s Struggle for Independence. Chittagong is now Chattogram, in Bangladesh.

The raiders did not find the ammunition they needed, and Sen was hanged on 12 January 1934. Several accounts of the episode survive. Kalpana Dutt, who joined the group and was later tried with Sen, wrote a set of reminiscences. The historians Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, K. N. Panikkar and Sucheta Mahajan summarise it in their survey of the freedom struggle. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia of Bangladesh, has an entry on Sen, and the journalist Manini Chatterjee drew on police records and interviews with raiders for her 1999 book Do and Die. This article follows those accounts and says where they differ.

A national-school teacher and a plan for open armed conflict

Banglapedia gives Sen’s birthplace as Noapara village in Raozan, Chittagong, and The Business Standard of Bangladesh reports the same on his 131st birth anniversary, 22 March 2024. He taught at a national school, one of the institutions set up during the Non-Cooperation Movement as an alternative to government schools. Masterda joins “master” to “da”, a Bengali suffix for an elder brother, as The Daily Star explains.

Sen took an active part in Non-Cooperation, was imprisoned from 1926 to 1928 for revolutionary activity and kept working in the Congress, the historians record. In 1929 he was secretary of the Chittagong District Congress Committee, and five of his associates sat on it. Banglapedia describes him as the leader of the Chittagong branch of the Jugantar party. Sen, Ananta Singh, Ganesh Ghosh and others came home in 1928 after release from detention under the Bengal Ordinance, Dutt writes.

The group’s reasoning is set out in Dutt’s introduction. The older method of killing a few officials had not dislodged the British, and the young men of Chittagong wanted to show that open armed conflict was possible without help from a foreign power. Their plan was to raid the government armouries, cut communications so that reinforcements could not arrive, and attack the European club. By her account they expected to hold the town for about a week and then to fight to the death if troops came. Chandra and his co-authors put the aim the same way, as a rebellion “on however small a scale” to show the British could be challenged.

Sen named the group after the Irish Republican Army, Dutt says, and Dan Breen, whose memoir of the Irish fight she read several times while in hiding with Sen, was his ideal. Penguin’s description of Do and Die likewise ties the plan to the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. She puts the cost at 15,000 rupees, raised from the recruits and their families, and says robberies were ruled out for this raid.

The raid came 12 days after Gandhi lifted salt at Dandi, which our article on the salt tax describes, and just over a year after Bhagat Singh’s bombs in the Assembly, covered in our account of the aftermath. Chandra and his co-authors contrast the Chittagong plan with Bhagat Singh’s. It was a group action aimed at the organs of the colonial state rather than the killing of one official, though its purpose was still to set an example and to demoralise the bureaucracy.

Ten o’clock on Good Friday

According to the historians, a group of six led by Ganesh Ghosh took the police armoury and a group of ten led by Lokenath Bal took the Auxiliary Force armoury, with its Lewis guns and .303 rifles. Ammunition could not be found, which the authors call a disastrous setback. Banglapedia names the leaders differently, giving Ananta Singh and Ganesh Ghosh the police armoury and Nirmal Sen and Lokenath Bal the Auxiliary Force armoury.

In Dutt’s telling, simultaneous attacks began at 10 pm on the telegraph office, the armoury and the police barracks, and rails were tampered with at Nangalkot and Dhum. Two leaflets were scattered through the town. One said that Gandhi had called on the country to break the law and that the raiders were breaking the law of treason. A second leaflet explained the raid’s purpose and was signed by the President of the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch, which was Sen.

Banglapedia’s entry notes that 18 April was Good Friday and that the senior Europeans were not at the club, and lists planned attacks on the telephone and telegraph building and on the railway links.

There was a cost that night. Dutt’s account says that Major Ferrol was killed at the armoury and two sentries lost their lives at the police barracks, and that the District Magistrate was fired on and missed. He reached the jetty, sent word by wireless and gathered the arms stored there. A counter-attack came from the hill with the waterworks opposite the armoury, and by Dutt’s account the raiders drove it back. Before leaving they poured petrol on the armoury to burn what they could not carry. One of them, Himangsu Sen, caught fire and was taken into the town, where he died in hiding three days later.

In the historians’ account the groups gathered outside the police armoury, where Sen, in white khadi, long coat and a stiffly ironed Gandhi cap, took the salute and proclaimed the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Unable to face the army that was expected, the group left the town before dawn and marched for the hills.

Jalalabad hill on 22 April

At about half past four on the afternoon of 22 April, Dutt writes, the group met reinforced troops on Jalalabad hill, the raiders on one hill and the troops on the opposite one. Chandra and his co-authors say several thousand troops surrounded them. A pitched battle went on until dusk, Dutt says, when the troops fell back. By her account eleven raiders fell in the first volley of machine-gun fire, and Ardhendu Dastidar, wounded and captured, died in police custody a few days later. Ambika Chakravarty was wounded and escaped, although a government communique had announced his death.

The morning after the battle the group decided on guerrilla war. Those ready for underground life and its dangers could stay, Dutt records, and the rest could go home.

Three years in the villages and the courts

The villagers, most of them Muslims, fed and sheltered the raiders for three years, the historians write, and the Chittagong group included Muslim members named Sattar, Mir Ahmad, Fakir Ahmad Mian and Tunu Mian. They also record the official response: the government armed itself with 20 repressive laws, burned some villages in Chittagong and fined others.

A clash at Kalarpole on 6 May 1930, in Dutt’s account, left four raiders dead and two wounded and taken prisoner. The House of Lords heard on 7 May 1930 a Bengal report dated 6 May, which said of Chittagong only that four raiders had been killed, three captured and six revolvers recovered. The report does not name the place; its date and its four dead agree with Dutt, and the number captured differs.

Ananta Singh gave himself up in Calcutta on 28 June 1930, Dutt writes. Ganesh Ghosh, Ananda Gupta and Lokenath Bal were taken at Chandernagore on 1 September 1930. Thirty prisoners faced a special tribunal on a charge of waging war against the King Emperor. Judgment came on 1 March 1932: by Dutt’s count, 16 were acquitted but held under the Bengal Ordinance, and Ananta Singh and 12 others were transported for life. In the Commons on 8 February 1932 Sir Samuel Hoare, asked about progress under the special Bengal ordinances in tracing the absconders, said he could make no statement and that progress was bound to be slow.

Women took part in this phase. They sheltered fugitives, carried messages, kept arms and fought with guns, the historians write. On 24 September 1932, Dutt records, Pritilata Waddedar led an attack on the Pahartali European club and, on the way back, died by taking cyanide. A woman, Mrs Sullivan, was killed in the attack, and 13 people were wounded according to the official announcement Dutt cites. Her own arrest came in September 1932, and after two months on bail she went underground with Sen.

Gairala, the tribunal and the gallows

The historians give Sen’s arrest as 16 February 1933. Dutt, who was with him, describes it: they were walking to an appointment when they ran into a police cordon at the village of Gairala, there were about two hours of fighting, Gurkha troops caught Sen by the waist and she never saw him again. She names the informer as Netra Sen and says that revolutionaries killed him on 2 January 1934. Some later retellings call Netra Sen a relative, which Dutt does not say. According to Banglapedia, a villager gave away the hiding place. In the months before, everyone urged Sen to leave Chittagong, Dutt adds, and he refused, saying the point of the underground work was to build an organisation in the district.

In May 1933 Dutt was captured with Tarakeswar Dastidar. All three were tried together in what she calls the Armoury Raid Second Supplementary Case. Sen and Dastidar were sentenced to death on 14 August 1933, a date Banglapedia gives as well, and Dutt received transportation for life. Chandra and his co-authors say Sen was hanged on 12 January 1934, and Banglapedia puts the hanging in Chittagong Jail with Dastidar. Dutt gives 12 January in her introduction and 13 January in the chapter on Sen, where she repeats what prisoners told her later: that it happened at midnight, and that his relatives were not given his body.

Where the accounts differ

The number of raiders is 65 in Chandra and his co-authors and in The Daily Star’s 2003 article. Casualties at Jalalabad vary. Chandra and his co-authors say more than 80 troops and 12 raiders died. In Dutt’s account 11 raiders fell in the first volley, and no firm figures for the government side were available, though rumour said 150 soldiers and Sir Charles Tegart told captured raiders “You have killed 64 of our men” in her telling. Banglapedia puts the raiders’ dead on 22 April at 14. No official British figure appears in the sources I opened.

The arrest is told differently too. Banglapedia says a Gurkha contingent seized Sen together with Kalpana Dutt and three others in the early hours of 16 February 1933. Writing as the person concerned, Dutt says she slipped into a pond and escaped, and was caught three months later. This article follows her.

A preface by P. C. Joshi in Dutt’s reminiscences calls the Communist Party the heir of the Chittagong tradition and says she would stand as its candidate in the coming provincial elections. That does not make her facts wrong, but it is why her figures are set beside Chandra’s and Banglapedia’s here.

What the raid changed, and how Chittagong remembers it

An official publication quoted by the historians said the raid “fired the imagination” of revolutionary-minded youth and that recruits poured into the groups. A report of the Civil Disobedience Enquiry Committee, quoted by The Daily Star, said much the same and added that the recruits included women and girls. Revolutionary activity revived sharply in 1930 and carried into 1931 and 1932, Chandra and his co-authors write, and in three years 22 officials and 20 non-officials were killed. Their pages also record the response: Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed in 1933 for a Calcutta speech in which he praised revolutionary youth and criticised terrorism as futile.

In Bangladesh, Sen is remembered with a hall at the University of Dhaka. It was completed in 1966 as Muhammad Ali Jinnah Hall, and students approved the name Masterda Surja Sen Hall in March 1971 and the syndicate in June 1972, the university says. There is a mural of him at the hall. On the 85th anniversary of the hanging, 12 January 2019, wreaths were laid at his statue at the Masterda Surya Sen Memorial Library in Raozan and at the sculpture at JM Sen Hall in Chattogram, The Daily Star reported. On 22 March 2024, his 131st birth anniversary, tributes were offered at the statue at JM Sen Hall, according to The Business Standard of Bangladesh.

In India the story reached a wide audience through Chatterjee’s book, which Penguin published in 1999, and through the Hindi film Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey. Ashutosh Gowariker’s film is based on the book, Business Standard reports, with the screenplay credited by Variety to Vijay Maurya, Raoul V. Randolf and Gowariker. Variety records its wide release on 3 December 2010.