BOOK REVIEW
Title: CHITTAGONG Summer of 1930
Author: Manoshi
Bhattacharya
Publisher: Harper
Collins Publishers India, 2012
Chronicle of the Bomb and 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 NCR 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 is indeed sacked, but most of the
insurgents are 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 is
incidents and actions such as this, that finally saw the British “Quit India”
in 1947. We are presented with dollops of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose style
militancy, complemented by the back drop 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 Ms. 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.
In the Palestinian/Lebanese/Israeli context, long considered
to be one of the most dangerous flash points in the globe, probably followed by
the India/Pakistan/China theatre, it can be argued that the Hizbollah and Hamas
are imitators of the early Jewish bombings of hotels and massacres of villages
pre 1948.
So, when we see the tumultuous developments in Iran, Syria
(a key backer of the Hezbollah), in Egypt, in Yemen and elsewhere in the
restive area, we still don’t find Israel exactly vulnerable. The US backed military might of Israel is
considerable. It has substantial, if undeclared, nuclear weaponry and
formidable surveillance and armament building capacities. Iran may, as yet be
barking, but Israel can, if it wants, seriously bite.
Today, the Al Qaeda and their satellites and fellow
travellers, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, 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 Ms
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 North Eastern 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.
(805 words)
10th June
2012
Gautam Mukherjee
Published in The Sunday Pioneer AGENDA Section BOOKS Page on Sunday 17th June 2012 as "Bomb & Pistol Wallahs" and online at www.dailypioneer.com
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