Place · armed raid site · Bangladesh
Chittagong armoury
The Bengal port where on 18 April 1930 Surya Sen's Indian Republican Army seized the police and auxiliary armouries, cut the telegraph and the rail line, and declared a provisional government — holding out for four days before a battle on Jalalabad hill.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.335, 91.835
Worth knowing
Two of the participants, Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta, are the best known women in the Indian armed movement; Waddedar led an attack on a European club in 1932 and took cyanide rather than be captured. Surya Sen was hanged in 1934.
Connections (3)
- CampaignCellular Jail, Andaman Islands
Transportation to the Andamans was the standard sentence for the Bengal revolutionary groups, and the survivors of Chittagong went there along with men from the Alipore, Kakori and Lahore cases. The jail's function was distance: a cellular plan a thousand miles out to sea, where a prisoner could be worked on an oil mill in solitary confinement and no newspaper would hear of it. Hunger strikes in 1933 and 1937 and the publicity they got finally emptied it.
- AnalogueBhikaiji Cama
The Chittagong group and the Paris circle are the two ends of the Bengal revolutionary movement — the propaganda run from exile where the censor could not reach, and the armed action at home. Chittagong's participants included Pritilata Waddedar, who led an attack on a European club and took cyanide rather than be captured, and Kalpana Datta, who stood trial with Surya Sen. Both ends were destroyed by the mid-1930s.
- CampaignSurya Sen
Surya Sen led the 18 April 1930 Chittagong Armoury Raid against the Chittagong Police Armoury and the Auxiliary Force Armoury — the attack that briefly declared the Provisional Government of the Indian Republic. The subsequent April 1930-March 1933 Chittagong insurgency under Sen's Indian Republican Army involved over 1,500 captured weapons and over 100 revolutionaries. Sen was hanged at Chittagong Jail on 12 January 1934 after being captured through betrayal.
On these journeys
- The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
- The armed movement and the exiles
- Bengal before partition — the delta as one landscape
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chittagong armoury raid”. Manini Chatterjee, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–34 (1999); Bengal government Home Political files.
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