Place · communal violence site · Bangladesh
Noakhali
The east Bengal district where organised killing, forced conversion and abduction followed Direct Action Day in October 1946, and where Gandhi spent four months from November walking barefoot village to village with a small party, staying in one house at a time.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.830, 91.100
Worth knowing
He was seventy-seven. Mountbatten later called him a one-man boundary force for what he did in Bengal, and Bengal's 1947 casualties were a fraction of Punjab's. It is the last and least discussed of his campaigns.
Connections (2)
- PrecursorDirect Action Day, Calcutta
Direct Action Day in Calcutta in August 1946 was followed within weeks by Noakhali in east Bengal, then by reprisals in Bihar, then by Garhmukteshwar, and finally by Punjab the following summer. The sequence is what turned partition from one option in a constitutional negotiation into an outcome everyone in London and Delhi had begun to assume, and it is why the timetable was moved forward by nearly a year.
- Life routeMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Gandhi reached Noakhali in November 1946 and stayed four months, walking barefoot from village to village with a small party, staying one night in each house, holding prayer meetings where he read from the Quran as well as the Gita, and sending his companions to live singly in separate villages. He was seventy-seven. Mountbatten later called him a one-man boundary force, and Bengal's 1947 casualties were a fraction of Punjab's.
On these journeys
- Decolonisation, partition and integration
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
Sources
Wikipedia, “Noakhali riots”. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vols 86–87 (the Noakhali diaries); Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi.
Open Noakhali in the repository →