- Home
- The Chittagong Revolutionary Movement
Record 05 · The Movement
The Chittagong
revolutionary
movement
A schoolteacher, a district armoury and a proclaimed republic that lasted a few days — and an underground that lasted four years.
What this page is, and is not
This is a historical account of an armed political organisation. It is written to explain why it existed, how it was structured, what it did and what happened to its members.
It is not an adventure story, and it does not describe operational method. Where a historical event involved violence, this archive records that it occurred, who was affected and what followed — and stops there. The point of studying the Chittagong movement is not the mechanics of its actions but the political situation that made a few hundred schoolteachers and students conclude that armed action was the reasonable option.
Surya Sen and the shape of the group
Surya Sen — known to the movement as Masterda, from his work as a schoolteacher of mathematics — was the organiser and effective commander of the Chittagong group.
The organisation drew on the older Bengali revolutionary tradition of Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar but was locally built and locally led. Its recruits were overwhelmingly young: students, recent school-leavers, a few teachers. Several were still in their teens. It operated through cells, on the standard clandestine principle that no member should know more than their own work required.
What distinguished it was ambition. Where earlier revolutionary groups had planned individual assassinations, the Chittagong group planned something closer to an insurrection: the simultaneous seizure of a district’s armed capacity, the severing of its communications, and the public proclamation of a government.
For that it adopted a name that stated the claim plainly — the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch. The wording was borrowed from Ireland, and it was not accidental.
- Leader
- Surya Sen (1894–1934), schoolteacher, known as Masterda
- Name adopted
- Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch
- Recruitment
- Schools and colleges of Chittagong district; members largely aged 15–25
- Structure
- Cells, with compartmentalised knowledge
- Principal action
- The armoury raid of 18 April 1930
- Broken
- Surya Sen captured February 1933; executed 12 January 1934
18 April 1930: the armoury raid
On the night of 18 April 1930, groups of revolutionaries acted simultaneously across Chittagong. They seized the police armoury and the Auxiliary Force armoury, cut telegraph and telephone communication, and disrupted the railway.
Outside the police armoury Surya Sen, in uniform, took a salute, hoisted the national flag and proclaimed a provisional revolutionary government. For a short period the district was effectively out of colonial control.
The operation failed in its central practical aim. The raiders took the armouries but could not locate the ammunition, which left them holding weapons they could not use. Knowing that a British column would arrive, the group withdrew from the town into the hills.
On 22 April 1930 British forces attacked their position in the Jalalabad hills. About a dozen revolutionaries were killed. The survivors dispersed, and the organisation moved permanently underground.
1930 — the raid. Armouries seized, communications cut, a provisional government proclaimed.
1930 — the encounter at Jalalabad. About a dozen revolutionaries killed.
Casualty figures vary between accounts; the order of magnitude is not disputed.
The period the organisation survived underground after the raid, before its leadership was executed.
The years underground, 1930–1934
What followed the raid is, in some ways, the more remarkable part of the story. A wanted organisation with a well-known leadership stayed at liberty in a policed district for nearly four years.
That was possible only because of a support network: households that gave shelter, messengers who moved information, sympathisers inside ordinary institutions, and a population unwilling to inform. Colonial administration responded with collective punishment, punitive taxation of villages and mass detention.
It is in this period — 1931 and 1932 — that women entered the organisation in more than a supporting capacity. Kalpana Datta joined in 1931. Pritilata Waddedar joined in 1932. Both were Chittagong women studying in Calcutta; both came in through the student network rather than through family connections.
On 13 June 1932, British forces surrounded a house at Dhalghat where Surya Sen, Nirmal Sen and Pritilata Waddedar were present. Nirmal Sen and Apurba Sen were killed, along with Captain Cameron of the British force. Surya Sen and Pritilata escaped. After Dhalghat she could not return to her school.
Pahartali, and the end of the organisation
On the night of 23 September 1932, a party led by Pritilata Waddedar attacked the Pahartali European Club. She was wounded during the withdrawal and died. It was the last major action the organisation carried out.
The collapse came quickly afterwards. On 16 February 1933 Surya Sen was captured at a village where he had taken shelter, betrayed by an informer. He was tried and hanged on 12 January 1934, together with Tarakeswar Dastidar.
Kalpana Datta, who had been arrested in September 1932 during preparations for the Pahartali action and released on bail, returned underground and was captured in May 1933. Tried in a supplementary trial, she was sentenced to transportation for life. She was released in 1939 and later joined the Communist Party of India.
By 1934 the Chittagong branch of the Indian Republican Army had effectively ceased to exist. Its members were dead, imprisoned or dispersed.
-
Assessment · 01
Militarily, it failed
It never seized usable arms, never held territory beyond a few days, and was destroyed within four years. Judged as an insurrection, it did not work.
-
Assessment · 02
Politically, it registered
It demonstrated that a colonial district could be taken out of British control, even briefly, by people the administration had itself educated. That was reported across India.
-
Assessment · 03
It changed who could participate
The admission of women as full participants was settled here in practice. After 1932 the argument that women could not take such roles had no factual basis left.
-
Assessment · 04
It was costly
Executions, transportation for life, long detentions and collective punishment of villages. Any honest account has to hold the cost alongside the significance.
Where the movement sits in the wider struggle
The Chittagong movement ran in parallel with, not inside, the Congress-led Civil Disobedience movement that began in 1930.
The two were not the same politics. Civil Disobedience was mass, public and explicitly non-violent; the Chittagong group was small, clandestine and armed. Their relationship was uneasy: the Congress leadership repudiated revolutionary violence, while many ordinary Congress sympathisers in Bengal admired the revolutionaries.
Both were responses to the same fact — that after 1919, 1922 and 1928, the colonial state had shown it would not concede on argument alone. They differed on what followed from that.
Pritilata Waddedar’s significance in the broader independence movement rests on this juncture. She belonged to the armed wing, and the argument she is remembered for making — that women had an equal claim to participate — was one the mass movement was also having, in its own way, at exactly the same moment.