TAHER’S LAST TESTAMENT: BANGLADESH THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
by Lawrence Lifschultz
During the spring of 1908 a legend took root in Eastern India around the life of a young Bengali named Khudiram Bose. In May of that year he was arrested and put on trial, charged with an attempt upon the life of D.H. Kingsford, a British magistrate, who had earned an exceptional reputation for the forms of punishment he passed on members of the underground nationalist movement. It was Kingsford’s habit to sentence participants in India’s early independence struggle to public whippings. The attack on the British magistrate failed. Khudiram and his associates were arrested. There followed a lengthy trial known as the Alipore Conspiracy Case which ended in a verdict of death. When Khudiram and Kanailal Datta were hanged, the city of Calcutta was overwhelmed by the funeral procession. The vast and spontaneous character of the out- pouring unnerved the local colonial authorities and a ban was imposed on any further public funerals of revolutionaries. In the years which followed both the Public Prosecutor and the Deputy Superintendent of Police who supervised the trial were shot dead by nationalists. The British regarded this period as the opening phase of what their historians would term the “terrorist movement”. However, to the colonized peasantry and intellectuals of the subcontinent, it was simply the first sign of militant nationalism. In the villages of Bengal where music has its own quality of motion, the notes of poems spread faster than the waters of the yearly floods. In this flow of music and history, Khudiram became something of a legend. Minstrels and beggars moved from village to village singing of his bravery against the British Government. Even today there is scarcely a child in Bangladesh who hasn’t heard his name. A saying used to go that he would be reborn each day until independence. To anyone who did not notice him or feel his presence in the country, a popular folk song had him remind people: “If you fail to recognize me, look for the sign of hanging around my neck.”
It would be another twenty-six years until the British would repeat a political execution in the volatile atmosphere of Bengal. In 1934, Surja Sen, the organizer of the famous Chittagong Armory Raid, was sentenced and hanged. In the years that passed there was never another political execution in Bengal.
This does not mean there were not countless political murders and massacres. The eastern subcontinent is one of the poorest areas of the world. Each day there arise battles between those who own land and those who must work it. For the peasantry of the subcontinent life is an edge. An edge on which questions of food, land, and water are constantly answered by cycles of revolt and suppression. Every day in the subcontinent men die over these issues trying to determine who will command whom. And in a rural economy where commodity production is largely a matter of food, this issue always returns to the ownership of land and the power of the state to preserve the existing arrangement.
TAHER’S LAST BANGLADESH
TESTAMENT: THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
by Lawrence Lifschultz
First published in Calcutta and New York, Taher’s Last Testament is reprinted with the permission of the author by the Taher Memorial Committee, 61 Finsbury Park Road, London N.4. Additional copies are available from the Committee. £1.00 per copy, plus 20p. postage inland; 30p. international.
