The Chittaqong uprising of 18 April 1930

The Chittagong Armory Raid, also known as the Chittaqong uprising was an attempt on 18 April 1930 to raid the armoury of police and auxillary forces from the Chittagong armoury in Bengal province of British India by armed revolutionaries for Indian independence from British colonial rule.
This elaborate plan was  conceived by a softly spoken local teacher by the  name of Surya Ben  who was popularly known as Masterda..In. 1916  when he was a B.A  student in Behrampore College he learned about the Indian freedom movement from one of his teachers. He was drawn to revolutionary ideals and joined a revolutionary organization called Anushilan Samity. movement. After completing his studies he returned to Chttagong in 1918 and joined as a teacher at National School. Nandakanan., At that time, the Indian National congress was the most prominent political party there.

   
                                                       Surya Sen

All of the leaders of the uprising, were participants in the congress led civil Disobedience movement launched in 1919. They were bitterly dissapointed by Gandhi's decision to call of the movement following the violence in Chauri Chaura in 1922.Apart from Surya Sen, Lokenath Bal, Ganesh Ghosh, Anant Singh, Ambika Chakravarti, Pritilata Waddedar, Tarakeswar Dastidar, Nirmal Sen and Kalpana Dutta are the names of other unsung heroes, involved in this  revolt..
The inspiration of the Chittagong raid  actually came from the 1916 Irish Easter uprising, which vexed the crown, and  in the case of the  Chittagong mission, there is one dimension which, in later decades and still today, is seen by many as the definitive moment when women left the traditional roles to play a part in defining an independent national identity.
Pritilata Waddedar, also from Chittagong, accompanied Sen during the 1930 mission and later, in 1932, led another raid on the Pahartali European Club, which reportedly had a sign at the entrance: “Dogs and Indians not allowed.” During this operation, Pritilata was surrounded and took a cyanide pill to kill herself, thus creating a defiant nationalistic image to be followed by women in future decades to break down restrictive social shackles.
The aims of  the Chittagong raid  were to seize enough  arms and ammunition which would be used in a great uprising, and show others that it was possible to challenge the armed might of the British Empire.
 After extensive planning and deliberation, and after  managing to  build up an army of teenage recruits. The plan was to assassinate  the members of the European Club – military and government officials who were responsible for siding with the British to maintain the Raj. The other objective  at the time was to make Chittagong independent.
At around 10 pm. around 100 of these recruits clad in khaki, marched in military order  in several groups. One of their batches raided the telephone exchanges and Telegraph offices and managed to cut off all communications between Calcutta and bacca.. The second severed rail connections at Nangalkot and Dham, which caused derailment of good trains and blockading of all railway traffic. At the same time leaflets were distributed all over the town explaining  the objective of the raid.. They also  hoisted the national flag on the premises of the armoury, and proclaimed a provisional Revolutionary Government  It was a symbolic blow on the British supremacy  at the time.
 After that they fled to the hills. They were pursued by the Police; and were  surrounded by the British Indian Army in the Jalalabad Hills, where they had took shelter on the afternoon of 22 April 1830.There was an encounter in which over 80 troops and 12 revolutionaries were killed in a gunfight. Surya Sen and some of his fellow revolutionaries were  successful in fleeing. The revolutionaries who were arrested in Chittagong were captured and trialed with  12 people being deported for life.
Stunned by Surya Sens actions, the British embarked on a series of brutal combing actions around the Muslim dominated villages where the revolutionaries were hiding. Despite repressive British actions, these villagers did not betray Surya and his band, instead they offered them food, work and shelter for three years.
In February 1933  Surya Sen was eventually arrested by the Police after being betrayed by one of his comrades, Netra Sen. He was brutally tortured by the British for days, his teeth knocked out, nails ripped, limbs  and joints broken, before he was dragged to the rope unconscious and, hanged, and given a burial at sea.

In his last letter, written to his friends Master-da exhorted us, 'Death is  knocking at my door.My mind is flying away towards eternity... At such a pleasant, at such s grave, at such a solemn moment, what shall I leave  behind you? Only one thing that is my dream, a golden dream, the dream  of Free India.  Never forget the 18th of April 1930, the day of the Eastern Rebellion in Chittagong..Write in red letters in the core of your hearts the names of the patriots who have sacrificed their lives at the altar of India's freedom.' 

This remarkable, anti-imperial revolt remains relatively little-known, if not quite forgotten, but  at the time managed to rattle an empire and two films have since been made about it. Ashutosh Gowariker's Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se (2010), starring Abhishek Bachchan and Deepika Padukone, and Debabrata Pain's small-budget but award winning Chittagong (2012), featuring Manoj Bajpai and Vega Tamotia, both, unfortunately, flopped at the box-office. 

Earlier, Manini Chatterjee, the daughter-in-law of communist leader PC Joshi and Kalpana Datta (1913-95), wrote a gripping account Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34 (1999).

She was well placed to do so because her mother, Kalpana, had been one of the insurgents who took part in the uprising.
Surya Sen and many of  his comrades paid a heavy price, sacrificing  their life, for the cause of freedom even though their actions have got dispersed in the pages of history.