Gohpur, Seventeen
A girl of seventeen with three years of schooling walked at the head of an unarmed procession to put a flag on a police station, and did not turn back when the officer raised his hand
On 20 September 1942, Kanaklata Barua led an unarmed procession of the Mrityu Bahini to the Gohpur police station in Assam to replace the Union Jack with the tricolour. The police fired, and she was killed at the front of the column, still holding the flag. Mukunda Kakati took it from her hands as she fell and was shot in turn.
The Road to the Police Station
It is the morning of Sunday, 20 September 1942, on the road into Gohpur in the Darrang district of Assam. The rains are just ending. The road is wet, and the paddy on both sides of it is green and high. A crowd of villagers is walking towards the police station. Nobody in it is carrying a weapon.
At the front walks a girl of seventeen. Her name is Kanaklata Barua, and she is from Barangabari, a village a short walk from here. She is holding a tricolour on a bamboo pole. Behind her the crowd is singing and shouting for independence.
She has been chosen to carry it. The plan is simple. Walk to the police station, take down the Union Jack, put this flag up in its place. It is the same plan being carried out that week at Sootea, at Dhekiajuli, at Tezpur, in towns all along this stretch of the Brahmaputra valley.
Waiting at the station is the officer in charge, a man named Rebati Mahan Som, with armed constables. He has orders. She has a flag and no way of defending herself. Both of them know what happens if neither side turns around.
An hour later Kanaklata Barua is dead, and so is the man who picked the flag up after her. What nobody in Gohpur could have known that morning is that this would be the most remembered thing anyone in the district ever did.
Why a Seventeen-Year-Old Was at the Front
Kanaklata Barua was born on 22 December 1924 in Barangabari village, in what was then the Gohpur sub-division of Darrang district. Her family descended from the Dolakasharia Baruas, who had been local chiefs under the Ahom kingdom and kept the Barua title long after the kingdom was gone.
