The Tamluk National Government
The parallel government that ran courts, cyclone relief and an army in Midnapore for twenty-one months, and then shut itself down when Gandhi asked
After the 1942 rising and a cyclone that killed thousands, a district of Bengal built its own state. From 17 December 1942 the Tamluk Jatiya Sarkar, under Satish Chandra Samanta, ran courts, relief, school grants and the Vidyut Vahini across four thanas of Midnapore. It heard 2,907 cases, survived the arrest of three of its heads, and dissolved itself in August 1944 on Gandhi's word.
The Court That Charged One Rupee
It is a morning early in 1943, in a village in the Tamluk subdivision of Midnapore. Two farmers are standing in a courtyard with a dispute about a boundary between their fields. There is no courthouse. There is a mat on the ground, a register, and three men sitting on it who have been chosen to hear them.
One of the farmers has paid a fee of one rupee to file the case. That rupee is the only thing about this court that looks ordinary.
The court is not the Raj's. Four miles away there is a British magistrate with a stamp and a police force, and neither farmer has gone near him. This court belongs to a government that declared itself on 17 December 1942. It has no capital city and holds no territory anyone has recognised. The men who run it are being hunted by the police. Its head is a fifty-two-year-old man from Gopalpur village named Satish Chandra Samanta, and his title is Sarbadhinayaka.
Courts of this kind heard 2,907 cases in the Tamluk subdivision before the government that ran them shut itself down. That is the number worth holding on to. Anyone can burn a police station. The hard thing is what you do on the morning after the police station has stopped working, when two farmers still have a boundary to settle. Almost nobody else in India managed it in 1942.
Why There Was a Hole to Fill
The Quit India resolution was passed on 8 August 1942 and Gandhi and the Congress leadership were in jail by two in the morning on 9 August. What followed in most of India was a few violent weeks and then exhaustion.
Midnapore was different, for reasons that had nothing to do with heroism and everything to do with what had already been done to the district.