Lebong Racecourse, 8 May 1934

Two shots at a Governor, a suitcase carried up the mountain by a girl of nineteen, and the end of Bengal's armed wave

On 8 May 1934 two young men fired at Sir John Anderson, Governor of Bengal, at the Lebong race course above Darjeeling, and both missed. The pistols had travelled up from Calcutta in a suitcase carried by Ujjwala Majumdar, nineteen, who was taken along because a young woman with luggage does not get searched. Bhabani Prasad Bhattacharya was hanged at twenty, Ujjwala got fourteen years, and Bengal's armed underground had nothing left to send.

Half Past Three at the Races

It is Tuesday, 8 May 1934, at the Lebong race course above Darjeeling. It is the smallest race track in the world, cut into a shelf of hillside, with the tea gardens falling away below it. The last race has finished. The horses are coming in. It is about half past three in the afternoon, and the Governor of Bengal, Sir John Anderson, is sitting in his box.

A young man steps up in front of the box with a pistol in his hand. He is about ten feet away. The court record says he steadied his arm before he fired.

A second or two later a second young man, standing a little to the side, raises a pistol and fires from about six feet.

Both shots miss. A bullet from one of the two pistols hits a woman in the crowd, Miss Beulah Thornton, in the ankle. The police open fire on the two men. Two men in the crowd throw themselves on them. Both young men are shot, overpowered, and carried to hospital.

The one who fired first was twenty. His name was Bhabani Prasad Bhattacharya. The pistols he and his friend used had come up the mountain in a suitcase. The person who carried that suitcase past the police was a girl of nineteen. She had passed her matriculation examination two months earlier. Her name was Ujjwala Majumdar, and the reason she was carrying the suitcase is the hardest thing in this chapter to look at.

The Suitcase on the Darjeeling Train

Ujjwala Majumdar was born in Dhaka on 21 November 1914. Her mother was dead. Her father, Suresh Majumdar, ran a rickshaw business in Calcutta and was away from home for long stretches. Her stepmother was two years older than she was. She had a younger brother, Gopal, and the two of them studied for their matriculation examination largely on their own.