Three Men in European Dress
The noon attack on the Inspector General of Prisons, the corridor they chose not to leave, and the ninety two letters one of them wrote from a condemned cell
On 8 December 1930 three students from east Bengal walked into the Writers' Building in Calcutta and shot the Inspector General of Prisons at his desk. They had planned no escape. Badal Gupta was eighteen and died in the corridor, Benoy Basu was twenty two and died five days later, and Dinesh Gupta survived to write ninety two letters from Alipore jail before he was hanged at nineteen.
The Room on the First Floor
It is Monday, 8 December 1930, around noon. Three young men in jackets, trousers and polished shoes climb the stairs of the Writers' Building in Calcutta. They reach the first floor corridor. They stop outside the room of Lieutenant Colonel N. S. Simpson, the Inspector General of Prisons for Bengal.
Simpson is at his desk. Clerks are working in the rooms on either side. It is an ordinary working Monday in the office block that runs the province.
The three walk in and shoot him.
What happens next is the part that matters. They do not run for the stairs. They do not climb out of a window. They stay inside the building, in a corridor with one way out, and wait for the police to come up. All three are carrying something besides a revolver. Badal has a small packet of potassium cyanide.
The oldest of them is twenty two. The youngest is eighteen. Only one of the three will leave the building alive, and only for seven more months.
Who They Were Before That Morning
Benoy Basu was a medical student. He was born on 11 September 1908 at Rohitbhog, in Munshiganj district of east Bengal, and he studied at the Mitford Medical School in Dacca. He built the Bengal Volunteers unit in that city.
Four months before Calcutta, he had already killed a man. On 29 August 1930 he walked into the Medical School Hospital in Dacca. Inspector General of Police Lowman was there, visiting a sick officer. Benoy fired at close range. Lowman died. The Superintendent of Police, Hodson, was badly wounded. Benoy got away and went underground.
Dinesh Gupta was born on 6 December 1911, also in Munshiganj district. He joined the Bengal Volunteers as a student at Dhaka College. He liked Bengali literature. He had translated a Chekhov story into Bengali for the magazine Prabasi. He turned nineteen two days before the attack.