Master da

The schoolteacher who spent twelve years building a network, one night spending it, and three years on the run keeping it alive

Surya Sen taught mathematics in Chittagong and was called Master da by everyone who knew him. He planned and led the raid of April 1930, then ran the underground from village to village for nearly three years while the people who sheltered him paid for it. He was betrayed in February 1933 and hanged on 12 January 1934.

The Classroom in Chittagong

Sometime in the early 1920s, in a national school in Chittagong town, a thin mathematics teacher is at the blackboard. His name is Surya Sen. He is in his late twenties. He wears a plain dhoti, he speaks softly, and the boys in front of him find him easy to like. He is also, at this hour, running a secret society.

The boys call him Master da. In Bengali, master is the schoolteacher and da is short for dada, elder brother. Put together it means something closer to "teacher who is also our own". Nobody in Chittagong called him Surya Sen for the next twenty years.

What he is doing in that classroom is the whole story. He is not recruiting. He is watching. He is finding out which boy keeps his word, which boy can hold his tongue, which boy visits his mother. The ones who pass go into a study circle. Some of them, years later, will carry a rifle up Jalalabad hill.

It took him more than a decade to build what one night in April 1930 spent. The interesting question is not how he planned the raid. It is how a schoolteacher kept a network alive for nearly three years afterwards. The district was flooded with police and there was a price on his head. It is also what that cost the people who sheltered him.

The Patience of the Recruiter

Surya Sen was born in 1894 in the Chittagong district, into a family of modest means. He went away to college at Behrampore in Bengal, and it was there, as a student, that he was brought into the revolutionary underground. He came home with a method, not just a politics.

The method was slow. Bengal's secret societies had learned the hard way that a fast network is a network full of informers. So Surya Sen recruited the way a teacher grades: over years, on evidence.