The Man Who Held the Armoury
He took the police armoury in ten minutes, then spent five months running and sixteen years in prison
Ganesh Ghosh led the team that seized the Chittagong police armoury on 18 April 1930 and found the rifles without their ammunition. He got four men out of the district by train, survived a shootout at Feni station, and was caught in Chandernagore on 1 September 1930 by Charles Tegart. He served fourteen years, most of them in the Cellular Jail, and came out to become a legislator.
The Armoury Door
It is a little before ten at night on Friday, 18 April 1930. Ganesh Ghosh is standing outside the police armoury at Dampara, Chittagong, with a revolver in his hand and a group of young men behind him. Most of them are younger than he is. He is twenty-nine.
The guard at the gate is dealt with quickly. The doors come open. Inside, in the dark, are the rifles of the Chittagong police: rack after rack of them, and revolvers in boxes, and the smell of gun oil and old wood.
For a few minutes the raid is going exactly the way it was drawn on paper. Ganesh Ghosh has trained for this since 1922. He has an engineering education he never finished, a decade in a secret society, and one night to use both.
Then two things go wrong. The ammunition for the rifles is not in the building. And a fire that the raiders set catches a young comrade named Himangshu Sen, who is badly burned.
Ganesh Ghosh will spend the next five months trying to get a burned boy and three other men out of Bengal alive. He will fail, in a particular way, and the failing will shape the next sixteen years of his life.
The Student Who Never Graduated
He was born on 22 June 1900 at Binodpur, in what was then Jessore district and is now Magura in Bangladesh. The family was Bengali Kayastha, comfortable enough to send him to college. In 1922 he entered the Bengal Technical Institute in Calcutta to study engineering.
That is where the thread of a normal life stops. The Bengal Technical Institute had been founded in the Swadeshi years as a national college, a place to train Indians outside the government system. It was also full of young men who had joined the secret societies. Ganesh Ghosh joined the Jugantar party there.