The Surrender at Calcutta
The escape at Feni, the safe town on the Hooghly, and the day he walked back into British hands because the boys in the Chittagong cells could not
Ananta Singh made Surya Sen's bombs, commanded a team on the night of the raid, and shot his way out of a police cordon at Feni station. He reached Chandernagore, where no British policeman could arrest him. On 28 June 1930 he walked out of that safety and surrendered in Calcutta, because the schoolboys who had carried his messages were being worked over in jail.
The Stationmaster's Office at Feni
It is the early morning of 23 April 1930, at Feni railway station, about eighty miles north of Chittagong. Four young men have been pulled off the Calcutta train. They are in the stationmaster's office, and a large police party is outside on the platform. Their tickets have been checked. Now the search begins.
One of the four is Jiban Ghoshal, called Makhan. One is sixteen years old. One is Ganesh Ghosh. The fourth is a man of twenty-six named Ananta Singh, and five nights ago he helped take the police armoury of Chittagong.
They are carrying revolvers, and the search is about to find them. So they shoot their way out. The office fills with smoke and noise, the police party on the platform scatters, and four wanted men get clear of a surrounded station into the dark.
That is the easy part of this story. The hard part comes ten weeks later. Ananta Singh, by then safe in a town the British police could not enter, walks into a Calcutta police station and gives himself up.
The Bomb-Maker
Ananta Singh was not a recruit of the raid. He was one of the oldest hands in Surya Sen's group.
His family were Punjabi Rajputs who had settled in Chittagong generations earlier. He met Surya Sen as a schoolboy at the Chittagong Municipal School and never left him. While other boys learned drill, Ananta learned chemistry. He made the group's bombs.
On 14 December 1923, he and Nirmal Sen robbed the treasury office of the Assam Bengal Railway at Chittagong, on Surya Sen's plan. He fled to Calcutta, was arrested, was let go. A second arrest in 1924 cost him four years in jail. He came out and opened a gymnasium. That is how the group recruited. You taught boys to lift weights, and you watched to see which of them could keep a secret.