The Boatman's Boy

Twelve years old, a boat, and a state police party that wanted to cross the Brahmani

On the night of 11 October 1938 a boatman's son named Baji Rout refused to ferry an armed police party across the Brahmani at Nilakanthapur ghat. The police were not British. They belonged to the princely state of Dhenkanal, whose Raja held his throne under British paramountcy. Baji Rout and six others were shot at the ghat, and a poem written five years later kept his name alive.

Warrants at Bhuban

It is late on the night of 10 October 1938, in the village of Bhuban in Dhenkanal. A magistrate named Binay Ghosh walks in with an armed force of about forty men. He is carrying warrants for eighteen people. The men are taken from their houses in the dark.

Word goes round the village before the police can leave with them. A crowd comes to the police station and stands outside it, asking for the arrested men back. This is what the movement here has trained people to do: gather, ask, do not strike.

The police fire into the crowd. Two men die at the station.

Now the force has eighteen prisoners, a village that has just watched two of its own shot, and a decision to make about how to get out. Bhuban sits near the Brahmani. The quickest way out is across the water, and the crossing is at Nilakanthapur, a few miles on. They start for it.

What is waiting at that crossing is a boat, and a boy of twelve sitting beside it, keeping watch because the older men of his village asked him to. His name is Baji Rout. His father was a boatman on this river and is dead, his mother husks paddy for other households, and he ferries people across for whatever they can pay.

He has been told one thing: do not let them cross at night. Nobody expects him to be the one who has to do it.

Whose Police, and Who Stood Behind Them

Before the ghat, be clear about who was walking toward it, because this is the fact the story usually loses.

The magistrate and the forty men were not the Raj's. They were the police of Dhenkanal, one of the twenty-six Garhjat states of Odisha, ruled in 1938 by Raja Shankar Pratap Singh Deo. The warrants came from an Indian palace. The order to fire at Bhuban was an Indian order.