If reading a conventional history book is boring, then Manoshi Bhattacharya?s Chittagong: Eye of the Tiger could change your perception. But this is no conventional history; the story of Surjya Sen aka Master-da and his boys is as much a part of a glorious era in pre-independence India as it is of popular culture in present-day Bangladesh?and the Bengali belt of eastern India.
This is the story of a group of valiant armed revolutionaries led by Master-da that made a daring attempt at raiding the Chittagong armoury of the British Indian forces in 1930. What made the act trailblazing was the involvement of about 54 teenagers who dared to defy British supremacy in the region, now a district in Bangladesh. While Bhattacharya?s first book, Chittagong: Summer of 1930, beautifully captured the armoury raid in the manner of a fast-paced action thriller, its sequel?Eye of the Tiger?deals with the four-year-long insurgency that followed and, in the process, makes for even more fascinating history. It covers the highly-publicised trial of the mutineers with its controversial outcome, the role of women such as Pritilata Waddadar and Kalpana Dutt in the movement, and Master-da?s painful death at the hands of the British. The book also contains rare and unpublished photos of the time.
Initially, the reader may not be able to absorb the flow of the book, written mostly in the perspective and accounts of the people involved in the uprising. The characters soon come to life, and even before one begins to realise, they become a part of the reader. Replete with first-hand impressions of the times left behind by the luminaries, Eye of the Tiger helps recreate life as it was lived then, in the villages and towns of British Bengal.
Bhattacharya makes ample use of Bengali words and phrases in her otherwise flawless English writing.
The fusion, coupled with details of customs, rituals and local idiosyncracies, provides the right setting for a Bengal of the 1930s. Readers also get to see a community, otherwise known for its intellectual exploits, in a new and heroic light.
Towards the later part of the book, Kali Kinkar De, one of the early recruits in Master-da?s team, gives a tearful end to the mutineers? story. While describing the last few hours of the leader to the inmates of Cellular Jail in the Andamans
in 1935, De reads out Master-da?s farewell letter
written in his own hand: ?The hangman?s noose dangles over my head… At this most beautiful, the most exclusive time of my life I give to you?the dream, the dream of independent India…?
It is the interpretation of this dream that makes for a memorable mutiny, something that also makes for a story well told.