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predominantly Hindu quarters of the city and several of the great bazaars. When local gang-leaders tried to force traders to close their shops, trouble broke out. The League later insisted that the Muslim processions had been ‘sober and disciplined’, led by college students and ‘Muslim girls in blue uniforms’.10 Be that as it may, the atmosphere rapidly became menacing. One observer was Major Sim of Vickers India Co. who managed a shop in the main thoroughfare, Chowringee. Sim saw something that resembled the march of a conquering army into the city, ‘with green hats and flags and every man with a lathi [heavy bamboo cane] – mostly so similar that they must have been bought especially for the occasion, and in bulk’.11 As he watched things suddenly turned vicious. Many observers ascribed this to Hindu thugs hurling bricks down onto the Muslim marchers from the great houses that dominated the city centre. The missiles were plainly intended to maim or kill; people had apparently been stockpiling the bricks for days as a mundane but effective weapon. Then Sim saw a Muslim smash a picture of the Hindu goddess Kali. ‘The crowd turned into wild beasts and tore up and looted and burned the row of little shops beneath us. We saw five people beaten to death with sticks in fifteen yards of road in the main street of the Empire’s second city.’ The police stood by and did nothing, probably, Sim surmised, because the chief minister, Suhrawardy, had told his subordinates not to intervene. Sim himself had a party political purpose in mind in recording these incidents. The recipient of his letter describing them was a Conservative MP, to whom Sim observed: ‘Our good friends in the Labour government are responsible for quite a few dead Indians.’12

At this point the local political leaders lost control. Over the next three days criminals turned the city into a battlefield. The governor told the viceroy that ‘it was a pogrom between two rival gangs of the Calcutta underworld’,13 with the thugs who had been released at the end of the war taking a prominent part. Bazaar toughs and gang-leaders were soon leading raids and counter-raids on Hindu and Muslim quarters, murdering whole neighbourhoods of men, women and children. Swords, iron bars and tins of kerosene were the preferred weapons. Sten guns and bombs made from chemical explosives bought or stolen from soldiers over the previous two years also came into their own. ‘The swollen bodies – of young and old, men and women – were lying in heaps, folded in gunny bags in the middle of roads, on lorries, handcarts or floating in canals.’14 Finally prodded into action, the police – a mere 500 of them, half of whom were unarmed – were hopelessly outnumbered. They drove around in their war-surplus jeeps dispersing the crowds. As soon as they had passed, the gangs emerged from the side streets and resumed the burning and killing.

There was a tinge of class hatred to these events.15 The houses of the great Hindu Marwari merchants in the city centre proved an early target; a leading Muslim merchant was found hanging from a lamp post. But hatred of ‘the enemy’ overwhelmed any economic rationale. Women of both religions were murdered and mutilated. Hindu children were executed near mosques in a macabre mimicking of the slaughter of goats for the goddess Kali. A Muslim cleric, Akbar Ali, was attacked in the fashionable Park Circus area and thrown half dead into a sewer. He was one of the lucky ones; nine days later his battered body was fished alive from the Ballygunge sewerage station, almost a mile away.16 Much of the killing showed the hand of trained fighters. The historian Suranjan Das recounts that INA men who had come to Calcutta to celebrate Indian National Army Day on 18 August were prominent in the attacks,17 even though Sarat Bose’s wing of the Congress and the INA leadership had loudly denounced communal hatred. Bose himself backed the rescue efforts of the Indian National Ambulance Corps, newly named the Azad Hind Ambulance Corps in memory of his brother. Other men of arms also took part.