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Plate 17 — Education
Nine things worth understanding
Written for students, teachers and general readers. Each topic is explained in plain language without simplifying the history into something it was not, and each links to the fuller account elsewhere on this site.
Start with the topics below, then follow the links into the fuller pages. The timeline is the fastest way to see the whole life in order.
The discussion questions further down move from comprehension through analysis to evaluation. The research page sets out where sources disagree, which makes a useful source-criticism exercise.
This site describes imprisonment, illness and political violence in factual terms. It contains no graphic imagery, no technical detail about weapons or explosives, and no glorification of violence or of physical suffering.
Plate 17.1 — Topics
Batukeshwar Dutt was an Indian revolutionary who fought against British rule. He was born in Bengal in 1910 and grew up in Kanpur. In 1929, when he was eighteen, he took part in a protest inside the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi that was designed to make the government pay attention to Indian demands. He was arrested on purpose, put on trial, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison far away in the Andaman Islands. He was released in 1938 after becoming seriously ill, went to prison again in 1942, and died in 1965.
By the 1920s, Indians who wanted independence disagreed about how to get it. Most followed Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, using non-violent methods such as boycotts, marches and civil disobedience. A smaller group, called revolutionaries, believed the British would never give up power in response to persuasion alone, and organised secretly. Batukeshwar Dutt belonged to this second group. Both groups wanted the same thing — an independent India — and disagreed strongly about the right method.
The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association was the secret organisation Batukeshwar Dutt belonged to. It started in 1924 as the Hindustan Republican Association and changed its name in 1928. The word “socialist” was added on purpose. Its members believed that removing the British would not be enough on its own — that independent India would also need to change how wealth and power were shared among Indians.
On 8 April 1929, Batukeshwar Dutt and Bhagat Singh went into the visitors’ gallery of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. The Assembly was debating two laws that would have made it harder for Indians to organise politically and to go on strike. The two men threw two small bombs at an empty part of the room, threw down printed leaflets explaining why, and shouted “Inquilab Zindabad”. Nobody was killed. They did not run away — they wanted to be arrested so that they would get a public trial and their argument would be reported in the newspapers.
The British ran different classes of prisoner, and they were treated very differently. European prisoners got better food, clothing, books and newspapers. Indians who were jailed for political reasons were usually treated like ordinary criminals. In 1929, Batukeshwar Dutt and others refused to eat until this changed. This is called a hunger strike. One prisoner, Jatindra Nath Das, died during it. Some improvements were won, but not everything they had asked for.
The Cellular Jail was a prison built by the British at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, more than 1,300 kilometres from the Indian mainland. It was designed so that each prisoner was kept alone in a separate cell and could not easily talk to the others. Indians called being sent there “Kala Pani”, meaning black water, because people who went usually did not come back. Batukeshwar Dutt was sent there, and he caught tuberculosis, a serious lung disease.
The two met in Kanpur in 1924 and joined the same organisation. They were together in the Assembly in 1929, were tried together, and got the same sentence on the same day. Later, in a different case about a policeman who had been killed in Lahore — something Dutt had no part in — Bhagat Singh was sentenced to death and hanged in 1931. Batukeshwar Dutt was not. He lived another thirty-four years. That is the main reason one of them became famous and the other did not.
It is tempting to think of the freedom movement as one group of people all doing the same thing. It was not. There were people in the Congress, people who worked inside the colonial councils, secret revolutionary groups, trade unions and student organisations. They argued with each other constantly. Batukeshwar Dutt himself is a good example of how the lines blurred: he was jailed in 1929 as a revolutionary, and in 1942 he joined Gandhi’s Quit India Movement and was jailed again.
Stories change as they are retold. In films and popular accounts the 1929 bombs are often shown as much bigger than they were, the leaflets are left out even though they were the whole point, and the trial is treated as an ending rather than as the goal. Being a good historian means asking: where does this information come from? Is it from a document written at the time, or from someone remembering many years later, or from a film?
Plate 17.2 — Classroom
Questions for students
These are ordered roughly from recall to judgment. None of them has a single correct answer, and the last three are intended to be argued about.
Plate 17.3 — Key terms
