Beneath public disapproval often lies the cold comfort of the status quo. The Bengal Files, directed by Vivek Agnihotri, may or may not be completely truthful to history, but the noise around it has shattered the silence in West Bengal around a forgotten figure from undivided Bengal’s dark chapter—Gopal Mukherjee aka Gopal Patha.
Agnihotri has accused the West Bengal government of threatening theatre owners not to screen his film in the state, and said he is planning legal action. But the ‘unofficial ban’ has not deterred authors and filmmakers, commoners and talk circuit crowd from poring over history books to resurrect a man who contemporary historians had failed to define. He was consigned to the dustbin of history—a butcher who had become a saviour of sorts, a Congress supporter whose actions made him the Hindu Right’s forever hero.
A forgotten figure and a film
On 16 August 2023, two years before the ongoing controversy over Agnihotri’s film, I had interviewed Santanu Mukherjee, Gopal Mukherjee’s grandson, for ThePrint. It was the 77th anniversary of the Great Calcutta Killings that began on 16 August 1946. It was the consequence of a series of Muslim League Council Meetings between 27-29 July 1946, which passed a resolution that 16 August 1946 would be ‘Direct Action Day’—aimed at taking direct action for a Muslim-majority Pakistan.
“Mohammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed that we shall have ‘either a divided India or a destroyed India’. The violence unleashed on that day set off a series of events that made the Partition of India unavoidable. The riots started in Calcutta, but soon spread to the Bengal countryside,” historian Ramachandra Guha had written for The Telegraph in a 2014 article.
Although the violence was started by the League, Guha wrote, Muslims suffered the most in Calcutta. “Out-numbered and out-gunned, they lost more lives and had more homes burnt than their Hindu adversaries,” he wrote.
In ThePrint interview, Santanu Mukherjee told me that it was during this mayhem that his grandfather decided to “form an army to save Hindus from rioters of the Muslim League”.
“He formed the Bharater Jatiya Bahini with Bengali, Odia, Bihari and Punjabi Hindus from the neighbourhood to take on the Muslim gangs that were unleashed by the prime minister of undivided Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy,” Mukherjee said.
Mukherjee told me his grandfather instructed his ‘army’ that if they came to know that one murder had taken place, they should ‘commit 10 murders’. But during the course of the long interview, Santanu Mukerjee categorically told me Gopal Mukherjee did not harbour any hate towards the Muslim community, did not identify with any kind of communal politics and was in fact a supporter of the Congress leader and former West Bengal chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy.
“My grandfather told his men that they won’t attack innocent Muslims, nor would they touch their women, children and elderly. Only those who came to attack with arms would be dealt with. Those were the rules of engagement,” Mukherjee told me in the 2023 interview.
Now, Santanu Mukherjee has accused Vivek Agnihotri of showing his grandfather in a poor light and filed a complaint at the Bowbazar Police Station in Kolkata. “The director never took any permission from us or even tried to meet us and speak to us regarding my grandfather. Derogatory terms were used against my grandfather,” Mukherjee told the press just before the release of the film.
In his complaint letter, Shantanu Mukherjee wrote: “… Recent interviews of the said Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri about my late grandfather, Sri Gopal Chandra Mukherjee, have been spoken of and depicted in a very poor light and in an utterly defamatory manner. Till date, there has not been any research project on my grandfather across Indian universities, and hence, each info available in the social arena stem from us and except it, all is hearsay.”
Keeping aside his argument with Agnihotri, the rest of Santanu Mukherjee’s statement is not entirely true. Both the Great Calcutta Killings and Gopal Patha have been written about and forgotten. The controversy over The Bengal Files is bringing that dark chapter in undivided India’s history and its unlikely protagonist back into focus.
Also read: Gopal Patha built army to save Hindus, met Gandhi too: grandson on Great Calcutta Killings
Goonda or saviour?
Whether it is due to the unofficial ban on The Bengal Files by the Mamata Banerjee administration, as alleged by Agnihotri or the allegations by Gopal Mukherjee’s family against him, Gopal Mukherjee aka Gopal Patha has rekindled the interest of authors and filmmakers, readers and social media influencers.
In a Facebook post, producer Rana Sarkar wrote that Vivek Agnihotri is not a filmmaker but an ad filmmaker of a particular political party.
“If he was indeed a filmmaker who was interested in making political films, then at least in one of his films, he would have shown the other side. He twists historical facts for cheap communalisation not for the box office but the ballot box,” he wrote.
National Award-winning Bengali director Subhrajit Mitra wrote on Facebook that he had the privilege of knowing Gopal Mukherjee in person, as their families were neighbours. Remembering Mukherjee warmly, Mitra wrote that while much is being spoken about the Great Calcutta Killings today, one should remember that at a huge congregation of Muslim League activists, Suhrawardy had given a “provocative statement”. “Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the right-hand man of Suhrawardy. His job was to get Muslim goondas from Bihar to Calcutta and unleash violence so that Calcutta could be annexed and made part of East Pakistan. Interestingly, Jyoti Basu (who later became West Bengal chief minister) was on stage to support Suhrawardy. When the situation got tense, he quietly slipped away,” Mitra wrote.
Educationist and author Sarojesh Mukerjee, who has a keen interest in the history of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Calcutta, told ThePrint he sees Gopal Mukherjee as a “community organiser who saved the lives of many people in North and Central Calcutta, where the riots mainly took place, remarkably without any regard to religion, race or creed.”
“If a lot of Muslim families were found to have been saved by Gopal Patha, for example, then what of one’s bias about him as a saviour of only Hindus?” he said.
Journalist Andrew Whitehead, who had interviewed Gopal Mukherjee in April 1997, described him as “a goonda or gang leader in Calcutta and involved in the Great Calcutta Killings, which so disfigured the city at Partition”.
“Mukherjee, a Hindu, talked openly about his role in street violence at the time of Partition and was proud of refusing to surrender any weapons to Gandhi. He explained that his nickname of ‘Patha’, goat, came from the family meat shop on College Street,” Whitehead wrote.
While Whitehead’s 1997 interview has been doing the rounds of WhatsApp groups and being quoted in evening tea stall addas in the city, advocate and author Joydeep Sen said there are many forgotten accounts of the 1946 massacre in other books and interviews. “Many are quoting the Andrew Whitehead interview today. But in A Traveller And The Road: The Journey of An Indian Communist, Leftist author Mohit Sen has described the Great Calcutta Killings as a “one-sided affair with the Muslim communalists and criminals going ahead to do what they did with practical immunity and little resistance”,” Sen told ThePrint.
“I do not understand why there is such debate over Gopal Mukherjee. Muslim gangs came to butcher Hindus, and Gopal Mukherjee emerged as a hero. Yes, he told his men not to harm innocent Muslims, but what is the objection to calling him a saviour of Hindus? If one talks about Hindu persecution, there is a problem; if one talks about Hindu valour, there is also a problem!” Sen said, adding he is planning a graphic novel on Mukherjee and the Great Calcutta Killings.
“How brutal the violence was during the Great Calcutta Killings has been described by Sam Dalrymple in his new book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions And The Making of Modern Asia. More books and films on that time are needed, backed by serious research. The Bengal Files is not enough,” he said.
In my 2023 interview, I had asked Santanu Mukherjee how he made sense of his grandfather, who was a mind-bending mix of contradictions: a Brahmin who ran a meat shop, a man who killed Muslim rioters to save Hindus but did not harm innocent Muslims. Mukherjee said that to understand his grandfather, one had to understand the complexity of those times.
Narrative wars do not care for nuance. As Bengal readies for the 2026 Assembly polls with the Opposition BJP alleging an alarming demographic shift under political patronage, can Gopal Mukherjee be saved from political appropriation after the release of The Bengal Files?
The only silver lining? Kolkata has picked up history books to find out the real Gopal Mukherjee. And that is never a bad thing.
Deep Halder is an author and journalist. He tweets @deepscribble. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)