Atulya Ghosh - Formative Years

Formative Years

He was born on 28 August 1904. The family hailed from Jejur in Hooghly district. In the early 1920s, he quit studies to become a Congress khadi (hand spun cloth became a symbol of self reliance) worker. In the 1930s, he was active in selling khadi in the East Bengal districts of Dhaka, Comilla and Chittagong, with the centre being Malekandra, the village home of Dr. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.

He was a member first of the Calcutta and then Hooghly district Congress committees. During this period he also came in contact with Bhupendranath Dutta (brother of Narendranath Dutta, better known as Swami Vivekananda), one of the known early communists in India, who introduced him to works by Lenin (autobiography - Kashtokalpito). According to his own admission in his autobiography, it was at this period that the concept of his later book "Gandhism in the eyes of an anarchist" was first formed (Kashtokalpito). However he was fully converted to the Gandhian mode of struggle by Vijay Modak, a well known philanthropist and Congress organizer of the Hooghly district. According to him, he started out on his political career as a "grassroots" worker with one of his first duties being carrying ladders and putting up political posters (Kashtokalpito). In 1930, he was arrested as a suspect in the murder case of a policeman in Midnapore but was released because of lack of evidence. He had to go underground for some time as during this period the British government of India used various acts to justify physical repression or elimination of political activists not necessarily involved in armed movements. (autobiography - Kashtokalpito). He spent two years hiding out with the family of a fisherman sharing their life (Kashtokalpito). During the Quit India movement of 1942 he was arrested and lost one eye in jail, as a result of police action on detainees inside the jail on protest strike when a baton was inserted into one eye. During the same period he contracted spinal tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized. He suffered from mis-advertent administration of drugs while in jail, but reportedly officially forgave the British surgeon in charge when the latter apologized (autobiography - Kashtokalpito). On his release he was diagnosed with severe malnutrition and was instructed to maintain a minimal body weight by the reputed physician and Congress leader and the second Chief minister of West Bengal of independent India, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy (autobiography-Kashtakalpito). He became editor of the weekly Janasevak in 1945. It was converted to a daily in 1949.

For some time he worked in the Hooghly bank, founded by the Congress leader Dhirendra Nath Mukherji. In 1947, he organized a Congress Seva Dal camp at Howrah station to assist elderly AICC members. When the Radcliffe Commission, empowered to draw the boundary line across Bengal, started functioning, he along with Dhirendra Nath Mukherji, Jadabendra Nath Panja, Dr Nalinaksha Sanyal, Sukumar Datta and others founded the New Bengal Association. The Association told Radcliffe that “the districts of Murshidabad and Nadia must be allotted to the Indian side of Bengal for the protection of the Calcutta Port, the lifeline of Eastern India.”