The Great Calcutta Killing of 1946
One Family’s Witness
In August 1946, as the British Raj entered its final months, a wave of communal killing swept through Bengal. In Calcutta, perhaps four thousand people died in four days of systematic violence, though some estimates put the number far higher. The event became known as the Great Calcutta Killing, and it was one of the worst episodes of the violence that accompanied the partition of India. For one family—the Robinsons, living in an apartment near the river at Howrah—it was an event that happened almost literally on their doorstep, and it was an event that forced them, within months, to make a decision they had been deferring for years: to leave India.
I was there, six years old. From the balcony of Colvin Court, a complex of apartments occupied by the East Indian Railways’ staff, I stood with a young friend and watched men come out of the buildings and houses along the street and begin to stab and beat each other to death. A crowd of five or six thousand had gathered in a nearby park, Hindus and Muslims together. Someone was stabbed, and within minutes the whole crowd turned on itself. For four days the killing continued around the family’s home, until the British Army brought it under control.
The Violence Spreads
The violence that day came to be called the Great Calcutta Killing, but it was not isolated. It followed the Muslim League’s call for a day of direct action—a political protest against the plan to partition India—and it began with the slaughter of Hindus by Muslims in Calcutta, followed by reprisals from the Hindus. The British Army’s official count put the dead at about four thousand, but contemporary observers and modern historians have suggested far higher figures, with some estimates running toward ten thousand dead and perhaps a hundred thousand driven from their homes.
What began in Calcutta spread to other cities and to the countryside. The violence was more than a political protest; it was the eruption of communal hatreds that had been building for years, stoked by the knowledge that partition was coming, that the country was about to be cut in two, and that Muslims and Hindus would no longer share the same state. In Bengal, the crisis was sharpened by the fact that the province itself was to be divided—West Bengal going to India, East Bengal (soon to be East Pakistan) going to Pakistan. Calcutta, as the great city of Bengal, became a flashpoint.
For three days the family shut themselves into the Colvin Court apartment while the police tried to take control. Bodies were left in piles on both sides of the road outside, and the smell of the dead seeped into the home. Ian, the eldest child, was seventeen and fearless. He took the curfew that the army had thrown over the city as no barrier and slipped out at night to find his friends. With cloths tied over their faces, he and the other young people salvaged food from the goods trains left standing on the tracks near the apartment block. Where the dead lay along the river, they pushed the bodies out into the water, beyond the reach of the vultures that had gathered.
The Decision
It was one thing to live through the violence. It was another to imagine what would come after. The country’s partition had been decided. Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister given some five weeks to partition Punjab and Bengal, had drawn his lines. His eastern line cut Bengal in two, leaving Calcutta and Howrah on the Indian side.
The implications for people like the Robinsons were profound. For generations, the family’s livelihood had come from the institutions of the British Raj: the army, the railway, the post office, the civil service. With the British going and the Raj ending, those institutions were being rapidly Indianised. Indians were being brought in to replace the English-speaking domiciled community that had long occupied the middle ranks. The laws that had reserved certain posts for Europeans and Anglo-Indians were being repealed or allowed to expire. The future was uncertain, and for a community that had never learned to think of anywhere else as home, the uncertainty was terrifying.
Around this time our lives became further complicated by illness. My mother became seriously ill with diphtheria. I caught malaria in Lucknow. My brother Ian had three bouts of typhoid, one of them very nearly fatal. The question of whether to remain in India turned on three things: safety, a steady living, and health. After the Calcutta killings, safety seemed uncertain. The steady living was no longer guaranteed. The children’s health was failing. And there was a fourth thing, harder to articulate: a sense that the world we had known was ending, and that there was no place for us in what was to come.
The Letter to Canada
My parents had begun to consider their options. One possibility was Canada, where my father had lived and worked as a young man. In May 1947, he wrote to the Canadian Ministry of Trade and Commerce asking it to confirm that old residence. By May, he had worked out a considered plan. With no clear opening for his children in a service passing into Indian hands, he proposed that the family go to Canada, where he would remain on leave before returning to India alone to serve out his last years until he was eligible for superannuation. He asked Ottawa about railway fares for the journey, both ways, calculating the costs.
In the end, nothing came of the Canadian plan. The family’s eyes started to turn towards Australia, with a clergyman friend, Reverend Alex Kerr, urging us to go there instead. He was posted to Cue, a small mining town in the Gascoyne-Murchison region of Western Australia, and he told my parents that there were good jobs waiting, and that they would enjoy the area. The family had also considered England, where my father could enter freely as a British subject born in England, and could take the family with him. But it was an England still recovering from the war, and it was austere and struggling, not the best place to find work or to offer a future for the children. They decided against it, a decision my mother would rue for the rest of her life. She had never been to England, but throughout her life she identified with it closely and considered herself English rather than Anglo-Indian. I recall her in later years cursing my father for taking her to ‘god-forsaken’ Australia, when an Englishwoman like her should be spending the rest of her life in England.
So the decision was made not to go to Canada or England, but to go to Western Australia. Reverend Kerr’s offer seemed concrete, and it pointed to a country where the family knew a few people and might make a fresh start. The family packed its possessions into two metal trunks and arranged to go to Perth.
The Passage
To reach the ship at Bombay, the family had to travel by train across the breadth of India. Leslie Chadwick, my mother’s older brother, was waiting for us in Bombay. He decided to join the family and go to Perth as well, at least to see whether it would suit him. He would stay there and later send for his wife. The two of them settled into a house at 100 Summers Street, East Perth, where they lived out the rest of their lives – in my aunt Gladys’s case, until she reached 103 years-old.
The Robinson family meanwhile had arranged its affairs, including the chore of getting passports so that they could leave and enter Australia. My father’s British Indian Passport recorded his trade as railway claims inspector, his birth in London on 18 August 1903, and his domicile at Tundla, the East Indian Railway junction near Agra where he was working. My mother’s passport was issued at Calcutta on 28 June 1947. The clerk first recorded her as a British subject by birth, then amended the entry in his own hand: “wife of a British subject by birth.” She had been born at Rangoon in 1906, within the Indian Empire. Aged six, I had to be entered on her passport, but my brother and sister were old enough to get passports of their own. Seven weeks after the passports were issued, the state named on their cover ceased to exist.
The family boarded the Stratheden at Bombay. She was one of five P&O sister ships built in the 1930s, white-hulled and buff-funnelled, known on the run to India and Australia as the Beautiful White Sisters. She had spent the war as a troopship and returned to the Tilbury—Bombay—Fremantle—Sydney mail route only the year before. The family’s passage was one of her first as a peacetime liner again.
On arrival at Fremantle, the master handed the quarantine officer a typed report of every passenger aboard. Among the tourist berths was a single entry for five names: Denis Harry Robinson, Carina, Daphne Madge, Ian Graham and Michael beneath him, the entries repeated down the page in ditto strokes. Class, tourist. Embarked, Bombay. For, Fremantle. The declared address was one address for all five: The Rectory, Cue, W.A. Leslie’s entry was separate, first class, on his own.
On 24 November 1948, the Stratheden berthed at Fremantle, and the Robinsons came ashore in Western Australia. It was two days before my eighth birthday. A son had been born to Princess Elizabeth on the 14th of that month, and named Charles. The grown-ups on the wharf talked about the new prince. Daphne cried and grieved for the friends she had left behind. Ian looked forward to a new adventure. I tasted an ice-cream in a cone for the first time. If my parents were apprehensive, they did not let their children see it.