The Investigation That Found Almost Nothing Happened
The tea tribes who pick Assam's tea today descend from the same colonial labour system that once sent thousands of workers walking home in protest. The government's own inquiry into what happened when they tried found almost nothing wrong. No one has ever certified how many died.
The tea you buy as Assam, the strong malty stuff you brew for the morning, comes off the Brahmaputra valley gardens, and those gardens are picked by the descendants of a labour system built in the colonial period: workers recruited under indenture out of Bihar, the United Provinces, and Bengal, held by contracts the courts enforced. That workforce is still there. A community that today makes up a fifth of Assam's population, well over a million still working the gardens for a cash wage of about three dollars a day. This is the story of the one time workers under that exact system tried to walk away from it, and of what the colonial record certified had happened to them when they did. The short version: the record certified almost nothing. The number of the dead was never taken.
Assam's other tea country
First, the jurisdiction, because this office certifies within its limits and marks the edge of them. This did not happen in the Brahmaputra valley the reader's tea comes from. It happened to the south, in the Surma valley, in the Chargola and Longai valleys of Sylhet district, in the Karimganj subdivision. Different rivers, different gardens, the same law and the same pipeline. The Assam Labour and Emigration Act governed both valleys, and the recruiting system that stocked the Brahmaputra gardens fed the Surma gardens out of the same home ground, the famine-pressed interior of Bihar, Bengal, and the neighbouring provinces.
Set the geography down plainly, because it is easy to get wrong. Sylhet today is in Bangladesh, not in the Indian state of Assam. The ground of this story now sits across an international border from the country its name would lead you to expect. So this is not a story about a distant valley with no bearing on your cup. It is a story about the same system, one valley over, at the moment it was tested.
Muluk Cholo
In early May 1921, the gardens of Chargola and Longai emptied. Sources give the first day as May 2 or May 3. The workers walked off under one cry, "Muluk Cholo": home, to our own land. They meant it literally. They were going home to the districts of Bihar, the United Provinces, Madhya Pradesh, and Bengal from which they, or their parents, had been recruited.
How many walked is the first thing the record cannot agree on. The academic account this site has drawn on before, from the Rupkatha Journal, gives roughly 9,000 in the first wave. A colonial-era report, relayed through a UK Parliament account, counts 6,000 to 7,000 coolies gone by the middle of May. Later and popular histories, from Sanhati and Get Bengal, run far higher, 30,000 to 40,000 across the whole movement. The figures researchers and communities cite for one event differ by a factor of four or five. That gap is not a footnote. It is the story.
The government of Assam read the walkout as a wage dispute inflamed by outside politics. It was the season of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, and the official contemporary position held that offers of a wage increase of 30 to 50 percent had failed to stop the workers, which the government took as proof that the grievance was not really wages at all. Whatever the cause, the direction was fixed. The workers followed the railway line on foot toward Chandpur, a river port on the Meghna, where a steamer might carry them home.
The night of May 20 at Chandpur
Chandpur could not hold them. One colonial account records about 3,000 gathered at the railway station and its surroundings by May 18 to 19, before anything happened. After the night of May 20, that same account records the survivors redistributed: roughly 1,000 put up in disused jute warehouses, another 500 left in the town. The arrivals had already outrun the room to keep them, and what was left of the crowd afterward still needed somewhere to go.
On the night of May 20, armed police, mostly Gurkha troops, moved on the crowd at the station and at the steamer ghat. The accounts of what followed do not line up, and this office will not pretend they do. Some describe the police firing on people as they slept on the platform. Others describe the gangway to the steamer being pulled away or blocked, and a crush toward the water, with women, children, and the old going into the Meghna. Common to the accounts is that people died. Missing from all of them is a count.
What the record certified
The government sent its own man. Sir Henry Wheeler, of the Bengal Executive Council, went to Chandpur to investigate what were called "serious misrepresentations" of the events, and reported back in early June, having returned to Darjeeling on June 3. His finding is short enough to quote against itself. Only two cases that might be described as "serious" had come to his notice. No injuries that could have been caused by a bayonet had been found. The official inquiry into a massacre certified, in effect, that there had been no massacre.
Set beside that the only official casualty figure that exists at all, and note what it measures. Dr. Batra of the Health Department estimated at least 160 deaths in the second half of May, from cholera and other disease that ran through the stranded, overcrowded workers, and he added that accurate figures were impossible to obtain. So the one number the colonial state produced is a hedged count of the dead from illness, not from violence. The names in the file are the officials, not the dead: Wheeler the investigator, Mr. Wares the Tippera Collector, K.C. De the Chittagong Divisional Commissioner, Batra of Health, a magistrate named Sushil Singh, a garden-side representative named Ferguson, and Captain Sheppard of the Eastern Frontier Rifles at the crowd.
Then there is the record the colonial file was never going to hold. Bengali-language accounts push the range far past anything in the English sources, as high as 7,000 to 15,000 dead. Some of those accounts describe a detail more severe than anything on the English side, and it should be given the same hedge the disputed English details get: that the dead and wounded were deliberately cut before being put into the river, so the bodies would not float, would not surface downstream, would not be found and counted where anyone outside could see them. That detail cannot be weighed against a source strong enough to stand behind it. What can be stated flatly is the gap: the government's "two serious cases" and the community's thousands are not close, and no arithmetic bridges them.
After
The killing did not end the action, it widened it. A general hartal, a total strike and shutdown, was called on May 21. A railway strike began at Chandpur on May 24 and reached Chittagong on the 25th. A steamer strike began on May 27 and spread to Goalundo and beyond. Some accounts hold that around 5,000 railway employees were eventually dismissed for taking part. Deshapriya Jatindramohan Sengupta, president of the Assam Bengal Railway workers' union, is named as a leader of the sympathy strikes. One source, and only one, names two organizers of the original garden walkout as Pandit Gangadayal Dikshit and Devsharan Tripathi; take that as a single thread, less corroborated than the rest.
The homecoming that "Muluk Cholo" promised mostly did not arrive. Many who survived were caught again further along the route, toward Dhaka and Mymensingh, beaten, arrested, and marched back to the gardens they had left. Historians now count the Chargola exodus and the Chandpur nights of May 1921 among the first large, organized labour protests against the colonial tea-plantation system, and an early landmark of the Indian trade union movement, decades ahead of the wage-and-welfare reforms that later reached the gardens.
What is and is not marked
Here is what the record will support, weighed and stated flat. A strike began in the first days of May 1921. Thousands walked, by counts that disagree fourfold, and by Bengali-language counts disagree far more than that. People died at Chandpur on the night of May 20. The government's investigator found two serious cases and no bayonet wounds. The only official death figure, at least 160, is for disease, and its author called it unreliable. The count of those killed was never taken.
The reader's tea still comes off gardens worked by the descendants of the system these people tried to leave. And at Chandpur, a century on, one Bengali account records the plainest measure of all: there is no memorial. No stone, no marker, nothing at the station or the ghat to say what happened there. An office that certifies by weight and measure can tell you that much for certain. The place carries no mark.
Sources
- Coolie Exodus from Assam's Chargola Valley, 1921: An Analytical Study, Economic and Political Weekly (the academic study of the exodus and the colonial government's official correspondence).
- India's Northeast in UK Parliament: Colonial Account of 1921 Uprising of Tea Garden Workers in Chargola and Longai Valleys in Assam, Nezine (Sir Henry Wheeler's investigation and his report's exact finding, "two serious cases," no bayonet injuries; the 6,000 to 7,000 mid-May departure figure; the Chandpur crowd numbers; the named officials Wares, K.C. De, and Dr. Batra; the 160-death disease estimate; Captain Sheppard).
- চাঁদপুরে চা শ্রমিক গণহত্যার একশ বছর (A Hundred Years of the Chandpur Tea Workers' Massacre), Chandpur Times, in Bengali (the 7,000 to 15,000 higher death-toll range, the account of bodies deliberately cut before being put into the river, the magistrate Sushil Singh and the garden representative Ferguson, and that no memorial exists at Chandpur today).
- Remembering the Chargola Exodus (Muluk Cholo Dibas) of Tea Plantation Workers, Sanhati (the 30,000 to 40,000 popular figure, the Muluk Cholo cry, that the Chandpur dead were never officially counted).
- Here Is All You Need to Know About "Chargola Coolie Exodus," an Important Part of Barak Valley's History, Barak Bulletin (the Chargola/Karimganj/Sylhet geography and the May 3 start date).
- Bengal's 'Muluk Chalo' Stir Was a Harbinger of the Trade Union Movement in India, Get Bengal (the Chandpur steamer ghat and railway station accounts, the railway and steamer strikes, Deshapriya Jatindramohan Sengupta).
- Pradip Barman, Inscribing the Migratory History of Tea Plantation Labours of Assam, Rupkatha Journal Vol. 13 No. 3 (2021) (the roughly 9,000 first-wave departure figure, already cited on this site's sibling article on the Assam tea workforce).