The Forgotten Holocaust: Did 500 Hindu Labourers Vanish from the History of Calcutta’s 1946 Great Killings?
Great Calcutta Killings 1946
The Ghosts of Kesoram Mills: Calcutta's Forgotten 1946 Hindu Massacre
They came from the villages of Orissa, carrying little more than the dust of their homeland on their clothes and dreams of a better life in their hearts. Calcutta, the grand and sprawling Imperial city, promised work. The clatter of its jute mills and the hum of its factories were a siren song for the poor and the ambitious. In the bustling industrial enclave of Metiabruz, within the walls of the Kesoram Cotton Mills, hundreds of these Oriya men found their new reality—a life of grueling labor, but one that held the promise of sending money back home.
They were fathers, sons, and brothers, living in cramped quarters, their shared language and culture a small comfort in a city that was both vast and alien. They likely never imagined that their factory walls, a symbol of their livelihood, would one day become their tomb. They couldn't have known that the political storms gathering over India were about to unleash a hellish fury directly upon them.
On August 16, 1946, amidst the bloody chaos of the "Great Calcutta Killings," these 500 Hindu laborers were systematically butchered and burnt alive. It was a massacre, not a riot. Yet, this story of incredible brutality was quietly and methodically erased from the pages of history, leaving the ghosts of its victims to whisper their tale in the margins of India's past.
A City Primed for a Bloodbath
The summer of 1946 was suffocating, not just from the heat, but from the tension of a nation on the verge of breaking. The British were leaving. The question was, to whom? The Indian National Congress pushed for a united India, while the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, demanded a separate nation for Muslims—Pakistan.
When negotiations stalled, the Muslim League declared August 16th as "Direct Action Day." It was presented as a peaceful protest to stake their claim for Pakistan. But the language used was anything but peaceful. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal, made a chilling promise that he would ensure Calcutta remained "closed." He declared a public holiday, ensuring that mobs could gather without obstruction. The city held its breath.
The day did not begin with protests; it began with violence. Armed mobs, reportedly given ration cards by the government to sustain them, emerged onto the streets. It was organized chaos. Lists of Hindu-owned shops were allegedly distributed. The violence was not a spontaneous eruption; it was a planned demolition of a city's soul.
The Inferno: When Calcutta Drowned in Blood
What followed for the next four days was a descent into medieval barbarity. The Great Calcutta Killings were not a riot between two equal sides; it was a state-sanctioned pogrom that quickly spiraled into a vortex of retaliatory violence.
The streets became a hunting ground. The air, thick with the smell of burning homes, carried the screams of the dying. Drains overflowed with human bodies. Vultures, growing bold, circled ominously overhead. Official figures, often a sanitized version of the truth, put the death toll around 4,000, with tens of thousands more injured. The reality was likely far worse.
From this city-wide inferno, certain stories of targeted, unimaginable cruelty have surfaced over time. None is more harrowing than the fate of the Oriya workers at the Kesoram Cotton Mills.
A Massacre Written in Blood and Fire
The industrial area of Metiabruz, with its large population of migrant workers, was a tinderbox. The Hindu laborers at the Kesoram mill were isolated, far from their homes, and seen as easy targets.
According to survivor accounts and historical research pieced together decades later, a massive mob descended on the mill. Some reports name a local communist trade union leader, Syed Abdullah Farooqui, as one of the instigators, highlighting the complex and often cynical political alliances of the time.
The workers were trapped. The exits were blocked. The mob’s intentions were not just to kill, but to annihilate. They set the mill ablaze, turning the factory into a giant furnace. Those who tried to flee the flames were met with swords, knives, and clubs at the gates. They were butchered and thrown back into the fire.
For the 500 Oriya men inside, there was no escape. Their pleas for mercy were swallowed by the roar of the fire and the bloodthirsty cries of the mob. It was a planned execution, designed to terrorize and to send a message that would echo far beyond the factory walls.
When Biswanath Das, the former Prime Minister of Orissa, rushed to Calcutta to find his people, he was met with a scene of utter devastation. The scale of the slaughter was so immense, so complete, that it defied comprehension.
The Politics of Silence: Why History Forgot
How does a massacre of 500 people simply vanish from a nation's memory? The erasure of the Kesoram Mills tragedy was not an accident; it was a choice.
In the aftermath, the newly independent Indian state was focused on forging a single, secular national identity. Acknowledging specific, communally-charged atrocities was seen as dangerous—an act that could unravel the fragile fabric of the new nation. The story of a Muslim mob, allegedly led by a communist, slaughtering Hindu workers did not fit the clean narrative of a united struggle for freedom.
And so, it was buried.
Textbooks Ignored It: Mainstream history textbooks mention the Great Calcutta Killings as a tragic event, but they rarely delve into the specific, organized massacres that defined it. The human faces of the victims were lost, replaced by sanitized statistics.
Official Records are Mute: The horror of Kesoram Mills exists primarily in survivor testimonies, oral histories, and the research of a few determined historians who refused to let the story die. Official British and Indian records of the time are conspicuously silent on the specifics of this large-scale event.
A Narrative Was Shaped: The dominant historical narrative focused on the high politics of Partition, on the decisions of men like Nehru, Jinnah, and Mountbatten. The stories of ordinary people, like the Oriya laborers who were slaughtered for their faith and vulnerability, were deemed inconvenient footnotes.
The Lingering Echoes of a Forgotten Tragedy
Remembering the Kesoram Cotton Mills massacre is not about reopening old wounds. It is about acknowledging the full, unvarnished truth of our past. It is a stark lesson in how political rhetoric, when mixed with religious fanaticism, can lead to unimaginable human suffering.
The massacre was a chilling preview of the horrors that would engulf Punjab and other parts of Bengal during Partition just one year later. It proved that violence could be used as a political tool to terrorize populations and force demographic change.
Today, the story of the Kesoram Mills victims is being slowly reclaimed, not by mainstream institutions, but by community historians and the descendants of those who survived. It serves as a powerful and painful reminder that history is not just what is written in books; it is also what is remembered in hearts and what is deliberately forced into silence. To forget them is to allow the forces that murdered them a final victory.