Time has a way of erasing many characters, leaving them buried in the sands of history until someone chooses to bring them back through words, stories, or the silver screen. One such forgotten figure who has been revived in recent times through The Bengal Files is Gopal Mukherjee, popularly known as Gopal Patha.
“Patha” means a male goat in Bangla, and the nickname came from the family’s goat-meat shop near College Street. However as per his family members, especially grandson, its not “Patha” but “Paata” or “Booker Paata” in Bengali which means Courage, confidence.
In August 1946, when “Direct Action Day” ignited the Great Calcutta Killings, Gopal Mukherjee built a self-defense network almost overnight. Depending on who recounts the story, he was either the strongman who shielded Calcutta’s Hindus from being butchered and stopped the city from slipping into Pakistan’s grip, or the commander of brutal reprisals who answered killings with killings. What cannot be denied, however, is his courage and skill in rallying hundreds of boys to stand up to the Muslim League mobs that went on a killing rampage during those four fateful days.
The recent film The Bengal Files portrayed Gopal Patha only through the lens of those four turbulent days. While that snapshot has shaped a public perception of him, his family has objected to the narrow portrayal, arguing that it fails to capture the full measure of his life and legacy.
That is why I tried to dig deeper into history and piece together a more detailed picture of Gopal Mukherjee – one that goes beyond the limited frame of cinema and may help us understand him better.
To know Gopal Mukherjee aka Gopal Patha (Paata) better, we must understand the social and political fabric of Calcutta during that time and how those shaped the ideology and personal beliefs of Gopal.
Calcutta’s 1940s mood wasn’t just Hindu vs Muslim or Congress vs League. It was a tug-of-war between ideas about how freedom should be won and how communities should survive the transition.
Gandhism: Non-violence and moral force: In 1940s Kolkata, Gandhism stood as a moral appeal for non-violence at a time when the city was drowning in communal suspicion and street-level clashes. Gandhi’s message of peace and reconciliation often sounded distant in a city where daily life was ruled by fear of sudden riots. His fasts, prayers, and meetings in places like Hyderi Manzil symbolized an attempt to heal a city tearing itself apart. Yet many in Kolkata, especially the youth, doubted whether Gandhian non-violence could protect their families or bring freedom. In Gopal’s world also, this approach of Gandhi was dangerously abstract. Years later he recalled refusing Gandhi’s request to surrender weapons during the interview: “With these arms I saved the sisters and mothers of my area… I will not give them up. even not a needle if I ever used that to kill someone to save my people” That blunt answer captures the gulf between Gandhi’s and Gopal’s creed.
The Subhas – Bhagat Singh current: In Bengal, the romance of Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti, the legend of Bagha Jatin, and then the wartime charisma of Subhas Chandra Bose nourished a belief that British power yielded to force. Even where people weren’t formal members of any group, the message travelled: train, arm, defend. Gopal’s squads fit this ethic. It was not “revolution” in the ideological sense, but it felt closer to Bose-style action than to the prayer-meeting politics.
Communal politics and the logic of majorities: In 1940s Kolkata, communal politics revolved around the cold logic of majorities. The Muslim League projected its strength through mass mobilizations, processions, and calls for Pakistan, while the Hindu Mahasabha urged Hindus to organize and defend their neighbourhoods. On the ground, this meant that survival often depended not on state protection but on which side had greater numbers on the streets. For Gopal Patha, who grew up in the volatile markets and lanes of North Kolkata, this arithmetic of strength became the foundation of his worldview. He saw that in moments of collapse, slogans or appeals to peace were powerless unless backed by men willing to fight. This hardened belief shaped his response during the Great Calcutta Killings: he gathered boys, formed the Bharat Jatiya Bahini, and matched the League’s violence with his own retaliatory force. In his eyes, it was not ideology but numbers, courage, and readiness to strike that decided whether a community survived.
Who was Gopal Patha before the riots? He was not a conventional politician. Gopal Patha’s early life was deeply rooted in the streets and akharas of North Calcutta, where strength and loyalty mattered as much as education or wealth. The wrestling pits, known locally as akharas, were not just places to build muscle but also hubs of discipline, bonding, and local prestige. Running his family meat business gave him economic independence and a constant network of men who looked to him for work, patronage, or protection. Some city histories even suggest a family connection to Anukul Chandra Mukherjee, one of the masterminds of the daring 1914 Rodda Arms Heist, when revolutionaries stole a consignment of Mauser pistols in broad daylight. The Rodda memorial on Ganesh Chandra Avenue, dedicated to the conspirators, is often associated with Anukul’s relatives and local patrons; a few accounts also claim Gopal himself helped preserve that memory.
By the time mid 1940s arrived, Gopal was no ordinary meat trader. He was part businessman, part wrestler, part neighborhood guardian; and in a city that was hurtling toward communal violence, these identities merged into something larger. His sense of duty to his community, sharpened by an inherited legacy of revolution, shaped the way he responded when Calcutta descended into chaos.
Calcutta, August 1946: When politics became street war: On 16 August 1946 the Muslim League called “Direct Action Day,” a show of strength to press the demand for Pakistan. In Calcutta, the League’s provincial premier H. S. Suhrawardy presided over the city as processions, counter-processions, and incendiary speeches gave way to massacre, fire, and looting. For four days the city bled; casualty estimates range into the thousands. The episode would be remembered as the Great Calcutta Killings. A detailed writing on this topic you can find in my blog endlessvista.com
Order collapsed in many parts of Calcutta. Police patrols were scarce, sluggish, or openly distrusted. Neighborhoods fell back on their own resources, with self-defense becoming the only option. In that vacuum, Gopal Patha – the wrestler and trader stepped forward and began assembling armed squads drawn from local akharas and street boys. By his own later account, he gathered as many as “800 boys” and gave them a stark directive: “If you come to know that one murder has taken place, you commit ten murders.” Retaliation became his principle, framed as protection for Hindus in a city set ablaze by the Muslim League’s mobs. Critics have since called him a killer, but in truth there was no evidence of Gopal having any history of violence except securing some arms etc since 1942 which he or his boys never used before those days of 1946. His actions during the Great Calcutta Killings were born of circumstance – a reaction rather than nature, reprisal rather than premeditation.
Most accounts agree that the Bahini’s methods were anything but gentle. Squads of trained wrestlers and local boys patrolled chokepoints, moved quickly through lanes, and struck back wherever Hindu families were under siege. Their weapons were whatever came to hand – iron rods, knives, pistols and bombs secured in 1942, or makeshift tools from the markets. By August 20, according to one India Today report, the Muslim League quietly sought a ceasefire once it became clear that Hindu resistance had stiffened. The same report notes that Gopal agreed, but only on the condition that League men lay down their arms first. The finer details of that negotiation are difficult to prove, yet the broader memory of a deadlock when neither side could advance further matches the recollections of survivors who saw the tide turn.
The essential truth is simpler: by mobilizing so quickly, Gopal and his men prevented far greater damage. But there is also a different angle: in such a scenario, “retaliation” rarely stays clean, and innocents almost always get swept into the cycle of violence. That double edge is why Gopal Patha remains such a divided figure – hailed as a rescuer by some, remembered as a reaper by others. However in an interview Gopal denied killing any innocent Muslim. He specifically told against a direct questions that their objective was to kill only those who were attacking Hindu people or Hindu homes. While ideally that sounds logical, what Gopal’s boys did during those days cannot be verified.
There is also a story of Gopal stepping in to save Gandhi himself at a later time. When troublemakers began attacking Gandhi’s sibir (camp), Gopal and his boys defended Gandhi. With a touch of irony, he later remarked how the great preacher of non-violence had ended up relying on armed guards for protection. Yet behind the bravado was also a note of regret. In interviews, he sounded almost sorrowful when recalling how some of his boys drifted into snatching and robbery in the years that followed. To contain that slide, he pulled many of them off the streets, tried to discipline the rest, and even helped a few find jobs so they could rebuild their lives.
After the killings: Gandhi’s fast and the fragile peace: A year later, Gandhi returned to a still-fragile city. He spent Independence Day not at a flag-hoisting in Delhi but fasting in Calcutta. That choice still stings and inspires, depending on the perspective. Hyderi Manzil saw prayer meetings that drew Hindu and Muslim delegations together. The 73 hour fast of Gandhi ended when leaders across factions signed a pledge that peace had returned and would be kept. For a few brief weeks, it worked.
For men like Gopal, that peace meant holstering weapons while keeping networks intact. Gopal lived until 2005, long enough to give interviews that continue to resurface today. In one recorded conversation with journalist Andrew Whitehead in April 1997, he admitted that he had ordered brutal reprisals to halt the killings. “It was basically duty,” he explained – helping those in distress, whatever it required. He even told during this recorded interview that he sent three of his boys to kill Suhrawardy but the jeep faced an accident and all three boys were killed in Beleghata. He also insisted that, in the arithmetic of 1946, muscle and speed saved lives. That statement has since been quoted in articles, documentaries, and television debates as filmmakers, politicians, and pundits revisit his story. Yet the rediscovery has been uneven: some portray him as a Bengali saviour who defended his community, while others reduce him to a communal strongman whose methods crossed moral lines.
So where do we place Gopal Patha? History often forces us to admit that a “protector” in one lane is a “perpetrator” in the next. Gopal Patha may belong in that uncomfortable category. The proper response is neither appreciation nor denunciation, but a clear-eyed account of what he did, why he did it, and how people lived and died around him.
The recent spike of attention around Gopal, whether positive or negative, matters less than returning to the authentic sources. The contemporary reporting on the 1946 killings, Gandhi’s Calcutta fasts and the pledges they produced, and the taped interviews Gopal gave in old age all help us triangulate the legend.
And if one pauses for a moment at Ganesh Chandra Avenue, beneath the busts of the Rodda Arms conspirators, the city’s layered story becomes clearer: traders and wrestlers, idealists and fixers, holy men and hard men. Gopal Patha belongs to that mosaic. He came from the market and the akhara, and when Calcutta burned, he did what such men often do – gathered his boys, drew his lines, and forced the night to blink first.
Whether we choose to light a candle for him or argue against his choices, what cannot be denied is the scale of the crisis in those four days and the speed with which Gopal filled a vacuum the state had left open for Calcutta to burn. In that sense, he was a quintessential product of Calcutta’s worst hours – someone who refused to wait for permission and instead did what he believed was needed to be done to defend humanity, Hindus, and Calcutta.
*************************************************************