History is not always written with ink. Sometimes it is written with fire, with blood, and with screams that echo long after the smoke has cleared. Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, is one such chapter in Bengal’s and India’s past.

In just four days of violence, Calcutta – a city once known for its mix of cultures and communities – turned into a killing ground. Officially, about 4,000 people were killed. Unofficial estimates suggest the number was closer to 10,000. More than 100,000 people lost their homes. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ash.

Yet for decades, Direct Action Day remained half-forgotten. Partition in 1947 overshadowed it. Textbooks skipped over it. Politicians avoided it. For most Indians, it was reduced to a passing reference. Survivors carried their memories quietly, often speaking in whispers about those terrible days.

Now, decades later, the tragedy has returned to public discussion – not through history books, but through cinema. Films like The Bengal Files have pulled Direct Action Day out of the shadows. They dramatize the pain, betrayal, and human cost of 1946, forcing us to remember that ignoring history never heals wounds; it only keeps them festering in silence.

Watching the film “The Bengal Files”

When my wife and I went to watch The Bengal Files yesterday, I carried hope and anticipation. But I walked out of the theatre with confusion, disappointment, and anger. Same I was discussing with two of my friends Prithwi and Pankaj who also watched the same show.

I was confused because the film blurred facts and events, mixing up Direct Action Day with the Noakhali riots, bringing references to present day events in West Bengal, and even putting Gandhi in places he never was. I began doubting my own understanding of history and also finding it difficult to connect the dots between past, present and multiple events – all together.

I was disappointed because the film failed to connect emotionally. Despite being about one of the darkest chapters of Indian history, the dialogues were weak, the acting forced, and the aggression overdone. A story of such magnitude should have moved hearts; instead, it left me cold with no emotion at all. In fact a faint tired cry was coming out from inside me.

I was angry because this was a missed opportunity. The truth of Bengal’s suffering has long been hidden from people. A filmmaker like Vivek Agnihotri, who has handled historical subjects with impact before (The Kashmir Files, The Tashkent Files), could have presented this story with depth. Instead, the film stumbled under the weight of too many subplots. While he claimed that his research went upto eighteen thousand pages, it didn’t reflect more than hundred pages in the film, that too poorly drafted. it may have reasons like possibility of censorship, political unrest or even riots in some sensitive areas. That may be the reason  instead of showing vividly, newspaper cuttings etc were shown to narrate the background.

Still, watching the film pushed me to dig deeper. I began revisiting what I had heard as a child from my grandmother about the Noakhali riots of October 1946. She told how our family fled Sylhet and came to Silchar, Assam in 1947, how chaos across present day Bangladesh erupted, how Hindus were attacked, uprooted from their ancestral homes including us, and left to wander as refugees. We were lucky since a few from our family were already studying in Silchar but many were not.

What follows here is not a formal history. This is a compilation of writings by many, and my understanding, reflections  – woven together with what I saw in the film and what I feel today.

Bengal in 1946: A Province on Edge: To understand why Calcutta burned, we must step back to the Bengal of the mid-1940s.

Still Scarred by Famine: Just three years earlier, Bengal had endured the Great Famine of 1943, which killed three million people. Villages emptied, fields lay barren, and thousands poured into Calcutta looking for survival. Refugee camps and slums grew. Even in 1946, hunger and desperation were everywhere. Poverty made the city restless, and communal propaganda found easy ground.

Demographics and Tensions: According to the 1941 census, Bengal’s population was about 54% Muslim and 43% Hindu. Rural Bengal was mostly Muslim, while Calcutta was largely Hindu. This created a natural divide: rural Muslims leaned toward the Muslim League, while the urban Hindu middle class leaned toward Congress. Despite political differences, Bengal had long seen cultural blending. Hindu poets wrote in Persian. Muslim peasants joined Hindu festivals. The “bhadralok” elite mingled in clubs and coffee houses. But by 1946, that fragile coexistence was cracking.

The Cabinet Mission Plan: In 1946, the British Cabinet Mission proposed that India remain united as a federation, with provinces grouped into clusters. Congress accepted at first but later pulled back, fearing it gave too much power to provinces. The Muslim League, feeling betrayed, walked out of talks. On 29 July 1946, Mohammad Ali Jinnah announced that the League would take “Direct Action” to secure Pakistan. He declared: “We will have either a divided India or a destroyed India.”

Bengal’s Politics: Bengal was ruled by the Muslim League under Premier Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. He declared 16 August 1946 a public holiday to allow Muslims to join the Direct Action rally at Ochterlony Monument (now Shaheed Minar). Posters and leaflets urged Muslims to “show strength.” Tension grew. Rumors spread that Hindus were arming themselves. Governor Sir Frederick Burrows warned of violence, but the British Raj had little interest in intervening. One intelligence officer later admitted: “We knew Calcutta would erupt. We simply did not have the will to prevent it.”

The Four Days of Riots:

16 August: The Spark: On the morning of the rally, tens of thousands of Muslims gathered at Ochterlony Monument. Suhrawardy’s fiery speech, though later denied as incitement, was taken by many as a call to action. As the rally dispersed, mobs stormed into Hindu areas. Shops were looted, trams stopped, passengers attacked. By evening, Hindu groups struck back. Violence spread across Sealdah, Howrah, and north Calcutta.

The Statesman, Calcutta’s leading English paper, wrote: “Within hours, the city descended into chaos. Men, women, and children were hacked, burnt, and beaten to death in broad daylight. Police stood helpless.”

17 – 18 August: The Killing Fields: The violence escalated. Whole neighborhoods burned. Curfews were declared but ignored. Hindu mobs struck Muslim homes in Chitpur and Burrabazar. Muslim mobs retaliated in Park Circus and Entally. A British army officer wrote: “I saw bodies piled on handcarts, pushed through blood-stained streets. Corpses floated in the Hooghly. The air was thick with smoke and the cries of women.”

19 August: The Aftermath: On the fourth day, British and Gurkha troops moved in, finally restoring order. The official toll stood at 4,000 dead and over 100,000 homeless. Many bodies were never counted. Historians believe the real number was closer to 10,000.

One survivor recalled years later: “For four days, we did not leave our rooftop. We watched neighbors kill neighbors, houses burning, and dogs dragging away corpses.”

Calcutta, once called the “City of Joy,” had become a city of corpses.

The Forgotten Victims: Oriyas and Other Migrants: Direct Action Day is often told as a Hindu – Muslim clash. But Calcutta in 1946 was also home to large migrant communities – Oriyas, Biharis, Marwaris, Punjabis, and Anglo-Indians. When violence erupted, mobs did not care who was “local” or “outsider.” For Oriya Hindus, who lived in slums and working-class neighborhoods like Kidderpore, Entally, and Garden Reach, the riots were devastating. Many were killed or driven out simply for being Hindus in Muslim-majority areas. Their huts were set on fire. Families fled with nothing.

One Oriya survivor remembered in his mother tongue: “We came to Calcutta to earn bread, but instead we found death. My father and brother never returned from the docks that day.”

These migrant Oriyas, Biharis, Marwaris had no voice in politics. Their suffering barely appears in official records. Yet their deaths remind us that communal hatred always strikes the weakest first.

Who Was Responsible?

• The Muslim League: Jinnah’s call for Direct Action and Suhrawardy’s holiday declaration gave the riots their spark. Police stood by as mobs killed.
• The Congress: Though not instigators, their political arrogance deepened mistrust. Some Hindu leaders encouraged retaliation.
• The British: Above all, the colonial rulers must bear blame. Their “divide and rule” had poisoned relations for decades. And when Calcutta burned, they looked away.

As historian R.C. Majumdar wrote: “The British created the circumstances, the League provided the spark, and the Congress failed to douse the flames.”

Aftermath: The Domino Effect: Direct Action Day was only the beginning.

• Noakhali, October 1946: Hindus were attacked, villages destroyed, women abducted. Gandhi walked from village to village to restore peace.
• Bihar, late 1946: Hindu mobs retaliated with mass killings of Muslims. Some reports counted 30,000 dead.
• Punjab, 1947: Partition unleashed full-scale slaughter. Trains of refugees were massacred. Millions were displaced.

Direct Action Day was, in many ways, the “dress rehearsal” for Partition.

The Film “The Bengal Files” and Historical Memory

How the Film Portrays the Tragedy: The Bengal Files brings Direct Action Day out of dusty archives and places it on the cinema screen. It shows the rally, the mobs that spilled into Calcutta’s lanes, and the brutal killings that followed. Cinematic sequences of burning houses, fleeing families, and corpses lying unclaimed on the streets recreate the horror of August 1946.

The movie focuses strongly on Hindu victimhood, portraying families torn apart, women subjected to unspeakable violence, and children left orphaned. The emotional intensity is deliberate – it aims to shock viewers into recognizing how Bengal suffered before Partition.

For many in the audience, it may be their first encounter with this history and hence found a large number clapping on some dialogues that were anti Gandhi, anti-Muslim or forcefully included in some scenes that looked out of context. School textbooks have often reduced Direct Action Day to a paragraph, if they mention it at all. In that sense, the film tried to play a so-called educational role, albeit through dramatization. However, in my opinion, this should not be considered as educational at all since it has enough drawbacks to make someone confused, ill-informed and form wrong opinion or judgement about various facts.

What It Gets Right

• Emotionally truthful: Survivors’ accounts match the film’s depiction of sudden betrayal and overwhelming violence. Many eyewitnesses did describe hiding on rooftops, running barefoot through burning streets, and watching neighbors and known people turn into enemies overnight.
• Silence exposed: The film succeeds in breaking decades of silence. It forces viewers to ask why such a massive tragedy was omitted from mainstream memory.
• Personalization: By telling the story through families rather than political leaders, it humanizes the statistics.
• Drawing parallel between past and present: The Bengal Files makes the chilling point that history does not just repeat itself – it adapts itself to the times. Characters like Saswata embody that continuity, reminding the audience that the underlying pattern of using populations as pawns has never really gone away.

 What It Misses

However, like all films, The Bengal Files simplifies a complex history.

1. One-sided focus: The film emphasizes Hindu suffering but glosses over Muslim victims of retaliatory violence. In reality, Direct Action Day saw atrocities committed by both sides, with cycles of revenge fueling the carnage. While it was solely instigated by Muslim league and killings carried out by Muslims, Hindus also retaliated and a lot of Muslims were killed too.
2. Political nuance: The movie downplays the roles of the British and the Congress, focusing almost entirely on the Muslim League. While Suhrawardy and the League deserve heavy blame, the wider context of colonial negligence and political arrogance is missing.
3. One of the biggest weaknesses of the film lies in its careless mixing of historical events. Instead of presenting the Direct Action Day and Noakhali riots as distinct episodes, each with its own causes, progression, and aftermath, the narrative blurs the lines between them. For example, the film attributes Gandhi’s controversial message urging women to take poison if assaulted to the Calcutta context, whereas in reality he made that remark during his stay in Noakhali. This makes the storyline appear disjointed, as if several episodes have simply been placed side by side without a binding thread. These distortions not only confuse viewers but also dilute the gravity of each event by merging them into a patchwork of loosely connected scenes.
4. The present as shown in the movie comes across as rather forced and unconvincing. The dialogues seem to be imposed rather than naturally flowing from the characters, resulting in a delivery that feels loose and uninspired. While the words spoken during the present time is strong, true and based on many incidences in West Bengal in recent times, in the overall context, it was unnecessary and deliberate. Instead of drawing the audience into the emotional weight of the narrative, the performances often fail to evoke genuine feelings, leaving scenes flat and disconnected.
5. The issue extends beyond historical inaccuracies into character development. The portrayal of Amar and young Bharti, who could have served as strong emotional anchors, instead feels excessively dramatized and one-dimensional. Their aggression is heightened to the point of caricature, leaving no room for subtlety or nuance. Dialogue delivery lacks the rhythm and viewers had to forcefully carry along. Rather than building an emotional bridge with viewers, the performances create a sense of detachment. The absence of genuine vulnerability, restraint, or depth in their expressions makes it difficult for the audience to empathize or invest in their journeys.
6. Another major factor that undermines the film is the use of language. The choice of having Bengalis speak in Hindi and, conversely, non-Bengali characters delivering dialogues in Bengali feels jarring and unnatural. Language is not just a medium of communication but also a carrier of culture, emotion, and authenticity. When it is mishandled, the entire atmosphere of a scene collapses. In cinema, especially when dealing with sensitive historical subjects, language can be a powerful tool to transport audiences into the time and place being depicted. Here, however, it becomes one of the film’s weakest points, ensuring that despite the subject’s gravity, the storytelling remains hollow and emotionally unconvincing.
7. Gandhi has been shown as one such villain for this incidence. While Gandhi can be blamed for many things, massacre of Direct Action day or Noakhali riots are not entirely for Gandhi. By August 1946, Gandhi had largely stepped back from the formal decision-making of the Congress high command. He was not in Calcutta during the outbreak (he was in Noakhali and later in Bihar in 1946–47, trying to douse communal tensions at the grassroots). Congress’s political dealings with the British and the Muslim League were being handled by Nehru, Patel, Azad, and others. Gandhi remained the moral voice of the party, but not the strategist. Moreover he lost direct control over Muslim League. The call for Direct Action came from Jinnah and the League. Gandhi just openly condemned the killings. He called Direct Action “a resort to anarchy” and described the riots as a “black day for India.” In short Gandhi did not cause the Direct Action Day riots, but he also failed to prevent or control them. What he did do was to respond afterwards, throwing himself into riot-torn areas (Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta in 1947) to personally try and restore peace.  His role was thus less of a “controller” and more of a “healer.”

Why The Film Still Matters: Despite its limitations, The Bengal Files performs a vital task. It revives memory. It makes us remember a chapter that slipped into silence. Cinema has the power to ignite conversations where textbooks fail. As one critic observed: “History tells us what happened. Cinema makes us feel it.”

The real silver lining in The Bengal Files was the presence of Mithun Chakraborty, Saswata Chatterjee and Pallavi Joshi, who managed to bring weight and credibility.

Mithun Da’s character, representing the collective voice of “We the People”, was especially powerful. Through his role, the film attempted to remind viewers that the wounds of Bengal’s partition and Direct Action Day were not just historical events, but scars carried by ordinary citizens. The way he delivered his dialogues had a chilling effect, almost like a voice rising from the ashes of forgotten history to confront the audience with truths long buried. On top of that he was shown with burnt tongue and impotent which depicts the general population who had never a chance to express what they wanted and succumbed to a few deciding their fate and the country just for personal gain, lust for the throne and power.

Pallavi Joshi, on the other hand, played the symbolic figure of Maa Bharti. Her portrayal was not about loud words or dramatic gestures but about silence, restraint, and an unspoken pain that carried volumes. In her eyes one could see the helplessness of countless mothers and women who lived through the massacres. The silence she carried was not emptiness but testimony – the silence of someone who had seen too much, someone who had endured what words could not express.

Saswata Chatterjee’s portrayal is to remind viewers that while the names, faces, and political outfits may have changed, the pattern of events often remains uncomfortably similar even today. During the period of Direct Action Day and subsequent riots, goons were mobilized and weaponized for political purposes. Many of them were not just locals but were brought in deliberately to tip the balance of violence. The riots were not just spontaneous outbreaks of anger or call for a separate country but often organized actions with backing from influential quarters.

In recent times, as hinted in the film, the narrative points to allegations that certain political persons have played a role in facilitating or encouraging illegal immigration from Bangladesh into West Bengal. These groups then become a potential vote bank and, in some narratives, even a force that mobilized during political unrest.

Together, these three performances gave the film a soul. Mithun Chakraborty’s role provided the spine of the narrative, giving it a grounding in moral and historical conscience, while Pallavi Joshi’s character served as the emotional anchor, embodying the trauma and dignity of those who suffered but remained unheard. And Saswata’s role works as a kind of bridge between these two timelines. His character reflects how ordinary people or functionaries are often caught in the larger design of power. The film argues that Bengal’s story of riots, displacement, and demographic shifts is not just a memory of the 1946s but an ongoing reality. The common people remain the victims – whether it was Hindus uprooted during the riots or locals now feeling marginalized due to unchecked migration. The only difference is the players – yesterday it was colonial administrators and communal leaders, today it is modern politicians.

In a movie that to an extent stumbled in execution – be it historical accuracy, language choices, or emotional connect – these three performances stood out. They gave the audience something to hold on to, something that felt real amidst the uneven storytelling. Without them, the film would have lost much of its impact.

Darshan Kumar also did some justice to his character, but there remained a noticeable gap in his performance. The frustration he portrayed, especially under the suffocating pressure of bureaucracy working at the mercy of political forces, came through well. His expressions of helplessness and suppressed anger reflected the reality of officers caught between duty and political compulsions.

However, there were moments where his acting felt a little forced, almost as if he was trying too hard to convey intensity. This created an artificiality in certain scenes, breaking the natural flow of the character. While he succeeded in bringing out the struggles of an honest officer trapped in a compromised system, his performance lacked the seamless authenticity that could have left a stronger impact.

Remembering and Forgetting

Why Did We Forget? : One of the most striking aspects of Direct Action Day is how quickly it faded from official narratives. Partition violence in Punjab has been widely studied, but Bengal’s suffering often remains in the shadows.

There are several reasons:

• Nationalist narratives: Post-independence leaders preferred to highlight unity, not division. Dwelling on communal carnage threatened the image of a new India.
• Political sensitivities: Bengal was divided between West Bengal (India) and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). Both sides avoided highlighting atrocities that could strain relations.
• Selective memory: Textbooks often reduced Direct Action Day to a few lines, emphasizing political negotiations rather than human suffering.

As a result, generations grew up unaware of what Calcutta endured in August 1946.

The Politics of Silence: For survivors, silence was also personal. Many families carried memories of betrayal by neighbors or friends. Speaking of those days risked reopening wounds. In a society eager to move forward, silence seemed safer.

The Importance of Remembering: Remembering Direct Action Day is not about rekindling communal bitterness. It is about truth and acknowledgment.

• It reminds us how fragile social harmony can be when poisoned by political ambition.
• It shows that once hatred is unleashed, it spares no one.
• It honors the victims – men, women, and children whose lives ended in fire and blood.

As historian Tapan Raychaudhuri wrote: “History is not only about kings and states. It is about the tears of common people. To ignore those tears is to deny history itself.”

To Summarize : Direct Action Day was not just a riot. It was a turning point. It revealed how far the communal divide had grown, how reckless political leaders had become, and how indifferent the colonial state was to Indian lives. It foreshadowed the horrors of Partition, where millions would suffer a fate even more devastating.

Films like The Bengal Files remind us that memory matters. They may simplify, dramatize, even polarize – but they ensure we do not forget. They force us to confront questions that textbooks avoided.

In the words of The Statesman, written in those dark days of August 1946: “Calcutta has seen many tragedies, but never such savagery, where the blood of her own children ran thicker than her rivers.”

The recent ban on the film by West Bengal Govt is somehow depicts that one of the darkest chapters of history is once again being tried to keep away from people. To remember is not to hate. To remember is to learn. May be West Bengal govt is too scared that violence will erupt or to appease Muslim community, which is a large vote bank, and, in the film, Muslim community is shown as the major culprit. While it is a fact that the violence was initiated by Muslim league, the aftereffect was on both communities.

However, to me personally, Direct Action Day teaches us that when politics abandons humanity, it is ordinary people who pay with their lives. Bengal paid that price in 1946. The least we can do is not let memory die and learn what hatred can cause to humanity…

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** The above summary, drawing upon a wide range of sources including the internet, Wikipedia, and various writings, encapsulates the incidences. The reflections are personal without intending to diminish any other faith or religion or beliefs. This is not a political writeup nor history and not to be used for any educational purpose. Using this for any purpose is purely at readers’ discretion without any obligation on the author’s part.