Gopal Chandra 'Patha' Mukherjee or Mukhopadhyay (1913-2005) was a goonda or gang leader in Calcutta and involved in the Great Calcutta Killings which so disfigured the city at Partition. I talked to him in Calcutta on 25 April 1997 in what he said was his first broadcast interview. My colleague Nazes Afroz translated to and from Bengali.
Mukherjee, a Hindu, talked openly about his role in street violence at the time of Partition and was proud of refusing to surrender any weapons to Gandhi. He explained that his nickname of 'Patha', goat, came from the family meat shop on College Street.
I wrote a newspaper article back in 1997 based on my interviews with Mukherjee and others who lived through the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 - it's available on the web and I've also posted the text below. My interview with Mukherjee was cited in an article about Direct Action Day in Calcutta posted in 2015 - here's the link
There's an entry on him in Suranjan Das and Jayanata K. Ray, The Goondas: towards a reconstruction of the Calcutta underworld (Calcutta, 1996), which says of him: 'Gopal was 5 feet 4 inches in height, wore long hairs like ladies, sported a moustache and long beards. He was a leader of leaders in the underworld. Gopal organised a big Resistance Group during the communal riot of 1946. Subsequently, during the 1950s, he and his underlings committed a large number of crimes, including dacoities. ...'
Duty does not permit repentance: The butchers of Calcutta by Andrew Whitehead Indian Express, 1 July 1997
Gopal `Patha’ Mukherjee, Gopal the Goat, looks an unlikely retired gang leader. He is positively beatific, with his thick, black-rimmed spectacles, long white beard, and tidy wisp of grey hair tied up on top of his head, sardar-style.
Yet, half a century ago, he was among the most feared of Calcutta’s musclemen, with 800 boys at his command. He was an emperor and they were his army. Gopal Patha he got the name because his family ran a meat shop on College Street was, at the time of partition, a protector of his community. His idea of keeping the peace was killing the other side.
“He was very ferocious,” recalls S. K. Bhattacharjee, a sub-inspector in the Lalbazar police headquarters at the time of the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946. “Gopal Patha looked like a gentleman. He was a criminal, but he was very helpful to the poor. During the riots, he came out to rescue Hindus.”
Then as now, gang leaders needed political patrons, and politicians were keen to have friends in low places. Gopal Patha, sitting in his office near Calcutta’s Wellington Square, says he was close to the Congress Chief, B. C. Roy though he insists this was a personal friendship more than a political allegiance.
Whatever the inspiration, when Direct Action Day unleashed communal rioting in Calcutta, Gopal Patha assembled his force. “It was a very critical time for the country,” he asserts. "We thought if the whole area became Pakistan, there would be more torture and repression. So I called all my boys together and said it was time to retaliate. If you come to know that one murder has taken place, you commit 10 murders. That was the order to my boys.”
The words are uttered so softly, it takes a while for their import to sink in. Calcutta was in flames and Gopal Patha, in effect, took the opportunity to douse the city in kerosene. “It was basically duty,” he insists. “I had to help those in distress.”
Today, his modest office is grandly titled the National Relief Centre for Destitutes. Apparently, a charity clinic occasionally operates from there. On the walls are black-and-white portraits of a pantheon of Bengali heroes, the garlands greying with dust and decay. And behind the door, sufficiently lifelike to unnerve the unwary, is a life-size model of Netaji, dressed in INA uniform, right down to the spit-and-polish military boots.
“People used all sorts of weapons,” says Gopal Patha, relishing the opportunity to reminisce. “They had small knives, big choppers, sticks, rods, guns, and pistols. I had two American pistols. We got some weapons during the 1942 movement. Then during the Second World War, the American army, the Negroes, were in Calcutta. If you gave them Rs 250 or a bottle of whiskey, they would give you a pistol and a hundred cartridges. That way we secured all these weapons, and we used them during the troubles.”
He made plenty of enemies. “We came to know a Hindu called Gopal Patha,” recalls former Muslim Leaguer G. G. Ajmiri. “He used to catch hold of Muslims and slaughter them.” Ajmiri was a Muslim strongman, a leader of the League’s student wing in Calcutta along with Mujibur Rahman (“He was not that important then.”) and a member of the Muslim National Guard.
Ajmiri, who appears to have been loyal in turn to Britain, to Pakistan (he served in its army) and now to Bangladesh, lives in Dhaka, where he delights in telling tales of his prowess. “They used to call me `brave’; `strongarm’. I never used a shotgun or sword. But I was a good boxer. And sometimes I took the bamboo sticks out of their hands and beat them with those.”
“One day,” says Ajmiri, warming to his theme, “somebody said: Gopal Patha has grabbed four Muslims and slaughtered them. Immediately, we rushed there. Gopal Patha looked at me and said: `Oh, this man has come again.’ So I said, `Yes. Why are you killing people just because they are Muslims?’ He said to me: `You go, we won’t kill anybody now.”’
Patha ripostes that his boys were always selective. “We fought and killed our attackers. But why should we kill an ordinary rickshaw-wallah or hawker?"For every first division gang leader like Gopal the Goat, there was a cluster of lesser figures, people like Jugal Chandra Ghosh, also now in his eighties. Still a big bear of a man, he was in 1946 a worker with the Congress Party’s trade union wing. But that wasn’t the source of his street power. “I had a club, an akhara,” he says. “I was a wrestler, and I trained my boys, and they carried out my instructions. There was this Congress party leader. He took me round Calcutta in his jeep. I saw many dead bodies, Hindu dead bodies. I told him: `Yes, there will be retaliation.”’
“I went round the saw mills and factories. I set an amount sometimes Rs 1,000, sometimes Rs 5,000. They paid up. Then I declared: for one murder, you get Rs 10, for a half-murder, Rs 5. That’s how we got started.” A year after the Killing, Gandhi came to a still-smouldering city and appealed for a surrender of arms. The journalist Sailen Chatterjee witnessed the scene. “People came with their weapons and placed them at the feet of Gandhiji. Shabbily-dressed people came with swords, daggers and country-made guns. Even Mountbatten said this was the miracle of Calcutta. Gandhi’s miracle.”
Ghosh was among those who surrendered their arms. It was a remarkable conversion, and Ghosh remains a committed Gandhian. In the aftermath of Ayodhya, he worked hard to prevent communal unrest in his mixed area of Calcutta.
But there were limits to the miracle. Some strongmen, those who had fanned the flames so diligently over the previous year, took an intransigent line. “Gandhi called me twice,” Gopal Patha says. “I didn’t go. The third time, some local Congress leaders told me that I should at least deposit some of my arms.”
“I went there. I saw people coming and depositing weapons which were of no use to anyone out-of-order pistols, that sort of thing. Then Gandhi’s secretary said to me: `Gopal, why don’t you surrender your arms to Gandhiji?’ I replied, `With these arms I saved the women of my area, I saved the people. I will not surrender them”.
With a steely glint in his eye, the sort which distinguishes the goonda from the loudmouth muscleman, Gopal Patha continued: “Where was Gandhiji, I said, during the Great Calcutta Killing? Where was he then? Even if I’ve used a nail to kill someone, I won’t surrender even that nail.”His sober determination underlines one of the tragedies of Partition fifty years on, so many of those who killed still have no sense of regret.