Dreams of Youth 79against the British raj. Defiance of the salt laws was followed by a boy-
cott of British goods, the picketing of liquor shops to deny the govern-
ment excise duties, and nonpayment of taxes in some parts of the
country. The British responded with police actions and mass arrests.
Subhas Chandra Bose spent the first couple of months of his im-
prisonment in quiet reading and meditation. In April 1930, he and
several other Congress leaders lodged in Alipur Central Jail were se-
verely beaten with lathis (wooden sticks) when they protested against
an assault on other prisoners by the guards. Subhas suf fered head inju-
ries and was left unconscious for an hour.^70 In Bengal, the civil disobe-
dience movement escalated greatly and became intertwined with revo-
lutionary terrorism. On Easter weekend in 1930, revolutionaries led by
Surya Kumar Sen raided the armory in Chittagong in commemoration
of the 1916 uprising in Ireland, and fought a running battle with Brit-
ish forces in the district for several weeks. Sarat Chandra Bose led the
legal defense of several revolutionaries accused in the Chittagong ar-
mory raid case. In December 1930, three young men—Benoy Bose,
Badal Gupta, and Dinesh Gupta—stormed the Writers’ Building, the
seat of the British government in Calcutta, and shot dead the inspector
general of prisons. They then engaged Calcutta’s police force in combat
along the verandahs of the building until their ammunition ran out.
Benoy Bose and Badal Gupta succumbed to their injuries, while Dinesh
Gupta was tried and executed. In Midnapur district, the British district
magistrate, James Peddie, who had ordered the police to shoot down
peasants refusing to pay taxes, was himself assassinated by revolution-
aries. Two of his successors suf fered the same fate. A new, more radical
phase of the in de pen dence movement had begun.
As emotions ran high, Subhas Chandra Bose was elected mayor of
Calcutta while in prison, defeating the incumbent, Jatindra Mohan
Sengupta. Both belonged to the Congress party, so the election was
something of an internecine con flict. More than just a factional fight
within the Bengal Congress, the tension between Bose and Sengupta
re flected the complex relationship between the province and the cen-
tral leadership of the Congress. Sengupta had been appointed to his
posts by Gandhi after C. R. Das’s death, and was generally inclined to
obey the dictates of the Congress high command. Bose represented the