Chapter 4 — ଭାରତ ଛାଡ଼ ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନ ଏବଂ ଏଥିରେ ଓଡ଼ିଶାର ଭୂମିକା

On 3 September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany, and the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India also at war on the same day, without consulting the Central Legislature or the provincial ministries elected in 1937. The Congress, which then governed eight provinces including Orissa, was not opposed to the fight against fascism; Jawaharlal Nehru had condemned Hitler and Mussolini for years. But it asked a simple question: how could Britain claim to be fighting for freedom and democracy while denying both to India? The Congress Working Committee demanded that Britain declare its war aims and state that India would be free after the war, with an immediate share in power at the centre.

The Viceroy's reply of 17 October 1939 offered only consultation with Indian opinion after the war and a small advisory committee during it. The Congress therefore ordered its ministries to resign, and between 27 October and 15 November 1939 the Congress governments of Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces, Bihar, the Central Provinces, the North-West Frontier Province, Assam and Orissa left office. In Orissa the ministry of Biswanath Das resigned on 4 November 1939 and the Governor took over the administration under Section 93 of the Act of 1935. Jinnah and the Muslim League celebrated 22 December 1939 as a Day of Deliverance from Congress rule, and in March 1940 the League passed the Lahore Resolution demanding separate Muslim states, the beginning of the demand for Pakistan.

The war meanwhile changed India. Prices rose steeply, the army was expanded from about two lakh to over twenty lakh men, war industries grew, and the government took emergency powers under the Defence of India Act. The fall of France in June 1940 and the German threat to Britain herself made the Congress leaders, especially Gandhi, unwilling to embarrass Britain at the moment of danger, and for a year the Congress hesitated between sympathy for the Allies and the demand for freedom.

Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been forced out of the Congress presidency in 1939, took the opposite view: Britain's difficulty was India's opportunity, and the war should be used to win freedom at once. The gap between his view and Gandhi's is the subject of the next chapter; here it is enough to note that by 1940 the Congress had lost office, the League had turned to Pakistan, and no offer had come from Britain.

In the summer of 1940, with Britain fighting alone after the fall of France, the Congress offered at Poona in July to cooperate in the war if a provisional national government were formed at the centre and Britain promised independence after the war. The government replied with the August Offer of 8 August 1940. It promised Dominion Status at an unspecified time after the war, a constitution to be framed by a body mainly of Indians after the war, an expansion of the Viceroy's Executive Council to include more Indians, and a War Advisory Council. It also assured the minorities that no constitution would be imposed against the will of large elements of the population, which was read as a veto for the Muslim League.

The Congress rejected the offer as inadequate: no national government, no date, and a veto for the minorities. Gandhi, who had earlier hesitated, now took charge again. He did not want a mass movement while Britain was in mortal danger, since he thought it un-Gandhian to take advantage of an enemy's distress and feared communal riots. But he insisted on the right to speak against the war, which the Defence of India Rules forbade. He therefore launched the Individual Satyagraha in October 1940: chosen individuals would announce publicly that they would not help the British war effort, would walk to a village and repeat the statement, and would be arrested. It was a protest for freedom of speech, deliberately limited.

The first Satyagrahi was Vinoba Bhave, who offered Satyagraha at Paunar near Wardha on 17 October 1940; the second was Jawaharlal Nehru, arrested on 31 October and sentenced to four years; the third was Brahma Datt of the Sabarmati Ashram. Then Working Committee members, then members of the AICC, then provincial and district leaders offered Satyagraha in turn. In Orissa, Harekrushna Mahtab, Nabakrushna Choudhury, Malati Choudhury, Biswanath Das and hundreds of others were arrested in 1940-41. By May 1941 about 25,000 Satyagrahis had been jailed across India. The movement was called off in December 1941 when the government released the prisoners on the eve of Japan's entry into the war.

The Individual Satyagraha kept the Congress alive and its cadres disciplined during two years when it had no office and no mass movement, and it demonstrated that the Congress was not prepared to be silent. But its deliberate moderation also showed the limits of Gandhi's willingness to fight while Britain fought Germany. What changed everything was Japan.

On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and entered the war. Within four months the picture in Asia changed completely. Hong Kong fell on 25 December 1941, Malaya was overrun, Singapore, the great British fortress, surrendered on 15 February 1942 with about sixty thousand Indian soldiers taken prisoner, and Rangoon fell on 8 March 1942. The Japanese stood on the borders of Assam and Bengal; their aircraft bombed Calcutta, Vizagapatam and Kakinada, and on the Odisha coast blackouts were imposed and the people of Cuttack and Puri prepared for invasion. Indians in Burma fled on foot through the jungles, and stories of the British leaving Indians behind while evacuating Europeans embittered the country. The myth of British invincibility was gone.

Under pressure from the United States and from Chiang Kai-shek of China, and with the Labour ministers of his coalition, Winston Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour member of the War Cabinet and a friend of Nehru, to India in March 1942 with a set of proposals. The Cripps proposals offered: Dominion Status after the war, with the right to secede from the Commonwealth; a Constituent Assembly after the war elected by the provincial legislatures, with the princely states nominating members; the right of any province not to join the new Union and to have a constitution of its own, which conceded the principle of Pakistan; and, during the war, Indian participation in the Viceroy's Executive Council, but with defence remaining in British hands and the Council remaining advisory.

The Congress rejected the proposals. The offer of freedom was for the future, and Gandhi described it as a post-dated cheque; the non-accession clause invited the partition of India and the princes to stay out; and the immediate share in government was a sham, since the Viceroy kept his veto and defence, the one subject that mattered in 1942, was withheld. Nehru and Maulana Azad, who negotiated for the Congress, found that Cripps could not deliver even the national government he had seemed to promise, because Churchill and Linlithgow refused. The Muslim League rejected the proposals because Pakistan was not clearly conceded; the Hindu Mahasabha rejected them because it was. Cripps left India on 12 April 1942.

The failure of the Cripps Mission convinced Gandhi that Britain would give nothing while she ruled, and that the presence of the British in India was itself the invitation to a Japanese invasion. From April 1942 his articles in Harijan began to demand an orderly British withdrawal, and the phrase Quit India was born.

Between April and August 1942 Gandhi moved from patience to urgency, and a student must understand why. He believed, first, that the British were incapable of defending India and that their presence would draw the Japanese in; if the British left, he thought, Japan would have no reason to invade. Second, the sight of Indians abandoned in Burma and the wartime hardships, requisitioning of boats and rice in Bengal and Odisha, rising prices and shortages, had created a mood of anger that would find expression with or without the Congress; it was better that the Congress lead it. Third, a British withdrawal was now the only condition on which India would fight the war willingly. Fourth, he was seventy-three and felt that the last struggle could not be postponed.

The Congress Working Committee met at Wardha on 14 July 1942 and passed the resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of British rule, failing which the Congress would launch a mass struggle under Gandhi's leadership. Several members hesitated; Nehru and Azad feared harming the war against fascism, Rajagopalachari resigned from the Congress, and the Communist Party, which had supported the war since Germany attacked the Soviet Union, opposed the resolution outright. But Gandhi carried the committee.

The All-India Congress Committee met at the Gowalia Tank maidan in Bombay and on 8 August 1942 passed the Quit India resolution. It demanded the immediate ending of British rule, promised that free India would join the war against fascism, and sanctioned a mass struggle on non-violent lines under Gandhi's leadership. In his speech that night Gandhi gave the country its mantra: Do or Die (karenge ya marenge). Every Indian was to consider himself free from that moment and to act as a free man; they would either free India or die in the attempt, but they would not live to see the perpetuation of slavery. He told the people not to look to the leaders for orders, since the leaders might be arrested, but to be their own guides, and he asked government servants to declare their allegiance to the Congress, soldiers not to fire on their countrymen, and princes to accept the sovereignty of the people.

Gandhi intended to negotiate with the Viceroy before starting the movement, and the programme, hartal, non-payment of taxes, a salt march, had not yet been finalised. The government did not wait. Before dawn on 9 August 1942 Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Kripalani and the whole Working Committee were arrested; Gandhi was taken to the Aga Khan Palace at Poona and the others to Ahmednagar Fort. The Congress was declared unlawful and its offices sealed. The leaders were in jail before the movement had begun; the movement that followed belonged to the people.

The arrests of 9 August 1942 set off the most violent upheaval in India since 1857. In Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Poona, Patna, Kanpur, Allahabad, Cuttack and hundreds of towns crowds came out on 9 and 10 August, and the police opened fire. The movement passed through three phases.

The urban phase (August 1942). Hartals, strikes and processions in the cities were met with lathi charges and firing. The mill workers of Ahmedabad struck for three and a half months; the Tata steel works at Jamshedpur closed for thirteen days; students of every college walked out. Within a week the towns were under control, and the movement moved to the countryside.

The rural rising (August to September 1942). Peasants, students and villagers attacked the symbols of British authority: railway stations, post offices, police stations, courts and government buildings were burnt; railway lines were torn up and telegraph wires cut; in Bihar and the eastern United Provinces the administration collapsed for weeks and railway communication with Bengal and the Assam front was broken at the moment the Japanese threatened it. In Ballia (U.P.) the people released prisoners and set up a government under Chittu Pande; in Midnapore (Bengal) the Tamluk National Government (Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar) of 17 December 1942 ran the Tamluk sub-division for nearly two years under Satish Samanta, with its own courts, police and relief; in Satara (Maharashtra) the Prati Sarkar of Nana Patil ruled the villages till 1946; and in Talcher in Odisha a parallel government was set up, described later. Ordinary people, tribal peasants in Odisha and Bihar, students in Patna and Cuttack, women in Midnapore, attacked police stations with bows, spears and stones and were shot down. The government replied with machine guns, aircraft, collective fines, burning of villages, flogging and mass arrests.

The underground phase (late 1942 to 1944). Leaders who had escaped arrest, Jayaprakash Narayan (who escaped from Hazaribagh jail in November 1942), Ram Manohar Lohia, Aruna Asaf Ali (who had hoisted the flag at Gowalia Tank on 9 August), Achyut Patwardhan, Sucheta Kripalani and Usha Mehta, who ran the secret Congress Radio from Bombay, organised sabotage, propaganda and the distribution of leaflets from hiding. In Odisha Surendranath Dwivedy was a leading underground organiser.

The statistics show the scale. By the end of 1942 about 60,000 people had been arrested, over 26,000 convicted and about 18,000 detained without trial; the government admitted that the police and troops had fired on 538 occasions and killed about 1,060 people, while the Congress estimated deaths at about 10,000; 208 police stations, 332 railway stations and 945 post offices were attacked, and villages were bombed from the air in Bihar and Bengal. By the end of 1942 the rising had been crushed, and the underground petered out by 1944.

The government blamed Gandhi and the Congress for the violence, publishing in 1943 a document called Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances. Gandhi, in the Aga Khan Palace, replied in a long correspondence with Linlithgow that the government's own violence, in arresting the leaders before any movement had begun, was the cause, and that he had never been given the chance to guide the people. When the Viceroy refused to withdraw the charge, Gandhi undertook a twenty-one-day fast from 10 February to 3 March 1943 as an appeal to the Viceroy's conscience.

The fast created a crisis. His health failed rapidly, and the government prepared for his death, even ordering sandalwood for the cremation. Three Indian members of the Viceroy's Executive Council, including Sir Homi Mody, resigned in protest at the refusal to release him. A Leaders' Conference at Delhi under Tej Bahadur Sapru demanded his release. Public opinion in India and abroad was moved, but Churchill and Linlithgow held firm, and Gandhi survived the fast. The episode showed that even in jail Gandhi remained the centre of Indian politics, and it turned sympathy back to the Congress after the violence of 1942.

The remaining leaders stayed in jail. Kasturba Gandhi died in the Aga Khan Palace on 22 February 1944 and his secretary Mahadev Desai had died there in August 1942. Gandhi himself was released on 6 May 1944 because of his health; the Working Committee members remained in Ahmednagar Fort until June 1945. The Congress remained a banned organisation until 1945, and the Muslim League, which had condemned the movement and cooperated with the government throughout the war, used the years of Congress absence to build up its strength in the provinces and to win the Muslim vote, which it demonstrated in the elections of 1945-46.

The movement ended without any formal withdrawal. By 1944 the underground had exhausted itself; the government had won the war of force. But the war itself was turning: the Japanese offensive against Imphal and Kohima in 1944, in which the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose took part, was defeated, and by 1945 Britain, victorious but exhausted, faced an India in which the Congress had been proved to be the voice of the people and in which the willingness of Indians to serve the Raj had been shaken. The Quit India Movement had failed as an uprising and succeeded as a verdict.

Odisha entered the Quit India Movement as a young province, formed only in April 1936, with a Congress organisation strengthened by twenty years of struggle and by two years in office. The elections of 1937 had given the Congress a majority in the Orissa Legislative Assembly, and the ministry of Biswanath Das (July 1937 to November 1939), with Nityananda Kanungo and Bodhram Dube, had passed a Tenancy Amendment Act, a debt relief measure and an education programme. In November 1939 it resigned with the other Congress ministries, and after a period of Governor's rule a ministry under the Maharaja of Paralakhemundi took office in November 1941 with the support of non-Congress members.

The years 1938-42 had also seen the Prajamandal movements in the feudatory states of Dhenkanal, Talcher, Nilgiri, Ranpur and others, in which the people demanded civil rights and the end of forced labour from the rajas; the firing at Bhuban in Dhenkanal in October 1938, where the twelve-year-old Baji Rout was shot dead refusing to ferry the police across the Brahmani, and the killing of the Ranpur political agent in January 1939 had shown that the states were seething. These movements gave Odisha a body of experienced fighters outside the British districts.

The war brought hardship to Odisha as it did to Bengal. The Japanese bombing of Vizagapatam in April 1942 caused panic on the coast; boats were requisitioned under the 'denial policy' meant to hinder a Japanese landing, which ruined fishermen; rice was procured for the army and prices rose; and thousands of refugees from Burma passed through Ganjam and Cuttack telling of British desertion. The Cripps Mission had been followed in Odisha with attention, and its failure produced the same anger as elsewhere.

The leaders of the Orissa Congress in 1942 were Harekrushna Mahtab (president of the Utkal Provincial Congress Committee and member of the Congress Working Committee), Nabakrushna Choudhury, Malati Choudhury, Biswanath Das, Nityananda Kanungo, Radhanath Rath of Samaj, Surendranath Dwivedy, Sarangadhar Das, Bhagirathi Mahapatra, Sarala Devi, Rama Devi, Gopabandhu Choudhury and the Ganjam leaders Dibakar Patnaik and Biswanath Das. Mahtab attended the Bombay AICC of 8 August 1942 and was arrested there; the other leaders were arrested in Odisha on 9 August and the following days. As in the rest of India, the movement that followed was carried by the people, the students of Cuttack and Puri, the peasants of Balasore and Cuttack, the tribals of Koraput and the subjects of Talcher.

The news of the arrests reached Odisha on 9 August 1942. That day and the next, hartals were observed in Cuttack, Puri, Balasore, Berhampur, Sambalpur and Bhadrak, and processions of students and townspeople marched with the national flag. The police lathi-charged the processions and arrested the local leaders within days; by the middle of August most of the district Congress workers were in jail and the organisation was declared unlawful. The movement then passed to the students and the villages.

Students. The students of Ravenshaw College, the Cuttack Medical School, the Cuttack Training College and the schools of the town boycotted classes, held meetings on the college grounds, burnt effigies and carried the flag through the streets; several were expelled and many arrested. In Puri the students of the Samanta Chandra Sekhar College and the Zilla School struck, and in Balasore, Bhadrak, Berhampur, Sambalpur and Bargarh the schools closed. Students carried the message to the villages, cut telegraph wires, distributed leaflets and formed the link between the underground leaders and the countryside. Among those who later became known were Surendranath Dwivedy, who organised the underground from Cuttack, Nabakrushna Choudhury and Malati Choudhury before their arrest, and student leaders of Ravenshaw.

Cuttack district. In the villages of Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara, Jajpur and Salepur the people attacked police outposts, burnt the records of the excise and revenue departments and cut communication lines. At Kendrapara and Salepur the police fired on crowds. The Alakashram at Jagatsinghpur was raided and its workers arrested.

Puri district. The most serious events were at Nimapara and Kaipadar. At Nimapara the people, refusing to pay revenue and attacking the police station, were fired on and several were killed; at Kaipadar near Khurda a crowd that surrounded the police station was fired on and villagers died. In Puri town the students and the Satyabadi group kept up the agitation.

Balasore district. Balasore, the district of the Salt Satyagraha, rose again. At Basudevpur, Bhadrak, Bhandaripokhari and Jaleswar crowds attacked police stations and government offices; police and military marched through the villages, and the worst massacre of the movement in Odisha, at Eram, took place here on 28 September 1942, described in the next section.

The pattern in the coastal districts was the same as in Bihar: leaderless crowds, armed with lathis, spears and stones, attacked the symbols of government; the government replied with rifles. Within six weeks the coastal rising had been crushed by arrests, firing and collective fines, but the underground continued through 1943.

Eram is a village in the Basudevpur area of Bhadrak, then in Balasore district, on the coast between the Baitarani and the sea. The villages of this tract had a long tradition of struggle: they had taken part in the Salt Satyagraha at Inchudi and nearby, had refused chowkidari tax, and in August 1942 they answered the Quit India call with meetings and the defiance of the ban on assembly. The local leaders, including Sridhar Das, Mahendra Das and others, organised a series of village meetings to spread the movement and to plan resistance to the Basudevpur police.

On 28 September 1942 a large meeting, estimated at several thousand people, gathered in the Melana Padia (the meeting ground) at Eram, in defiance of the prohibitory order. The sub-divisional police officer Kunjabihari Mohanty, with a party of armed police, surrounded the ground. Without adequate warning and while the meeting was peaceful, he ordered the police to fire. The firing continued for several minutes; the police fired 304 rounds, according to the official record. Twenty-nine people were killed on the spot or died of their wounds, and fifty-six were wounded. Among the dead was Pari Bewa, a widow of the village, who is remembered as the first woman martyr of the Quit India Movement in Odisha. The dead were peasants, fishermen and village youths; the youngest was a boy.

The scale of the killing, second in the whole country only to Jallianwala Bagh in a single firing on a single meeting, gave Eram its name: the Jallianwala Bagh of Odisha, and the ground is called Rakta Tirtha (the pilgrimage of blood). Afterwards the police and military marched through the villages of Basudevpur, burnt houses, seized property and arrested hundreds. No inquiry was held during the war; after independence a memorial was raised at the Melana Padia and the twenty-nine names were inscribed.

Eram must be understood as part of the broader rising in Balasore and Bhadrak. Police stations at Basudevpur, Bhandaripokhari and Bhadrak had been attacked, the telegraph lines to Calcutta had been cut, and the government feared that the coast, with the Japanese in Burma, was slipping out of control. The firing at Eram was intended as a lesson, as Dyer's had been at Amritsar, and like Amritsar it hardened the people against British rule instead of breaking them. When Harekrushna Mahtab and the other leaders came out of jail in 1945, Eram was the first place of pilgrimage for the Congress in Odisha.

The Quit India Movement in Odisha reached its greatest intensity not on the coast but in the hills of Koraput, the tribal district in the south-west that had been transferred from Madras to the new province in 1936. Here the Congress, through the work of Radhakrushna Biswasray, Sadashiva Tripathy and the Gandhian ashrams, had taught the Bhumia, Gadaba, Paraja, Kondh and Koya tribes the charkha, the boycott of liquor and resistance to the forest laws and to the forced labour (goti) and cesses of the local landlords and officials. In 1942 this preparation produced a tribal rising led by Laxman Naik.

Laxman Naik was born in 1899 in the village of Tentuliguma in the Mathili area of Malkangiri, a Bhumia tribal, who had become a Congress worker and organiser of the Gandhian programme among the tribes. On 21 August 1942, in answer to the Quit India call, he led a procession of several hundred tribals, carrying the national flag and singing, to the Mathili police station to demand the release of arrested Congress workers and to hoist the flag on the thana. The police fired on the procession; several tribals were killed and many wounded. Laxman Naik, wounded, was arrested. In the confusion a forest guard named Ramaiya was found dead, and the police charged Laxman Naik with his murder. The sessions court convicted him on the evidence of the police, the High Court at Patna rejected his appeal, and he was hanged in Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943. He went to the gallows calmly, saying that he died for the country and that the fruit of his death would be freedom.

The Mathili firing was one of several in Koraput. At Papadahandi in the Nabarangpur area, on 24 August 1942, a procession of about two thousand tribals marching to the police station was fired on by the police at the Turi river; nineteen were killed on the spot and many more drowned or died of wounds, and hundreds were arrested. Processions and attacks on police stations took place at Nandapur, Kotpad, Jeypore, Umerkote and Dabugam; the tribals cut roads and bridges, burnt forest offices and refused forest dues and goti. The government sent troops through the district; villages were burnt, collective fines imposed and about a thousand tribals imprisoned in the Koraput, Berhampur and Rajahmundry jails, where many died of disease. Sadashiva Tripathy, Radhakrushna Biswasray and other leaders were jailed for the duration of the war.

The Koraput rising is important for three reasons. It showed that the Congress programme had reached the poorest and least-educated people of Odisha, and that they understood freedom in terms of their own grievances, forest, goti and the liquor contractor. It produced in Laxman Naik the best-known martyr of the province, whose statue stands before the Odisha Legislative Assembly and after whom Laxman Naik College and other institutions are named. And it made the tribal question, the rights of the adivasis to their land and forests, a permanent part of the politics of independent Odisha.

The feudatory state of Talcher, north of Cuttack on the Brahmani, had been a centre of the Prajamandal movement since 1938. Its raja, supported by the British political agent, had crushed the Prajamandal with force, and about thirty thousand of his subjects had fled across the border into the British district of Cuttack in 1939, camping at Angul and living on Congress relief until the government pressed the raja to allow their return. The Prajamandal leader was Pabitra Mohan Pradhan, with Nabakrushna Choudhury and Malati Choudhury as advisers from the Congress side.

In August 1942, when the Quit India Movement began, the people of Talcher rose again. Under Pabitra Mohan Pradhan and his associates they organised the Chakra Bahini (the circular army, so named from the villagers' habit of surrounding a place), a volunteer force that took control of the villages of the state, set up a parallel administration with its own village committees and courts, refused revenue and forced labour to the raja and collected its own funds. The raja's police were driven from the villages; the durbar's authority was confined to Talcher town. This was the Odisha equivalent of the Ballia, Tamluk and Satara governments, and it lasted for some weeks in September 1942.

The British government treated Talcher as a war zone. Troops were sent, and in an act that shocked the province, aircraft were used to bomb and machine-gun the villages of Talcher from the air, one of the few places in India, with Bihar and Midnapore, where the Royal Air Force was turned on Indian villagers. Villages were burnt, crops destroyed, hundreds arrested and the leaders sentenced to long terms. Pabitra Mohan Pradhan was captured and imprisoned. The Chakra Bahini was broken by October 1942, but the Talcher rising remained a symbol; when the feudatory states were merged with Odisha in 1948, Talcher was among the first, and Pabitra Mohan Pradhan became a minister in the state.

The other feudatory states also stirred. In Dhenkanal, Nilgiri, Athagarh, Ranpur and Nayagarh the Prajamandals held meetings and processions and were suppressed by the rajas' police with British support; Nilgiri in particular saw a Prajamandal rising in 1942 and again in 1947 that ended with the state being taken over by the Government of Odisha in November 1947, the first princely state in India to be merged. The Quit India Movement thus linked the freedom struggle in British Odisha with the struggle of the people of the states, and prepared the way for the merger described in later chapters.

Women. The women who had made salt in 1930 led again in 1942. Rama Devi and Sarala Devi were arrested in August 1942; Malati Choudhury worked in the Talcher and Cuttack villages until her arrest and was jailed for the duration; Annapurna Maharana, daughter of Gopabandhu Choudhury and Rama Devi, organised students in Cuttack and went to jail at nineteen; Jambubati Devi, Hiramani Devi, Kiranbala Sen and many others were imprisoned. In the villages women hid the underground workers, carried messages and fed the volunteers; at Eram a widow, Pari Bewa, died under police fire; and in Koraput tribal women marched with Laxman Naik's processions. The government's own records show over a hundred women convicted in Odisha in 1942-43.

The press. The government imposed censorship and demanded securities from the newspapers. Samaj, edited by Radhanath Rath, refused to submit and suspended publication rather than print under censorship; Rath was arrested. The Asha of Berhampur and the Prajatantra of Harekrushna Mahtab were likewise silenced. In their place the underground circulated cyclostyled bulletins and leaflets, carrying news of Eram, Mathili and Talcher across the province and abroad.

The underground. With the leaders in jail, the movement in Odisha was organised from hiding by Surendranath Dwivedy (later a member of Parliament), who moved between Cuttack, Puri and Balasore, and by socialist-leaning young Congressmen such as Nabakrushna Choudhury before his arrest, Sarangadhar Das and the student leaders of Ravenshaw. They maintained contact with Jayaprakash Narayan's all-India underground, printed and distributed leaflets, arranged shelter for wanted workers, organised the cutting of telegraph lines and the sabotage of railway communication between Cuttack and Calcutta, and collected funds. The underground continued into 1943, longer than the open rising, and it trained the socialist wing of the Odisha Congress that later formed the Praja Socialist Party.

The scale of repression. Across Odisha the police fired on crowds at Eram, Mathili, Papadahandi, Nimapara, Kaipadar, Kendrapara, Salepur, Bhandaripokhari and other places, killing over a hundred people in all; about three thousand persons were imprisoned, several hundred flogged and thousands of rupees collected in collective fines; troops occupied Koraput and Talcher; and villages were burnt in Balasore, Koraput and Talcher. For a province of about nine million people this was, in proportion, one of the heaviest tolls in India.

By the end of 1942 the open rising had been suppressed everywhere, in Odisha as in Bihar, and the student must be able to explain why a movement of such fury failed to drive the British out.

The absence of leadership. The arrest of Gandhi and the whole Working Committee on 9 August, before a programme had been announced, left the people without direction. Gandhi had asked them to be their own leaders, and they were, but each district acted alone, at different times, without coordination, so that the government could deal with them one by one.

The overwhelming force of a wartime state. In 1942 the government had over a million soldiers in India, emergency powers under the Defence of India Rules, a loyal police and civil service, aircraft and machine guns, and the will to use them because the Japanese were at the gate. Villages were bombed, whole districts fined and thousands flogged. No non-violent or half-armed movement could match this.

The lack of a united front. The Muslim League opposed the movement and asked Muslims to stay away; the Communist Party, committed to the 'people's war' after Germany attacked Russia, opposed it; the Hindu Mahasabha and the Liberals kept aloof; the princes and landlords supported the government; and Rajagopalachari had left the Congress. The movement was the Congress and the masses alone.

Violence and its limits. The turn to sabotage and attacks on police stations gave the government the excuse to use maximum force and alienated some sections; but the people did not possess the arms to carry violence further, so the rising was crushed between its own limits and the state's power.

The short life of a spontaneous rising. Peasant risings without organisation burn out in weeks; once the harvest season came and the troops arrived, the villagers could not keep the field.

In Odisha these general causes applied with particular force: the province was young, its Congress leadership small and quickly jailed, its people poor and unarmed, its tribal districts remote from the coast, and the coastal districts under military watch because of the Japanese threat. Yet the very ferocity of the repression at Eram, Mathili, Papadahandi and Talcher showed how seriously the government took the danger.

Though crushed within months, the Quit India Movement is regarded as the decisive struggle of the freedom movement, and its significance can be stated under several heads.

It showed the depth of the demand for freedom. The rising of leaderless peasants, students and tribals in every province, at the cost of thousands of lives, proved that the demand for independence was not the demand of a few politicians but of the whole people, and that the British could hold India only by force. Linlithgow himself called it the most serious rebellion since 1857.

It ended the possibility of compromise. After 1942 no Indian leader could accept less than complete independence, and no British government could hope to hold India for long. When the Labour government came to power in 1945, its decision to leave India was taken against the background of 1942 and of the naval mutiny of 1946.

It undermined the loyalty of the services. Government servants, policemen and even soldiers had shown sympathy with the movement, and the INA trials of 1945-46 and the naval mutiny of February 1946 completed this erosion; the British realised that the instruments of their rule could no longer be trusted.

It produced a new generation of leaders. The underground of 1942, Jayaprakash Narayan, Lohia, Aruna Asaf Ali, Achyut Patwardhan, and in Odisha Surendranath Dwivedy, Nabakrushna Choudhury and Sarangadhar Das, became the socialist leadership of independent India.

It linked the freedom struggle with the people of the princely states. The Talcher and Nilgiri risings in Odisha, and similar risings elsewhere, made the merger of the states a part of the freedom programme.

For Odisha, the movement completed the transformation begun in 1921. The Salt Satyagraha had brought the coastal peasant into the struggle; Quit India brought the tribal of Koraput and the subject of the feudatory state. The martyrs of Eram, Papadahandi and Mathili, and above all Laxman Naik, gave the province a memory of sacrifice comparable with that of any part of India, and the leaders who emerged from jail in 1945, Harekrushna Mahtab, Nabakrushna Choudhury, Biswanath Das, Nityananda Kanungo and Malati Choudhury, led the province through the elections of 1946, the merger of the states in 1948 and the first years of independent Odisha.

The movement also had a cost. The years of Congress absence from politics allowed the Muslim League to grow, and the demand for Pakistan, which had been a resolution in 1940, was a political force by 1945. The chapter on the Independence Act and Partition takes up that story.