The Undisputed Leader Of Darbhanga: Young Karpoori Thakur's Activism During Independence

1942: The Karpoori Story

In August 1942, Mahatma Gandhi announced the 1942 Quit India Movement. Socialist leaders supported the Movement. But with the arrest of Congress leaders, the movement became leaderless.

Author Dr Santosh Kumar writes, ‘The socialist leaders, evading arrest, took over the leadership of the movement. Bullets were going on everywhere in Bombay (Mumbai). Socialists began to hold secret meetings. A central governing board was created. The organisation work was given to Achyut Patwardhan. Dr Rammanohar Lohia was entrusted with the responsibility of policy making. Jayaprakash Narayan was arrested in Hazaribagh Jail. He, along with his comrades, Ramnandan Mishra, Yogendra Shukla, Suraj Narayan Singh, Gulali and Shaligram escaped from the jail on August 10. They reached Gaya the next day. It was decided that Jayaprakash, Ramnandan Mishra and Shaligram Dubey would move towards Benares and Yogendra Shukla, Suraj Narayan Singh towards North Bihar.’

A provincial convention of students took place in Darbhanga. Preparations were going on for August 9. A meeting of the students of CM College (Darbhanga) was also organised. Kamta Prasad Gupta, a freedom fighter and local leader, proposed the name of Karpoori for the chairmanship of the meet. Karpoori gave a call for Satyagrah but the students disagreed as Gandhi had given the slogan of ‘Do or Die’ for which a peaceful protest might not suffice.

The students might well have disagreed with Karpoori’s idea of peaceful protest in a Gandhian manner; they were still deeply impressed with the way Karpoori put across his idea of launching a protest against the British.

Karpoori soon became the undisputed student and youth leader of Darbhanga. He led a huge procession of students in Darbhanga from August 10 to 11, 1942. The British government took serious note of it and carried out a ruthless lathicharge on a peaceful and unarmed procession of students and youth at Kachahari Chowk in the town. Karpoori escaped the charge of the English brigade but several teenage boys lost their lives, and several others were critically injured. Dr Kumar writes, ‘This heart-wrenching and painful incident made the people of the entire Darbhanga district rebel. Railway stations, post offices and all other means of communication were destroyed from the border of Nepal in the north to the banks of the Ganges in the south. The British rule almost came to a standstill in this entire state, but the British oppression started two weeks in an even more frightening manner than before.

On August 14, the communication system was disturbed in the Sindhwara area under the leadership of Kulanand Vaidik and Karpoori Thakur. Dr Kumar writes, ‘Oil was sprinkled on the Ladha Bridge near Muhammadpur and it was set on fire. The bridge burned for two days and was completely destroyed. Another bridge was also demolished on Rahika Road . . .’

After Jayaprakash Narayan ordered that Azad Dasta would be formed to fight the British, secret offices of the squad were established in every town and district. Suraj Narayan Singh, a resident of Narpat Nagar village of Darbhanga district, was made the head of Bihar State Azad Dasta, a radical and underground organisation that sought to carry out operations against the British.

As British operations against protestors intensified, Karpoori had to abscond with other socialists for thirteen months. Professor Pralayankar Bhattacharyya gives a heart-wrenching account of what Karpoori went through while escaping to Nepal. He describes how Karpoori and his friends, after having walked miles without food and water, see hope for life after seeing maize crops.

‘Suddenly a river was seen. It was still raining. Some corn plants were seen by the side of a bountiful stream. Life battling with death woke up in hope. Karpoori returned with some corns and peeled them off. But most pearls of corn were rotten and it was not possible to eat them without roasting. . . . The coincidence was favourable. At some distance, a pyre was blazing. The unbearable hunger did not see what was right or wrong. He roasted corn on the funeral pyre and ate them (roughly translated from Hindi description).

During the chilling Azad Dasta days, Karpoori had vowed that he would not have a child in enslaved India. He kept his word and his first child, Ramnath, was born after Independence.

When the British repression calmed down, Karpoori Thakur returned to Pitaunjhia and became a teacher in the village middle school. It was a pleasant coincidence that he started teaching in the same school in which he had studied.

But the school became a cover for freedom movement activities. Clandestine meetings with leaders like Bashisht Narayan Singh, Ram Bujhawan Singh and Satya Narayan Azad would take place there. They would go from village to village to distribute pamphlets with the message of freedom.

Bhagalpur Jail: A Leader Is Born

It was 23 October 1943. Karpoori and his three friends had slept at the school at night after their daily routine. The police had been tracking them for a few days. A villager from Pitaunjhia, Muneshwar Singh, says, ‘At 2 a.m. on the intervening night of 23 and 24 October, the police surrounded the school, woke up the four men and arrested them. They were first kept in Darbhanga jail. As Bashishth Narayan Singh had earlier escaped from Darbhanga jail, they were all shifted to Bhagalpur Camp Jail.

Karpoori’s daily routine in jail included reading the Gita and the Ramayana besides engaging in the worship of Lord Hanuman and taking part in bhajan–kirtan, which would take place in the jail almost every day. Karpoori would wear a thick khadi dhoti and half-sleeved kurta.

But mismanagement at the jail, poor quality food, nonallotment of jail uniform and complaints about uncleanliness, gave Karpoori an opportunity to stage a protest. After twenty days of protest with Karpoori hardly eating anything and his condition deteriorating, the jail administration eventually conceded his demands on the twenty-eighth day of the protest. Karpoori became a leader of the prisoners and rose in the estimation of his socialist peers and seniors.

But his father Gokul Thakur was deeply concerned as he had not been getting any news about Karpoori. Ramnath Thakur says, ‘In October 1944, when Karyanand Mishra, another leader who was arrested and brought to the gate of Bhagalpur Central Jail, a middle-aged villager came in front of him and said—‘Babu, are you also a Swaraji (freedom fighter)? My son is also Swaraji . . . He went on hunger strike for 28 days but survived. I have come to meet him. He is not at all worried about us, but we are worried about him. His name is Karpoori.

The first thing Karyanand Mishra did in jail was to look for Karpoori Thakur. Prominent socialist leader Basavan Singh helped him meet Karpoori Thakur. ‘The form of the first meeting is etched in the mind till date—fair face, stout body, black eyebrows, shiny forehead, broad chest, budding youth. It looked as if Dr Rammanohar Lohia has come in front of me,’12 Karyanand Mishra later described the meeting.

Karpoori’s sacrifice earned him the reverence of not only the political prisoners but also of the criminals in the jail. As everyone got very worried about his health, frail Karpoori was advised to eat meat, fish and eggs to recover fast. The vegetarian man became a non-vegetarian for life.

Karpoori would speak on the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, India’s freedom struggle and the biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Mao Zedong. He would engage in serious discussions on socialism, communism, capitalism, Dialectical Materialism, Hegel, Marx, Indian philosophy, bourgeois-policy and the origin of family–society–property.

Basavan Singh and Karpoori used to be the foremost speakers in the jail which housed over fifty prisoners, all arrested for taking part in the 1942 movement. In a sense, the Bihar unit of the Socialist Party was largely moulded inside the bars of the Bhagalpur jail by Karpoori Thakur and Basavan Singh.

In November 1945, when Karpoori came out after serving twenty-five months of imprisonment, all the veteran socialist leaders, Jayaprakash Narayan, Ramnandan Mishra, Basavan Singh, Suraj Narayan Singh, Ganga Sharan Singh and Ramvriksha Benipuri started treating Karpoori with parity and respect.