The Proscription of an Irish Text and the Chittagong Rising of 1930

Abstract

It is fairly well known that the Chittagong Rising of 1930 was an attempt made by Surya Sen and his followers to re-enact the Easter Rising of Dublin, 1916, in Chittagong. However, what has been grossly overlooked by nationalist historians is the role of an inflammatory Irish Text in providing the Chittagong revolutionaries with ideas and trajectories to carry on their struggle against the British government. Nor has any attempt been made so far to assess the extent to which the Rising in Chittagong can actually be regarded as a re-enactment of the Easter Rebellion and in what ways it differed from its Irish counterpart. This article therefore focusses on one hand on the Irish text, My Fight for Irish Freedom, written by Dan Breen, an Irish guerilla fighter, that inspired the Chittagong revolutionaries to undertake the armoury raid. On the other hand, it describes the Chittagong Rising, the influence it derived from Dan Breen's book, and how far the Rising was influenced by Ireland. The article adopts an integrated approach and is divided into two sections. In the first it describes briefly the Easter Rising in Ireland, situates Dan Breen's activities in the wider canvas of Ireland's freedom struggle by taking into account the Irish War of Independence, followed by the Irish Civil War. In the second section, it describes the Chittagong Rising and critically analyses it by a description of the events in order to ascertain how far the Rising can actually be regarded as an emulation of what happened in Ireland between the years 1916 and 1921. It also tries to establish the relationship between the Irish Text and the Rising and highlights the circumstances under which the British Government was compelled to take the drastic step of proscribing Breen's book.