Saquib Salim

On the afternoon of 13 September, 1929, inside the Borstal Jail at Lahore, a twenty-four-year-old Indian revolutionary named Jatindra Nath Das died of starving himself for 63 days. His death forced the Imperial Legislative Assembly of British India to debate whether an empire had the right to starve a man for holding an opinion.

Das had been jailed three times before he turned eighteen -- once for picketing shops selling foreign clothes and a second time under the Bengal Ordinance of 1925 (jailed without trial).

It was at Mymensingh Jail that he first discovered the hunger strike as a weapon. Das refused to salute a visiting Inspector-General of Prisons, and remained on a hunger strike for 20 days until the officer apologised. When the Lahore Conspiracy Case swept him up alongside Bhagat Singh in June 1929, few who knew him were surprised at what followed.

On 13 July 1929, Das and several co-accused joined Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt on fast, over demands including ending flogging of political prisoners to providing amenities like newspapers, books, and edible food to them. Newspapers of the day, reproduced later by the socialist leader Yusuf Meherally in his 1948 chronicle of the freedom struggle, tracked his decline almost by the week: "148 pounds on arrest, 109 by the 15th of August, 103 by the 23rd, and by the 2nd of September, ninety-two. His left side went paralysed, and his eyes were unable to open. The doctors force-fed him for weeks before abandoning even that, for fear the procedure itself would kill him faster than the fast owing to his illness."

Contrary to the popular notion that the government of the day was indifferent, the record shows something closer to careful calculation. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who visited the Borstal Jail on the 9th of August, told the press that Das "speaks in whispers... and looks for release in death."

Newspaper clippings announcing jatin Nath Das's death

Barely a month later, defending his government's conduct before the Assembly, Sir James Crerar could manage nothing warmer than the observation that "Jatin Das is now removed from an Earthly tribunal", a sentence that reads less like condolence than acquittal of duty.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, no revolutionary by temperament, said that "a man who resorts to hunger-strike is moved by his soul."

Motilal Nehru's censure motion against the Punjab government's handling of the case passed by fifty-five votes to forty-seven. This was a rare defeat for the bureaucracy, absorbed only after a young man was already beyond saving.

His last coherent wish was only this: "Cremate me by the side of my mother in Calcutta." That request became a movement of its own.

Subhas Chandra Bose arranged for the body to travel by train from Lahore to Howrah. By the time the funeral reached Calcutta (Kolkata), upward of a hundred thousand people, by some counts nearer two hundred thousand, had gathered to walk behind it through Harrison Road, Chitpore, and Bhawanipore to the Keoratala cremation ground.

Bose-led Bengal Volunteers gave the last salute and Das's brother, Kiran Chandra, lit the pyre. His father, Bankim Behari Das, chose not to see his dead son's face and told reporters he preferred to remember "the smiling face with which he left me," not the disfigurement of a nine-week fast.

Beside the pyre, his old teacher, Professor Nitendra Chandra Banerjee, called him the modern Dadhichi, the Puranic sage who gave his own bones so that Indra could forge a weapon against tyranny, and asked mourners to wear a tilak of his ashes as a vow.

The grief did not stay inside India. Mary MacSwiney, sister of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who had died on his own hunger strike in an English prison nine years earlier, cabled to say the two deaths belonged to the same struggle.

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Eamon de Valera called Das, "the Indian MacSwiney." It is no coincidence that two administrations of the same empire, on opposite ends of the world, were made within a decade of each other to answer for the same weapon, i.e., a prisoner's refusal to eat.