For all those protesting about the “wrong" portrayal of Gopal Mukherjee (known in local lore as Gopal Patha or Gopal the Goat as he had a meat shop) in the soon-to-be released film The Bengal Files by Vivek Agnihotri, the long interview that he gave to Andrew Whitehead in 1997 is illuminating. Including the fact that it is the only interview of this key figure of the “Great" Calcutta Killings triggered by Jinnah’s Direct Action Day call on 16 August 1946. Why was he forgotten?

Fifty years passed since those horrific days before, ironically, a Briton came to Kolkata to hear from the man himself what happened. Even Whitehead’s silly questions like exactly how many Muslims Mukherjee had killed—entirely missing the point of the events of 16-19 August 1946— shows the extent to which the role of “Gopal Patha" has been buried or misrepresented since then. And calling him “secular" now also shows the lingering effects of that ignorance.

The carnage that first saw Hindus being killed by Muslim mobs and then an equally bloody retaliation led by Mukherjee—not against all Muslims but just those who had murdered Hindus—was an early example of a “targeted response", now used to describe Operation Sindoor. The actions of Gopal Patha and his band of armed Hindu ‘boys’ was neither communal nor secular: they were measures needed to ensure that the Muslim League’s gambit to capture Calcutta failed.

Films and books exaggerate—they call it artistic licence—to prove a point, so Agnihotri has not done anything unprecedented. To judge a man who did what he did in 1946 by today’s standards of ‘acceptable’ behaviour is not unprecedented either; but it leads to inaccuracies. Mukherjee does not need to be “saved" from today’s “communal" slur: he lived in extraordinary times; it was an inflection........

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