The Calcutta Riots of 1946, also known as the “Great Calcutta Killing,” were four days of massive Hindu-Muslim riots in the capital of Bengal, India, resulting in 5,000 to 10,000 dead, and some 15,000 wounded, between August 16 and 19, 1946. These riots are probably the most notorious single massacre of the 1946-47 period, during which large-scale violence occurred in many parts of India. However, the “Great Calcutta Killing” stands out somewhat in the history of Calcutta, given that it was by far the most deadly episode in the recent history of the city.
By advocating fearlessness, invoking a sense of responsibility and discoursing at an ethical moral plane, Gandhi prioritised his ideological fight against the ideology that had created the circumstances in which violence of this kind took place. He understood, from the very beginning, that the hegemony of communal ideology was partially a reflection of the socio economic structure of that society. And this was quite significant because his own earlier understanding of communalism was not as focused as it was beginning to look like now.
Literature and history serve the same God and have a close interdependence on each other in that they both ‘narrate’ events. The empiricist and the constructionist theories of history have come under challenge and there is now an increased recognition that history's invented, discursive narratives have a close relationship with the figurative codes of literature as both depend on language and narrative forms. Both are, in particular ways, creations of the human imagination, although with differing objectives.
