While announcing the renaming of Suhrawardy Avenue in Kolkata as Gopal Mukherjee Road, West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari on June 21 claimed that the road bore the name of “someone who wilfully misused state power as a weapon, orchestrating the massacre of innocent citizens for sheer political gain. ” (Archive)

It is apparent that Adhikari suggested that the road (in Kolkata’s Park Circus area) had been named after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who is associated with two major atrocities during his tenure as the chief minister (premier) of undivided Bengal: the Great Calcutta Killings (1946) and the Noakhali Genocide (1946). As the head of the provincial government, he was accused of complicity through state inaction and political maneuvering. **

Bengal BJP shared the same post from its official X handle.

BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya, too, implied in an X post that Suhrawardy Avenue had been named after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. “A major artery of the city bore the name of a man whose legacy remains inseparable from one of the darkest chapters in Kolkata’s history…” he wrote on X. (Archive)

Several other users echoed the same claim. Among them are Bengal transport minister Arjun Singh, BJP spokespersons Keya Ghosh and Pradeep Bhandari, pro-BJP handles Shashank Shekhar Jha, MeghUpdates and News Arena India, NDTV managing editor Akhilesh Sharma and others.

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Same Claim was Made by Swarajya Magazine in 2017

“It’s A Crying Shame That ‘The Butcher Of Bengal’ Has A Road Named After Him In Kolkata” was the title of a story on Right-wing portal Swarajya in August, 2017. The Snapshot section of the story stated, “Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy engineered the killings, maiming, rape and molestation of tens of thousands of Hindus in Calcutta back in 1946. It is a shame, therefore, that a major thoroughfare in Kolkata is named after a criminal who was involved in such heinous crimes against humanity.”

The concluding paragraph of the story went onto demand that Suhrawardy Avenue in Kolkata be renamed while stating, “It is high time the name of the road is changed. Bengal does not lack heroes, and it is high time one of them is honoured instead of a criminal who caused so many deaths and such destruction in the city.”

Suhrawardy Avenue

The author of this article, Jaideep Mazumdar, was the associate editor of Swarajya Magazine. His biography on the Swarajya website stated that he was journalist with many years of experience in The Times Of India, Open Magazine, The Outlook, The Hindustan Times, The Pioneer and some other news organizations.

Fact Check

First of all, the over 3000-word article did not provide any evidence regarding the central claim that Suhrawardy Avenue in Kolkata was indeed named after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. The author talked about Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and his alleged brutality and crimes. As a matter of fact, after the article was published on Swarajya website on Aug 16, 2017, many on social media contested this claim — that Suhrawardy Avenue named after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy?

We looked up some old maps of Calcutta. The oldest map that we found that had mentioned Suhrawardy Avenue is a 1940 map (high resolution).

If one zooms into the map, on the bottom right of the map, bordering Park Circus, Suhrawardy Avenue can be seen.

1940 map suhrawardy avenue

That means that Suhrawardy Avenue was named sometime prior to 1940. To find information about a subject that old, Google Books and Google Newspaper Archive are good resources. Google Newspaper Archive wasn’t helpful so we turned to Google Books. We searched for every reference of “Surhawardy Avenue” prior to December 31, 1940.

The 17th Volume of Calcutta Municipal Gazette states that the road was named Suhrawardy Avenue in 1932-33, “Calcutta Improvement Trust Road from Park Circus to its junotion with Kasaipara Lane and lying, to the north of the Park, to be called Suhrawardy Avenue. P. TRIVED, Assessor to the Corporation. Central Municipal Office, The 20th April,…” (sic)

Google Books also allows a user to search within a specific book. We searched for all references of Suhrawardy within the book and this is what we found.

“The new road constructed by the Calcutta Improvement Trust from Park Circus to the junction of Kasaipara Lane-on which stands the house of Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta-was named Suhra-“.

Unfortunately, Google Books for copyrighted books only shows snippets and not the entire book. In this snippet, the name of the lane can be seen only partially as “Suhra-“. However, the description of the road matches the previous screenshot from the same book. Hence it would be safe to assume that the incomplete word “Suhra-” means “Suhrawardy Avenue”.

The aforementioned snippet from the 17th volume of Calcutta Municipal Gazette proves that Suhrawardy Avenue was not named after Huseyn Suhrawardy but after Sir Hassan Suhrawardy. Sir Hassan Suhrawardy was the vice chancellor of Calcutta University from 1930-1934. He was conferred knighthood in February, 1932.

A History of Calcutta’s Streets by P Thankappan Nair also reconfirms that Suhrawardy Avenue was named after Sir Hassan Suhrawardy. See the relevant section ( Pages 866, 867) below.

To sum up, Suhrawardy Avenue in Kolkata’s Park Circus area, which has now been renamed as Gopal Mukherjee Road, was not named after politician Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. It was named after academic and former Calcutta University VC Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, whose house stood on that street.

UPDATE: Swarajya updated their title and Snapshot section of the article after Alt News’s exposé. Here’s the original version of their article.

** For the role of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in the Great Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali violence of 1946, see ‘Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-47’ by Anwesha Roy, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

False
Claim:
Suhrawardy Avenue in Kolkata was named after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy.

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