Violence Against Noakhali's Hindus and Gandhi's Peace Walk

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Beginning around 10 October 1946 and continuing for several weeks, Muslim mobs in the Noakhali and Tippera districts of eastern Bengal killed and abducted Hindu residents, destroyed and looted Hindu owned property and temples, and carried out forced conversions to Islam. It followed the Great Calcutta Killings of mid August 1946, days of intense Hindu Muslim rioting in Calcutta that broke out after the Muslim League's Direct Action Day call for a separate Muslim state, and Noakhali's violence in turn provoked retaliatory Bihar riots against Muslims the following month. The violence was organized along religious lines, aimed specifically at the district's Hindu minority rather than diffused communal disorder, in the charged atmosphere the Direct Action Day campaign and the preceding Calcutta violence had created.

Tens of thousands of Hindu residents fled or were displaced from Noakhali and Tippera. Mohandas Gandhi walked through the affected villages of Noakhali for weeks that winter in a personal peace mission, urging reconciliation, one of the defining images of the final year before Partition. The cycle of communal violence across Bengal and Bihar in late 1946 is treated by historians as a direct precursor to the mass violence and displacement that accompanied Partition itself the following August.