Freedom movement · Journalism · Public service
Life and work
1911–1980 · Freedom fighter, editor and legislator
Dasarathi Tah joined Congress in 1930 and participated in the Salt Satyagraha and Quit India movements.[1] Historian Sukanta Pramanik records a leaflet issued by Tah on 26 August 1942, printed at Raina Bazar, urging students to join the freedom struggle. The same study describes his organisation of a hartal at Jamalpur and Kalna on 1 September.[2]
After independence he represented Raina in the first general election and again in 1957 and 1967, first for the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party and later the Praja Socialist Party.[1] A university history thesis records Prafulla Chandra Ghosh recommending him for a cabinet post on 4 December 1967.[3] Arild Engelsen Ruud’s study of Raina describes Tah as the constituency’s main opposition figure: during the food scarcity of the mid-1960s he was alleged to have led a procession of several thousand peasants that seized hoarded paddy from landlords in the Dakshin Damodar, and in 1969 he moved from the Praja Socialist Party to the Congress, taking many former PSP voters with him (pp. 21, 109).[4]
He also edited and published Damodar, which began as a weekly in 1936 and became a daily in the 1970s.[5] A Bengali local account remembers his wife, freedom fighter Roma Tah, keeping the newspaper running during his underground years.[6]
Dutta names Dasarathi Tah among Ugra Kshatriya participants in the freedom movement, in Explorations in Colonial Bengal, p. 314. This community reference is distinct from the biographical sources above.[7]
