1930: Key Events

• The former Congress Party activist Surya Sen leads an Indian Republican Army raid on the police and auxiliary force armouries at Chittagong. The group launched a sustained guerrilla action against the British, triggering several terrorist movements in and around Midnapore, and brutal state reprisals against the entire nationalist movement.

• The poet Mohammed Iqbal suggests a merging of the North West Frontier Province, Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan into a single state, the ancestor of Pakistan.

• Gandhi inaugurates the civil disobedience movement with his epic march from Ahmedabad to Dandi to defy the Salt Act.

• The Department of Industries and Labour takes over radio operations and starts the Indian Broadcasting Service in Bombay and Calcutta.

• Physicist C. V. Raman wins the Nobel Prize for his theory of the ‘Raman Effect’ of scattered light.

• Rabindranath Tagore, who started painting aged 67, has his first exhibition at the Galerie Pigalle, Paris; the show travels through Europe and opens at the Town Hall, Calcutta, in 1931.

• Abanindranath Tagore paints his definitive work, the Arabian Nights series.

• Munshi Premchand publishes the first number of his journal Hans.

• Sailajananda Mukherjee starts the Bengali film weekly Bioscope reporting the Hollywood, Bombay and Calcutta film industries and publishing reviews, pre-release synopses of films, industrial surveys and, occasionally, essays about technical and aesthetic issues.

• Ambalal Patel and Chimanlal Desai start Sagar Film. Gubbi Veeranna starts production with the Gubbi-Karnataka Films Corp. at the Malleshwaram Studios in Bangalore.