1931: Key Events

• Bhagat Singh is hanged, after throwing a bomb at the Central Legislative Assembly ‘to make the deaf hear’. He becomes India’s first nationally renowned socialist martyr.

• The Gandhi-Lord Irwin Pact is signed, leading to the temporary suspension of the civil disobedience movement. It is resumed after the failure of the second Round Table Conference in London, where Winston Churchill refers to Gandhi as a ‘half-naked seditious fakir’.

• New Delhi, designed by the Orientalist architect Edwin Lutyens, becomes India’s capital.

• ​Alam Ara is India’s first sound film. Kalidas is the first Tamil sound feature; in Telugu it is Bhakta Prahlada and in Bengali Jamai Sasthi.

• B. N. Sircar founds New Theatres, a sound film expansion of International Filmcraft (Est: 1930).

• Pancholi’s Empire Talkie Distributors acquires rights to RKO-Radio productions and RCA-Photophone sound equipment.

• The Bengali film weeklies Batayan (edited by Abinashchandra Ghoshal) and Chitralekha (edited by Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee) are launched.

• The Bengali literary quarterly Parichay (edited by Sudhindranath Datta) starts, arguably the most influential journal of cultural theory in pre-Independence Bengal.