Bengal

By the 1870s, Calcutta’s student community was honeycombed with secret societies, but these were not very active. The first revolutionary groups were organised in 1902 in Midnapore (under Jnanendranath Basu) and in Calcutta (the Anushilan Samiti founded by Promotha Mitter, and including Jatindranath Banerjee, Barindra Kumar Ghosh and others.) But their activities were limited to giving physical and moral training to the members and remained insignificant till 1907-08.

In April 1906, an inner circle within Anushilan (Barindra Kumar Ghosh, Bhupendranath Dutta) started the weekly Yugantar and conducted a few abortive ‘actions’. By 1905- 06, several newspapers had started advocating revolutionary violence. For instance, after severe police brutalities on participants of the Barisal Conference (April 1906), the Yugantar wrote: “The remedy lies with the people. The 30 crore people inhabiting India must raise their 60 crore hands to stop this curse of oppression. Force must be stopped by force.”

Rashbehari Bose and Sachin Sanyal had organised a secret society covering far-flung areas of Punjab, Delhi and United Provinces while some others like Hemachandra Kanungo went abroad for military and political training.

In 1907, an abortive attempt was made by the Yugantar group on the life of a very unpopular British official, Sir Fuller (the first Lt. Governor of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, although he had resigned from the post on August 20, 1906).

In December 1907, there were attempts to derail the train on which the lieutenant-governor, Sri Andrew Fraser, was travelling

In 1908, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose threw a bomb at a carriage supposed to be carrying a particularly sadistic white judge, Kingsford, in Muzaffarpur. Kingsford was not in the carriage. Unfortunately, two British ladies, instead, got killed. Prafulla Chaki shot himself dead while Khudiram Bose was tried and hanged.

The whole Anushilan group was arrested including the Ghosh brothers, Aurobindo and Barindra, who were tried in the Alipore conspiracy case, variously called Manicktolla bomb conspiracy or Muraripukur conspiracy. (Barindra Ghosh’s house was on Muraripukur Road in the Manicktolla suburb of Calcutta.) The Ghosh brothers were charged with ‘conspiracy’ or ‘waging war against the King’ – the equivalent of high treason and punishable with death by hanging. Chittaranjan Das defended Aurobindo. Aurobindo was acquitted of all charges with the judge condemning the flimsy nature of the evidence against him. Barindra Ghosh, as the head of the secret society of revolutionaries and Ullaskar Dutt, as

the maker of bombs, were given the death penalty which was later commuted to life in prison. During the trial, Narendra Gosain (or Goswami), who had turned approver and Crown witness, was shot dead by two co-accused, Satyendranath Bose and Kanailal Dutta in jail.

In February 1909, the public prosecutor was shot dead in Calcutta and in February 1910, a deputy superintendent of police met the same fate while leaving the Calcutta High Court. In 1908, Barrah dacoity was organised by Dacca Anushilan under Pulin Das to raise funds for revolutionary activities. Rashbehari Bose and Sachin Sanyal staged a spectacular bomb attack on Viceroy Hardinge while he was making his official entry into the new capital of Delhi in a procession through Chandni Chowk in December 1912. (Hardinge was injured, but not killed.)

Investigations following the assassination attempt led to the Delhi Conspiracy trial. At the end of the trial, Basant Kumar Biswas, Amir Chand and Avadh Behari were convicted and executed for their roles in the conspiracy. Rashbehari Bose was known as the person behind the plan but he evaded arrest because, it is said, he escaped donning a disguise.

The western Anushilan Samiti found a good leader in Jatindranath Mukherjee or Bagha Jatin and emerged as the Jugantar (or Yugantar). Jatin revitalised links between the central organisation in Calcutta and other places in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

During the First World War, the Jugantar party arranged to import German arms and ammunition through sympathisers and revolutionaries abroad. Jatin asked Rashbehari Bose to take charge of Upper India, aiming to bring about an all-India insurrection in what has come to be called the ‘German Plot’ or the ‘Zimmerman Plan’. The Jugantar party raised funds through a series of dacoities which came to be known as taxicab dacoities and boat dacoities, so as to work out the Indo-German conspiracy. It was planned that a guerrilla force would be organised to start an uprising in the country, with a seizure of Fort William and a mutiny by armed forces. Unfortunately for the revolutionaries, the plot was leaked out by a traitor. Police came to know that Bagha Jatin was in Balasore waiting for the delivery of German arms. Jatin and

his associates were located by the police. There was a gun- fight as a result of which the revolutionaries were either killed or arrested. The German plot thus failed. Jatin Mukherjee was shot and died a hero’s death in Balasore on the Orissa coast in September 1915.

“We shall die to awaken the nation”, was the call of Bagha Jatin.

The newspapers and journals advocating revolutionary activity included Sandhya and Yugantar in Bengal, and Kal in Maharashtra.

In the end, revolutionary activity emerged as the most substantial legacy of swadeshi Bengal which had an impact on educated youth for a generation or more. But, an overemphasis on Hindu religion kept the Muslims aloof. Moreover, it encouraged quixotic heroism. No involvement of the masses was envisaged, which, coupled with the narrow upper caste social base of the movement in Bengal, severely limited the scope of the revolutionary activity. In the end, it failed to withstand the weight of State repression.