Revolutionary Nationalism in Bengal: Anushilan and Jugantar

Two Groups, One Mood: Anushilan and Jugantar

By Narendra Singh · GS faculty, The Cavalier · 15 years teaching GS

The Moderates' prayers and petitions had brought little by 1900. Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905 (see our page on the Swadeshi Movement and the partition of Bengal) then showed that protest alone would not change British policy. A section of educated young men concluded that the British would have to be driven out by force. After the Barisal Conference of April 1906 broke up under police batons, the paper Yugantar wrote that force must be answered by force. These youths did not plan a mass uprising. They modelled themselves on Irish nationalists and Russian revolutionaries and chose to strike at unpopular officials.

The Anushilan Samiti began in Calcutta on 24 March 1902 as a physical-culture club, with Satish Chandra Basu and the barrister Pramathanath Mitra as its leading figures and Aurobindo Ghose as a patron. The word "anushilan" (practice, or cultivation) is taken from the essays of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who wrote about training body and character. The young men learned lathi, wrestling and drill, and read the Gita and Bankim's novels. The group's greatest growth came in Dacca (Dhaka), where Pulin Behari Das built a branch that overshadowed the parent society. Its Dacca section alone had about 500 branches.

Jugantar ("new age") grew around a Bengali weekly of that name launched in 1906 by Barindra Kumar Ghosh (Aurobindo's younger brother), Bhupendranath Datta (Swami Vivekananda's younger brother) and Abinash Bhattacharya. The paper preached open revolt and was prosecuted for sedition. Behind it stood a secret group, the Jugantar party, which collected arms and bomb-makers.

The Printing Press and the Bomb Factory

The Bengal revolutionaries fought with paper as much as with powder. Aurobindo's pamphlet Bhawani Mandir (1905) proposed a secret order devoted to the Mother, and the papers Sandhya (Brahmabandhab Upadhyay), Yugantar and the English daily Bande Mataram carried the message to thousands of readers. Bhupendranath Datta was tried for sedition for what Yugantar printed. Printing presses were raided, editors jailed, and the next issue appeared from another hiding place. The authorities' answer was a series of laws on the press, covered on our page on the Indian press under British rule.

The second workshop was physical. Hemchandra Kanungo, who had gone abroad to learn bomb-making, helped set up a bomb factory in a garden house at Maniktala, a suburb of Calcutta, under Barindra Ghosh. In December 1907 the group tried to kill the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, who escaped. The Muzaffarpur bomb followed nearly five months later.

Muzaffarpur to Alipore: The 1908 Chain

The sequence of 1908 is a favourite for chronological questions, so memorise the chain below.

The defence of Aurobindo in the Alipore Bomb Case was led by Chittaranjan Das, who gave up a lucrative practice for it and became a national figure. After his acquittal Aurobindo withdrew from politics. In 1910 he left Bengal for Pondicherry, then French territory, and turned to spiritual work. The Alipore case shows how a conspiracy trial can become a stage: the defence presented Aurobindo as a poet and educator and the court could not link him to the bomb. Historians' verdict on this phase is that terrorism could not by itself drive out the British, but the revolutionaries restored a sense of pride and courage and became immensely popular, even among people who disagreed with their methods.

Our page on the revolutionary struggle and the Indian National Army carries the wider all-India picture, including the London group of Shyamji Krishnavarma, Savarkar and Madame Cama.

Delhi 1912 and the War Years: Rash Behari Bose and Bagha Jatin

After 1909 repression thinned the Bengal groups, but the idea survived. On 23 December 1912 a bomb was thrown at Viceroy Lord Hardinge as he rode in state on an elephant through Chandni Chowk, Delhi, to mark the transfer of the capital from Calcutta. Hardinge was wounded and an attendant was killed. The plot was headed by Rash Behari Bose, a Bengali who worked at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun and had ties with the Bengal groups and with revolutionaries in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. The bomb is usually said to have been thrown by Basanta Kumar Biswas, who was hanged in 1915. Rash Behari evaded arrest for three years, took part in planning the Ghadar uprising set for 21 February 1915, and escaped to Japan that year. In 1943 he handed the Indian Independence League to Subhas Chandra Bose, a link that connects Bengal's early revolutionaries to the INA.

In Bengal the First World War revived the hope of help from outside. Jatindranath Mukherjee, known as Bagha Jatin ("Tiger Jatin", after a story of his fighting a tiger), became the Jugantar leader. Through agents abroad he planned to receive German arms and to rise while troops were busy in Europe, the plan called the German plot or Indo-German conspiracy. The police learned of it. In September 1915, Jatin and four comrades fought a running battle with armed police near the Buri Balam river at Balasore, Orissa. He was wounded and died the next day. The Defence of India Act, 1915, gave the police wide powers against such groups.

Chittagong 1930: The Last Great Raid

When Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement began in 1920, many Bengal revolutionaries joined the Congress for a time. Within weeks of the Dandi march that opened Civil Disobedience, on 18 April 1930, the revolutionaries struck at Chittagong. Under Surya Sen ("Master Da"), a schoolteacher who led the Jugantar branch in Chittagong, a group calling itself the Indian Republican Army (Chittagong branch) attacked the police armoury and the auxiliary force armoury at the same time and cut the telegraph and rail links. They captured the weapons but could not find the ammunition. At the police armoury they hoisted the national flag and announced a provisional revolutionary government. Pursued into the Jalalabad hills on 22 April, they fought the army and about a dozen youths were killed. Surya Sen was arrested in February 1933 and hanged in January 1934.

What made Chittagong different was the part played by women, as historians stress. Pritilata Waddedar, a graduate and teacher, led an attack on the Pahartali European Club in September 1932 and took poison when wounded, to avoid capture. She was twenty-one. Kalpana Dutta was a member of Surya Sen's group and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In Calcutta, Bina Das fired at the Governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson, at the Calcutta University convocation on 6 February 1932. She missed and was jailed. The same period saw the HSRA of Bhagat Singh in the north, covered in our page on the Gandhian phase of the national movement. Several of those northern revolutionaries had Bengal links: Sachindranath Sanyal, author of Bandi Jivan, was a disciple of Rash Behari Bose.

How UPSC Has Asked It: Past Papers Solved

These are actual CDS and NDA questions since 2018. Questions on this theme are mostly "who with what": a man and an act, a book, a society or a newspaper. One adjoining set asks about the Swadeshi background.

Practice MCQs (with answers)

1. The Anushilan Samiti was founded in Calcutta in
   1. 1897
   2. 1905
   3. 1908
   4. 1902
2. The weekly Jugantar was launched by a group that included
   1. Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Bhupendranath Datta
   2. Pulin Behari Das and Surya Sen
   3. Savarkar and Madame Cama
   4. Bagha Jatin and Rash Behari Bose
3. In April 1908 Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at a carriage at
   1. Dacca
   2. Muzaffarpur
   3. Alipore
   4. Chittagong
4. Who led the defence of Aurobindo Ghose in the Alipore Bomb Case?
   1. Motilal Nehru
   2. Tej Bahadur Sapru
   3. Chittaranjan Das
   4. Bipin Chandra Pal
5. The 1912 bomb attack on Viceroy Hardinge in Delhi was headed by
   1. Rash Behari Bose
   2. Bagha Jatin
   3. Surya Sen
   4. Barindra Ghosh
6. Bagha Jatin died in 1915 after a battle with the police at
   1. Chittagong
   2. Calcutta
   3. Muzaffarpur
   4. Balasore
7. Pritilata Waddedar led an attack in 1932 on
   1. the Writers' Building, Calcutta
   2. the Pahartali European Club, Chittagong
   3. the Governor's carriage, Calcutta
   4. Dacca Jail
8. The Chittagong Armoury Raid took place in
   1. 1919
   2. 1922
   3. 1930
   4. 1942

Quick Revision