The Bomb on the Elephant
The board in 1912: a bomb in Chandni Chowk, Bengal after Alipore, Punjab on the Pacific coast, and the war that had not started yet
On 23 December 1912 a seventeen-year-old in a saree threw a bomb into the Viceroy's howdah in Chandni Chowk, and the clerk who planned it was at his office desk the next morning. This scene-setter lays out the board this book is played on: the Bengal underground after the Alipore case, the Punjabi farmers building a movement on the Pacific coast, and the European war that would open the door. It names the chain of nine people this chapter follows.
The Procession in Chandni Chowk
It is the afternoon of Monday, 23 December 1912. Chandni Chowk is packed. Delhi has just been made the capital of British India, and the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, is riding into his new capital on an elephant. He sits in a howdah with Lady Hardinge beside him. Behind him stands an attendant holding a state umbrella over his head. Bands play. Troops line the route. Flowers come down from the rooftops.
On one of those rooftops, in a space reserved for women, stands a seventeen-year-old from a village in Nadia district, Bengal. His name is Basanta Kumar Biswas. He is wearing a saree. He has told the women around him that he is called Lakshmibai.
The elephant comes level with the roof. Biswas throws a homemade bomb into the howdah.
It explodes behind the Viceroy. The umbrella bearer, a servant who had held the same umbrella over Lord Curzon years before, is killed on the spot. Hardinge is torn open across the back, shoulders and legs by the splinters, and slumps forward. Lady Hardinge is not hurt. The elephant does not bolt. In the noise and the smoke, Biswas walks down into the crowd, drops the saree, and disappears.
The government offered ten thousand rupees for the bomb thrower. It took them fourteen months to find him. The man who planned the whole thing was never suspected at all, because the next morning he was at his desk in Dehradun.
Who Planned It, and Why That Matters
The planner was Rash Behari Bose, head clerk at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun. He had a government salary, a government office, and a government reputation. By the accounts of his own circle he took the night train back and went to work as usual. He then helped organise a meeting of loyal citizens of Dehradun to condemn the outrage. Those accounts come from the revolutionaries themselves rather than from the police file, so hold the detail lightly. What is certain is that the police did not touch him for years.