The Riverbank at Balasore
Jatindranath Mukherjee, the arms ship that never came, and ninety minutes in a ditch at Chashakhand
On 9 September 1915 five men with Mauser pistols dug into a hillock near the Buribalam river in Balasore and fought off a force with rifles rather than surrender. Their leader was Jatindranath Mukherjee of Jugantar, whom Bengal called Bagha Jatin, and he had come there to meet a German arms shipment that had already been seized on the other side of the world. This lesson follows him from the Rodda arms heist to the ditch at Chashakhand, and asks why the best organiser the Bengal underground ever had ended up fighting like this.
The Mound by the Buribalam
It is the morning of 9 September 1915, in scrub country near the Buribalam river in Balasore district, Odisha. It has been raining for days. Five men are lying in a shallow ditch on a low hillock the local people call Chashakhand. Their clothes are soaked. They have walked for two days through the forests and hills of Mayurbhanj with very little food.
They have Mauser pistols. That is all they have. Spread out in the wet grass below them are police and soldiers with rifles, hundreds of them.
The man in the middle of the ditch is thirty-five years old. His name is Jatindranath Mukherjee. Bengal calls him Bagha Jatin, Jatin the Tiger. He is the head of Jugantar, the largest secret society in the province. For the past year he has been the Indian end of a plan to arm a rising with German rifles landed on this coast.
The rifles are not coming. He does not know that yet. He knows only that the police have found him, that his men have perhaps a hundred rounds between them, and that he has told them nobody surrenders.
What happens in the next ninety minutes is the last stand of the most capable organiser the Bengal underground ever produced. The question worth carrying into the lesson is not how he died. It is why a man who was very good at staying alive chose a ditch.
The Man in the Ditch
Jatindranath Mukherjee was born on 7 December 1879 at Kayagram, a village in Kushtia district in what is now Bangladesh. He was a big man, a swimmer and a wrestler, and he trained as a stenographer. For years he held a clerk's job in government service in Bengal.
