Anushilan and Alipore

On the day Bengal was partitioned in 1905, Calcutta tied rakhis on the banks of the Ganga. Under the swadeshi anger an underground had already formed: the akharas a woman had opened, the Anushilan Samiti, the Dhaka lathi drill, the garden at Muraripukur where the bombs were made. This chapter follows it to Muzaffarpur, the Alipore trial, and the gallows.

Lessons in this chapter

• Rakhi on the Ganga — 16 October 1905: the rakhis on the bathing steps, and the samitis that turned swadeshi anger into an underground
• Lakshmir Bhandar — The akhara in her own garden, the Pratapaditya sword, the rakhi oath, and the line she refused to cross
• The Lathi at Dhaka — How a chemistry demonstrator's lathi yard in Dacca became Bengal's largest secret society, and how the Raj removed him without a trial
• The Garden at Muraripukur — Barin Ghose built the Maniktala bomb factory, then wrote a confession trying to hang alone for all of it
• The Man Who Learned the Bomb — He photographed a seventy-page bomb manual in Paris, built the Muraripukur laboratory, lost twelve years in the Cellular Jail, and then wrote the one memoir that audited the movement
• Muzaffarpur, 30 April 1908 — Khudiram Bose, eighteen, threw the bomb at the wrong carriage, walked twenty-five miles, and was hanged on 11 August 1908
• Mokama Ghat — Prafulla Chaki, nineteen, cornered on a river-port platform on 1 May 1908, and the policeman who found him
• The Approver — 31 August 1908: two prisoners with hidden revolvers, the approver who came to the jail hospital, and a twenty-year-old who refused to appeal
• The Second Rope — Satyendranath Bose set the trap for the approver, a jury voted to acquit him, and a judge sent him to the rope on 21 November 1908
• The Bomb-Maker's Return — The Alipore chemist who signed his appeal on a tapped-out argument, and what the Cellular Jail did to him

Back to Kranti Veer: The Rising and the Underground (1857-1911)