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
On the evening of 30 April 1908, two boys sent from the Muraripukur garden threw a bomb at a carriage outside the European Club at Muzaffarpur. The target was Douglas Kingsford, the Calcutta magistrate who had ordered a schoolboy flogged. They hit the wrong carriage and killed two Englishwomen. Khudiram Bose was caught at Waini station the next morning and hanged at Muzaffarpur on 11 August 1908, at eighteen, and this lesson teaches both the courage and the cost.
The Gate of the European Club
It is the evening of Thursday, 30 April 1908, a little after half past eight. Muzaffarpur, in north Bihar, is a small station town of courts and bungalows. Outside the gate of the European Club two boys are waiting in the dark. One is Khudiram Bose, eighteen. The other is Prafulla Chaki, a year or so older. They have watched this gate for days. They know the shape of the carriage that comes out of it.
A carriage comes out. It turns towards the road. Khudiram runs at it and throws.
The bomb goes into the carriage and bursts inside it. In the noise and the dust the two boys run in different directions. Behind them, two women are dying in the wreck of the vehicle. Neither of them is the man the bomb was meant for.
The man was Douglas Kingsford, a judge, and he came out of that gate in another carriage. The women were Mrs Kennedy and her daughter Grace, the wife and daughter of a barrister of the Muzaffarpur bar. Khudiram Bose ran about twenty-five miles through the night, on foot. He was taken at a railway platform the next morning and hanged a hundred and three days later.
This lesson is both halves of that. A boy who was brave beyond argument, and a bomb that killed the wrong people. The tradition has hard words for the gap between the two, and the lesson ends there.
The Boy From Midnapore
Khudiram Bose was born on 3 December 1889 in Midnapore district, in the village of Habibpur. His father was a local revenue official. Both parents died while he was a child, and an elder sister brought him up. He grew up without much schooling and without anybody to tell him no.