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
Narendranath Goswami turned approver in the Alipore Bomb Case and began naming his own friends in the witness box. On 31 August 1908 two under-trial prisoners, Kanailal Dutta and Satyendranath Bose, shot him inside the Alipore jail hospital. Kanailal admitted the killing, refused to appeal, and was hanged on 10 November 1908 at twenty; thousands walked barefoot behind his body to the burning ground at Kalighat.
The Hospital Verandah
It is the morning of Monday, 31 August 1908, inside Alipore Central Jail in Calcutta. In the jail hospital, two under-trial prisoners are lying in bed, both of them faking. Satyendranath Bose came in on 27 July with bronchial asthma. Kanailal Dutta followed three days later, complaining of severe colic. Neither is ill. Each of them has a revolver hidden in the bedding.
Kanailal is twenty years old. He has just sat his BA examination from Hooghly Mohsin College. He has been in this jail since May, one of the boys picked up after the raid on Barin Ghose's garden at Muraripukur.
The man they are waiting for is Narendranath Goswami, the son of a landholding family, arrested at that same garden. In June, Goswami agreed to give evidence for the Crown in exchange for a pardon. He has already stood in the witness box and named his own friends.
A European convict overseer named Higgins brings Goswami across to the hospital and leaves the three of them talking on the verandah. Satyen has sent word that he too wants to turn informer, and wants advice on how. Goswami has come to give it.
Nine shots will be fired on that verandah in the next minute or two. What matters in this lesson is not the shooting. It is the reason Kanailal gave the magistrate afterwards, and the five words he used when his lawyers asked about an appeal.
What an Approver Was
An approver is an accused person who turns witness for the prosecution against everyone else in the dock, usually in exchange for a pardon or a lighter sentence. The word is an old one in Indian criminal law and it is still in the statute book.
For the Raj in 1908 the approver was not a detail. It was the whole method. The police had raided Muraripukur on 2 May and taken dozens of young men, but a raid gives you bombs and notebooks, not a conspiracy. To prove that the men in the dock formed one organisation, the prosecution needed somebody from inside it to stand up and say so.