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

Ullaskar Dutt built the bombs at Muraripukur and was sentenced to hang in May 1909. He only appealed because Barin Ghose argued him into it in tapped code through a condemned-cell wall, and the High Court cut the sentence to transportation for life. In the Cellular Jail a week of standing handcuffs and a fever broke his mind, and he spent the rest of the decade in the Madras asylum before the amnesty of 1920 let him out.

Two Taps on a Wall

It is May 1909, inside Alipore jail in Calcutta. Two condemned cells stand side by side at the head of a row the prisoners call the 44 cells. In the first is Barindra Kumar Ghose. In the second is a chemist of twenty-four named Ullaskar Dutt. Three days earlier a judge sentenced both of them to hang.

A warder asks Ullaskar whether he wants to appeal to the High Court. He says no. He wrote down his reason years later, in his own words: how could he appeal to a court whose authority to try him he did not accept?

Then the tapping starts on the wall between the cells. The jail has banned the prisoners from talking, so Barin and Ullaskar have worked out a code of taps and thumps. Barin argues through the brick, one knock at a time, that the whole thing was his and Ullaskar must sign the form. Everybody else is appealing. There would be one precious life less lost out of the total.

Ullaskar signed. That signature saved him from the rope and handed him something worse.

The Chemist Nobody Asked For

Ullaskar Dutt was born on 16 April 1885 at Kalikachha, in Sarail, in the Brahmanbaria area of what was then eastern Bengal. His father, Dwijadas Dutta, was a Brahmo Samaj man with a degree from the University of London. The son was clever, restless, and bad at doing as he was told.

He got into Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1903. He did not finish. A British professor named Russell said something contemptuous about Bengalis in class. Ullaskar went for him the next morning and was thrown out of the college. He moved to Bombay and the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, and that is where the story turns, because the institute had a laboratory.