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
Hemchandra Kanungo sold family property, reached Marseille at the end of 1906, and in Paris in 1907 learned explosive chemistry from Russian exiles. He photographed a seventy-page Russian bomb manual page by page while Pandurang Mahadev Bapat took the plates to Berlin for translation, and he reached Calcutta in January 1908 to build the Muraripukur laboratory. Transported for life in the Alipore case and released in 1921, he published Banglay Biplab Prachesta in 1928, a memoir that named the movement's own leaders as its problem and which the police translated in order to study the argument.
The Bench in the Rue
Paris, July 1907. In a rented room with a chemistry bench, a Bengali man of thirty-five is being taught by a Russian who will not give his name. The students know him only as Ph.D. Police work later put the name Nicholas Safranski to him. He was an exile from the Tsar's empire, counted among the maximalists, the faction that thought the bomb was the argument.
The Bengali is Hemchandra Kanungo, of Radhanagar village in the Midnapore district. He is not a student. He is a trained artist, a former chemistry demonstrator at Midnapore College, a surveyor for the district board. He has a wife and three children in Bengal. To sit on this bench he sold family property and went to Europe with no contacts and almost no money.
On the bench is a booklet of about seventy pages, in Russian. It is a working manual for making bombs and fuses. There is one copy, and the man who owns it will not part with it.
Hemchandra has come nine thousand kilometres for the contents of that booklet. He has been in Europe seven months already, and broke for most of them. He knocked on doors in Switzerland, France and England. Men who talked about revolution turned him away politely.
What he does with the booklet is the reason bombs worked in Bengal in 1908. What he wrote about it twenty years later is the reason we know how badly the rest of it went.
The Man Before the Bomb
Nothing in his first thirty years points at explosives.
He was born on 4 August 1871 at Radhanagar, in what is now Belda in West Bengal. He went to Midnapore Town School, passed the Entrance examination, started First Arts at Midnapore College, then left for medical study at Campbell Medical School in Calcutta. He left that too. What he actually wanted was to draw. He enrolled at the Government College of Art in Calcutta and finished there.