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

Satyendranath Bose was a Midnapore professor's son who helped start the district's first secret society in 1902 and led its National Volunteers to the Surat Congress with a pistol in his clothes. In Alipore jail he set the trap that brought the approver Narendranath Goswami into the hospital where he and Kanailal Dutta shot him. A jury voted to acquit him, a judge refused their verdict, and he was hanged eleven days after Kanailal, his body burned inside the jail so that Calcutta could not bury him.

The Man With the Pistol at Surat

It is late December 1907, in a large canvas pandal on the bank of the Tapi at Surat. The Indian National Congress is meeting, and it is breaking in half. Tilak has been refused the platform. Chairs are being lifted over heads and the hall has stopped being a meeting. Somewhere in the noise stands a Bengali of twenty-five in a dhoti, a clerk's build, no title and no office. His name is Satyendranath Bose. He has come from Midnapore at the head of a group of young volunteers, and he has a pistol in his clothes.

Beside him is his own nephew, ten years older than him, the Bengal nationalist leader Aurobindo Ghose. Thirty-three years later, in Pondicherry, Aurobindo would recall that day to the people who wrote down his talks.

"Only Satyen Bose was with me and he had a pistol. He said to me, 'I have a pistol with me. Shall I shoot Suren Banerji?' I said, 'For heaven's sake, don't do that.'"

Sri Aurobindo, recorded in Talks with Sri Aurobindo, 23 February 1940

Surendranath Banerjea was the most respected moderate leader in Bengal. He was not the enemy. He was the other side of an argument. In that shouting hall, Satyendranath had already reached the point where an argument and a target look the same.

He was told no. He put the pistol away. Eleven months later he used one, on a man he believed had earned it, and it cost him his life and even his ashes. This is how a professor's son from Midnapore got from the pandal at Surat to a rope at Alipore.

A Family of Teachers

Satyendranath was born on 30 July 1882 in Midnapore district. His father, Abhaya Charan Bosu, taught at Midnapore College. His grand-uncle was Rajnarayan Basu, headmaster of the Midnapore district school from 1851 to 1866, a Brahmo scholar whose writings on the Hindu past were read across Bengal. Aurobindo was Rajnarayan's grandson, which made Satyendranath his uncle by blood and his junior by a decade.