The Manual from Paris
A student in Paris copied a bomb manual in 1907, and the farmers of Mulshi made him a commander in 1921
In Paris in 1907 Pandurang Mahadev Bapat and Hemchandra Kanungo photographed and translated a seventy-page Russian bomb manual, and copies reached India House in London and the Maniktala group in Bengal. Bapat stayed out of police reach for about four and a half years and was never convicted of a bomb case. From 1921 he led the Mulshi farmers against the Tata dam with open obstruction and accepted arrest, and they gave him the name Senapati, commander.
The Booklet on the Bench
Paris, July 1907. In a rented room with a chemistry bench, two Indian students are being taught by a Russian who will not give them his name. His students know him only as Ph.D. Years later the police decided he was a man called Nicholas Safranski. He was an exile from the Tsar's empire with a price on his head.
The two Indians are Hemchandra Kanungo of Midnapore in Bengal and Pandurang Mahadev Bapat of Parner, in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra. Bapat is twenty-six. He came to Britain in 1904 on the Mangaldas Nathubhai scholarship. He was sent to study engineering at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh. He has not opened an engineering book in months.
The woman who brought them into this room is Bhikaji Cama. She is the Parsi exile who will unfurl a flag for India at Stuttgart a month from now, on 22 August 1907. She introduced them to a French anarchist called Joseph Albert. Albert passed them upward. The Russian teaches history first, then geography, then economics and socialism. Only at the end of the course comes the thing the two of them crossed a continent for: explosive chemistry.
On the bench sits 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 is not going to give it away.
What these two men do about that problem over the next six months puts a bomb in a Bengal garden and a manual on a printing press in London. It also puts one of them in a cell for most of the next thirty years. Bapat never built a bomb that killed anyone. The title India ended up giving him was not a bomb-maker's title at all.