The relative prosperity of the Burdwan district in the immediate aftermath of the India-wide fin de siècle famines, from which it had escaped comparatively unscathed, motivated an influx of migrants seeking work in the well-paid but hazardous coal mines and other local industries. With many areas of India experiencing demographic stagnation or even decline in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Burdwan saw a population increase of 130 per cent between 1891 and 1901. By the end of this period, one in three people had been born outside the district. Even among the “district-born” residents, movement from one subdivision, village, or town to another was common.
Rash Behari Bose was a perfect example. Rash Behari was born in the neighbouring Hooghly district but spent his childhood in the village of Subaldaha in Burdwan. As he got older, he began studying in the nearby French enclave of Chandernagore, where his father worked and maintained a house. A strip of territory perched on the Hooghly River, Chandernagore lay just north of Calcutta and some 30 miles east of Subaldaha. First settled by the French in 1673, Chandernagore retained its anomalous legal status as a French possession until 1962, years after the end of British rule elsewhere in the subcontinent. At the beginning of the 20th century, employment mainly centred around manual labour in the jute mills, but Bose’s father worked in the far more comfortable role of a civil servant.
Throughout his primary education and into his teenage years, Rash Behari moved around a lot, dividing his time between his father’s house in Chandernagore and his grandfather’s residence In Subaldaha, likely with occasional visits to his mother’s family in Hooghly district. Rash Behari’s characteristic fearlessness was apparent from a young age, as evidenced by a boyhood pastime of gathering human skulls from a cremation ground on the banks of the Bhagirath river along with a friend, possibly his cousin Srish Chandra Ghosh. The boys often collected their macabre trophies in the dark of midnight, and one biographer opined that the practice led Bose to “meditate upon the frailty and mystery of life.”
Unlike some revolutionaries who grew up among Calcutta’s urban intelligentsia, Rash Behari was a product of rural Bengal. His earliest memories were formed in villages comprised of mud or brick homes with roofs of reed or straw. Larger brick houses belonging to bankers and merchants lined the main streets, and temples – most often dedicated to the god Shiva or the goddess Kali – were common centres of worship. Many households tended a small plot with one or two trees for growing tropical fruits like plums, plantains, guava, mangoes, limes, or papayas. Local shops sold staples like mustard oil, tobacco, salt, and rice, while weekly or bi-weekly markets provided opportunities for purchasing other essentials like garments, spices, utensils, and vegetables. In the afternoons, groups of men could be seen “squatting on mats or carpets, engaged in discussing village politics, or in playing at cards, dice or the royal game of chess.” In the evenings, the smell of smoke was omnipresent, both from the cooking of meals on verandah woodstoves and from the burning of cakes of cow dung “for the purpose of saving the bovine inmates from the bite of mosquitoes and fleas.”
Unlike some other parts of India, vegetarianism was not especially common in the riverine villages of western Bengal, other than among some sects like Vaishnavas (worshippers of Vishnu) or high-caste brahmins. For most of the rural population, the teeming fish of waterways like the Damodar River – which included various species of carp – provided an important source of dietary protein. Other key staples included pulses, rice, milk, and vegetables. Bose himself does not seem to have been raised vegetarian, and certainly ate non-vegetarian foods as an adult, although he later wrote: “Meat is not essential as long as we get a sufficient quantity of milk and milk products in our diet … Where, however, milk is not available, meat, fish or eggs must form part of our diet otherwise we cannot have a balanced diet and this is one of the causes of deterioration of the Indians’ physique.”
Most of the population – more than 90 per cent – spoke a western dialect of Bengali called Rarhi boli, with another four to five per cent speaking Hindi and one in a hundred (including Rash Behari) speaking English. Overall literacy rates in the district were high compared to other parts of Bengal, and Bose learned to read from a young age. Like many boys of his generation, Bose was captivated by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 work of historical fiction, Anandamath, which he read as early as fourth class in 1900.
The book tells the story of a brotherhood of anti-colonial rebels in 18th-century India, who attempt to overthrow the colonial government during a major period of famine. A defining novel in the Bengali literary and cultural renaissance of the period, Anandamath presented themes of sacrifice, patriotism, and resistance to tyranny in a way that profoundly influenced a generation of young men growing up in a period of widespread famine, social unrest, and intellectual ferment. Another text that struck a strong chord with Bose was Nabinchandra Sen’s poem, “Battle of Plassey,” which rendered a similarly patriotic ode to the Indian soldiers who fought against Company forces in 1757, whose defeat paved the way for colonial rule.
As a child and then as a young man, Bose was fascinated by stories of the uprising of 1857, arguably the largest and most significant anti-colonial rebellion of the nineteenth century. While the British described the event as a “mutiny” resulting from the religious objections of Muslim and Hindu sepoys (soldiers) regarding rumours that pig and cow fat were being used to grease their rifle cartridges, young men of Bose’s generation came to see the conflict as “the first revolutionary movement of the Indian people in the 19th century.” Writing about the uprising as an adult, Bose attributed the failure of the movement to the fact that “the great masses did not have faith in the constructive ability of their revolutionary leaders.”
The idea that a successful rebellion required the enthusiasm of the masses, as well as determined and courageous leadership, would pervade Bose’s writings and influence his tactics throughout his revolutionary career. When fighting broke out in 1857, Bose’s home district was one of the areas that remained loyal to the British and helped Company troops mobilise against the rebels, with the maharajah of Burdwan doing “everything in his power to strengthen the hands of Government.” Maintaining crucial lines of transportation and intelligence, he supplied elephants and bullock carts to ensure supply chains remained undisturbed.
Despite initial successes in routing British-aligned forces across a vast swathe of northern India and establishing strongholds in Delhi, Lucknow, Cawnpore, and elsewhere, the disparate rebel factions were unable to maintain their momentum, and by 1858, British and British-allied troops had re-established control. In response to largely unsubstantiated rumours of the rape and torture of European women by “bloodthirsty” rebels, the British unleashed havoc on the Indian population. Mass hangings, summary executions, and the razing or desecration of religious structures were widespread. A sergeant in the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders referred to the experience as a “horrible … war for civilised men to be engaged in,” but justified British atrocities such as the callous shooting of wounded rebels on the basis that the actions of the insurgents had branded them “traitors to humanity.”
Excerpted with permission from Fugitive of Empire: Rash Behari Bose, Japan and the Indian Independence Struggle, Joseph McQuade, Penguin India.