In 1906, frightened residents of Koya village in rural West Bengal watched as Jatindranath Mukherjee grappled with a Royal Bengal tiger. Jatindranath (also known as Jyotindranath), had been summoned by the villagers to deal with this marauding big cat. He had arrived armed with a kukri or small knife, expecting to meet a small tiger. Now, he found himself locked in mortal combat with a huge man-eater instead.
Suddenly, the enraged tiger charged at him. Jatin caught hold of the creature by the neck and attacked it with the kukri. With its last roar, the tiger closed its jaws around Jatin’s right knee and collapsed. Jatin lay immobile, his leg seriously injured. Someone eventually fired a rifle at the dead beast. Jatin chuckled and said, “Useless. It won’t move any more. Don’t damage the skin!”
Villagers started gathering from far and wide to pay their respects, thinking it might be Jatin’s last day alive. He was taken to Calcutta to see a well-known surgeon. Jatin’s legs were mauled badly, but he recovered under the care of the surgeon, who devoted himself to Jatin’s care. Six months later, Jatin was able to walk without crutches. He was awarded a silver medal by the Government of Bengal and instantly became a hero. People started calling him Bagha Jatin (Tiger Jatin). His particular brand of unapologetic, muscular Bengali nationalism influenced a whole generation of revolutionaries, including the fiery young MN Roy.
MN Roy grew up on the other side of India from Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (Chatto), in a completely different world. While Chatto grew up attending intellectual addas with scientists, teachers and royals, Roy came of age attending a different type of gathering – one that made bombs.
Born Narendranath Bhattacharya on 21 March 1887, seven years after Chatto, Roy would later change his name to avoid arrest. I will refer to him as Narendranath in this chapter and the next few chapters because that is what he called himself in that period of his life. His father Dinabandhu Bhattacharya was the last of a line of priests from Midnapur, South Bengal. But Dinabandhu chose to become a Sanskrit teacher instead in Arbelia, a village near Calcutta. In 1899, he moved to Chingripota, a move that would have a significant effect on Roy.
What made the son of a respectable schoolteacher take to revolution and anarchy? It was a sign of the times. In the 1860s, Bengalis, mostly from the elite classes, had begun going abroad for study or work. Their tales of liberty, dissent and free speech had trickled back and stirred the imagination of all of Bengal. As historian Kris Manjapra explains, “By the 1890s, in the prime colonial cosmopolis of Calcutta, it was common for individuals from diverse classes to have had some experiences of foreign travel, or to know someone with stories of life abroad, whether he be coolie, lascar, free labourer, haji pilgrim, student or bhadralok tourist.”
Naren grew up with the heady scent of revolution in the air. Bengal was famous – notorious if you asked the British – for new ideas, social reform and rebellion. The reformist Brahmo Samaj was active here too, and was turning traditional Hindu culture on its head. The boy Naren was surrounded by dissent, revolution and an atmosphere of curiosity, much as the young Chatto was in Hyderabad.
By fourteen, Naren had become a revolutionary, heavily influenced by the Bengal revolutionaries of the time, especially those like Swami Vivekananda, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal, who espoused a robust home-grown nationalism. Vivekananda was taking Indian philosophy and religion to the rest of the world, and the young Roy lapped it all up. At the time, he knew nothing about Marxism, but he was beginning to learn all there was to know about radical nationalism.
Later, he would write in his memoirs, “When, as a school boy of fourteen, I began my political life, which may end in nothing, I wanted to be free. Independence, complete and absolute, is a newfangled idea. The old-fashioned revolutionaries thought in terms of freedom. In those days, we had not read Marx. We did not know about the existence of the proletariat. Still, many spent their lives in jail and went to the gallows. There was no proletariat to propel them. They were not conscious of class struggle. They did not have the dream of Communism. But they had the human urge to revolt against the intolerable conditions of life. They did not know exactly how those conditions could be changed. But they tried to change them anyhow. I began my political life with that spirit, and I still draw my inspiration from that spirit than from the Three Volumes of Capital (Das Kapital) or three hundred volumes of Marx.” Being free rather than tied to any ideology would define Roy’s existence.
Naren began his life restless, and restless he remained to the end. His cousin Harikumar Chakravarty described him thus: “He was constantly searching for something distant, something beyond and spent many nights in the cremation ground, which later became his favourite spot for secret meetings of his revolutionary group.” Roy would frequently walk thirty miles to the Belur Math, founded by Swami Vivekananda, in his quest for knowledge.
In 1901, he met Sivnarain Swami, who had reportedly been one of the rebels in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, later called the First War of Indian Independence. Sivnarain Swami, like many Bengali reformers of the time, believed that Hindu society had been weakened by caste divisions. He was looking for young men like Naren, who he could train in revolution but also those who would lead reforms in Hinduism. The swami told Naren inspiring tales of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had been charged with sedition in 1897, and the Chapekar brothers, who had become the face of revolution after they had protested the brutal anti-plague measures introduced in Pune.
The same tide of vigorous Bengali nationalism that had influenced Chatto now wholly consumed the young Naren. In some cases, nationalism was both metaphorically and literally muscular. For example, the revolutionary activities of a nationalist secret society called Anushilan Samiti founded in 1902 included teaching young men to be physically fit and to focus on Indian sports like lathi, swordplay and wrestling. The well-known revolutionary brothers, Aurobindo Ghose and Barindra Ghose, both of whom were influenced by the fiery philosophy of Italian nationalists, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, were closely associated with the Anushilan Samiti. By 1905, there were more than five hundred branches of the society in Bengal, Assam and Dhaka. In 1906, the Anushilan Samiti launched a newspaper called Jugantar or “New Era”. Later, the newspaper lent its name to the West Bengal division of the Anushilan Samiti, which was being spearheaded by Jatindranath Mukherjee – the same Bagha Jatin we met earlier.
Jatindranath was the single biggest influence on young Naren. He embodied the qualities of Bengali revolutionaries of the time: a person deeply influenced by the teachings of Gita and Hinduism, but also muscular, physically impressive and charismatic, someone who would not hesitate to intervene if he saw British officers bullying the local population. “Jyoti was a rare synthesis of the traditional Indian paths of action, devotion and knowledge: he believed that physical strength was to be acquired only on condition that simultaneously there would be an effort to realise the soul force. Thus, far from transforming an entire generation of Indians into violent rebels, he implanted the feeling of almost a sacred fervour of Mother India, a feeling in harmony with the essence of the Gita and enhanced by the vision of Bankim Chandra,” wrote Naren of his idol.
There are legendary stories about Jatin. In 1905, the Prince of Wales (who later became King George V) visited Bengal. Jatin, along with a few friends, decided to wait for the prince at a road crossing, aiming to show him how much the British were detested in India. There he saw a hackney-coach which had Bengali women sitting inside and a group of British solders sitting on the top, rudely swinging their legs in the ladies’ faces. When Jatindranath politely requested the soldiers to move their legs, they refused. He then “sprang to the hood of the coach, slapped the cheeks of the English offenders, and with quick footwork, kicked them off the coach among general cheers.” This story demonstrated both his bravery and chivalry.
The then viceroy, Lord Curzon, took the decision to partition Bengal on 19 July 1905. Young Bengal erupted in anger at what they saw as an egregious application of the British policy of divide and rule. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s rousing anthem Bande Mataram was sung for the first time at the 1896 session of the INC. And addressing the session was the stirring figure of Sister Nivedita, an Irish nationalist and follower of Swami Vivekananda. Sister Nivedita argued for political freedom for India instead of spiritual salvation. The same year, Aurobindo Ghose wrote the pamphlet Bhawani Mandir, laying down the ideals and methods of revolution.
Meanwhile, Jugantar took a radical position. Its June 1906 issue argued, “The foreigners manage by artifice to obtain and take away the wealth of the country and everything substantial in it, and throw the Indians, reduced by them to skeletons, into the horrid jaws of famine, pestilence and poverty. Is this to be called peace? War or a revolution is an infinitely better thing than the peace under which mortality is fast rising in India.”
Excerpted with permission from Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy, Kavitha Rao, Westland.
