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The Barisal Conspiracy Case of 1913 was a trial prosecuted by the British colonial authorities against 44 Bengalis who were accused of planning to incite rebellion against the Raj and associated leaders were Trailokyanath Chakravarty and Pratul Chandra Ganguli. As such, it was part of the greater movement for independence that swept India in the decades prior to the departure of the British in 1947.
Barisal was a district in the south-eastern corner of Bengal. The colonial police there reported that they had seized certain documents implicating the Anushilan Samiti, a revolutionary organization whose East Bengal chapters were under the leadership of Trailokyanath Chakravarty and Pratul Chandra Ganguli. The seized documents included a proposal to seduce native-born troops and to incite them to rebellion and wholesale massacre of the British.
The trial of the 44 commenced in Calcutta in June 1913. The prosecutor for the Crown purported to show evidence of how the conspirators had divided up Bengal into several districts in order to preach sedition. The Samiti had specifically targeted students and unmarried youth by means of meetings and religious services, and their membership numbered hundreds in Barisal district alone.
Judgment was passed in January 1914. Of the original 44 accused, 32 were discharged or pardoned, or had the cases against them withdrawn. The remaining 12 pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy against the British Crown. Five of the 12 - among them Pratul Chandra - were given lengthy transportation sentences to the Andamans of between 10 and 12 years. The remaining seven convicts were given transportation sentences between two and seven years.
The case had further consequences. The Calcutta daily Amrita Bazar Patrika had published a series of articles commenting on the case. A show cause motion was brought against the editor Motilal Ghose and the publisher of the newspaper, charging them with contempt of court. However, the motion was later dismissed by a special branch of the High Court.
The Indian independence movement was a series of historic events with the ultimate aim of ending British rule in India also known as British Raj. It lasted until 1947.
Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) is a communist party in India. The party was founded on 19 March 1940 by Tridib Chaudhuri and has its roots in the Bengali liberation movement Anushilan Samiti and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.
Khudiram Bose was an Indian nationalist from Bengal Presidency who opposed British rule of India. For his role in the Muzaffarpur Conspiracy Case, along with Prafulla Chaki, he was sentenced to death and subsequently executed by hanging, making him one of the youngest martyrs of the Indian Independence Movement.
Emperor vs Aurobindo Ghosh and others, colloquially referred to as the Alipore Bomb Case, the Muraripukur conspiracy, or the Manicktolla bomb conspiracy, was a criminal case held in India in 1908. The case saw the trial of a number of Indian nationalists of the Anushilan Samiti in Calcutta, under charges of "Waging war against the Government" of the British Raj. The trial was held at Alipore Sessions Court, Calcutta, between May 1908 and May 1909. The trial followed in the wake of the attempt on the life of Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford in Muzaffarpur by Bengali nationalists Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki in April 1908, which was recognised by the Bengal police as linked to attacks against the Raj in the preceding years, including attempts to derail the train carrying Lieutenant-Governor Sir Andrew Fraser in December 1907.
Anushilan Samiti was an Indian fitness club, which was actually used as an underground society for anti-British revolutionaries. In the first quarter of the 20th century it supported revolutionary violence as the means for ending British rule in India. The organisation arose from a conglomeration of local youth groups and gyms (akhara) in Bengal in 1902. It had two prominent, somewhat independent, arms in East and West Bengal, Dhaka Anushilan Samiti, and the Jugantar group.
The Revolutionary movement for Indian Independence was part of the Indian independence movement comprising the actions of violent underground revolutionary factions. Groups believing in armed revolution against the ruling British fall into this category, as opposed to the generally peaceful civil disobedience movement spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi.
Jugantar or Yugantar was one of the two main secret revolutionary trends operating in Bengal for Indian independence. This association, like Anushilan Samiti, started in the guise of suburban fitness club. Several Jugantar members were arrested, hanged, or deported for life to the Cellular Jail in Andaman and many of them joined the Communist Consolidation in the Cellular Jail.
Jatindra Nath Das, better known as Jatin Das, was an Indian independence activist and revolutionary who worked to make India independent from the British Raj and was a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He died in the Lahore Central Jail after a 63-day hunger strike.
Pratul Chandra Ganguli was an Indian revolutionary.
Atulkrishna Ghosh was an Indian revolutionary, member of the Anushilan Samiti, and a leader of the Jugantar movement involved in Hindu German Conspiracy during World War I.
Pandit Mokshada Charan Samadhyayi (1874–?) was a leading figure of the Jugantar movement.
Trailokyanath Chakraborty was an Indian independence activist and politician. He led and worked with other freedom fighters. He lived for 80 years, spending 30 years in jail. Some of his time in jail was in Bangladesh, which was under Pakistani control, after the partition of India into India and Pakistan. After independence in 1947, he became a politician and parliamentary member. In spite of being a freedom fighter and spending much of his life in hiding, he had a strong influence in the family of his brothers, education of grandchildren and their marriage decisions. He inspired many female grandchildren to get higher educational degrees. He was never married.
The first Christmas Day plot was a conspiracy made by the Indian revolutionary movement in 1909: during the year-ending holidays, the Governor of Bengal organised at his residence a ball in the presence of the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and all the high-ranking officers and officials of the Capital (Calcutta). The 10th Jat Regiment was in charge of the security. Indoctrinated by Jatindranath Mukherjee, its soldiers decided to blow up the ballroom and take advantage of destroying the colonial Government. In keeping with his predecessor Otto von Klemm, a friend of Lokmanya Tilak, on 6 February 1910, M. Arsenyev, the Russian Consul-General, wrote to St Petersburg that it had been intended to "arouse in the country a general perturbation of minds and, thereby, afford the revolutionaries an opportunity to take the power in their hands." According to R. C. Majumdar, "The police had suspected nothing and it is hard to say what the outcome would have been had the soldiers not been betrayed by one of their comrades who informed the authorities about the impending coup".
The history of the Anushilan Samiti stretches from its beginning in 1902 to 1930. The Samiti began in the first decade of the 20th century in Calcutta as conglomeration of local youth groups and gyms(Akhra). However, its focus was both physical education and proposed moral development of its members. From its inception it sought to promote what it perceived as Indian values and to focus on Indian sports e.g. Lathi and Sword play. It also encouraged its members to study Indian history as well as those of European liberalism including the French Revolution, Russian Nihilism and Italian unification. Soon after its inception it became a radical organisation that sought to end British Raj in India through revolutionary violence. After World War I, it declined steadily as its members identified closely with leftist ideologies and with the Indian National Congress. It briefly rose to prominence in the late second and third decade, being involved in some notable incidents in Calcutta, Chittagong and in the United Provinces. The samiti dissolved into the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1930.
The Rodda company arms heist took place on 26 August 1914 in Calcutta, British India. Members of the Jugantar faction of the Bengali revolutionary organisation Anushilan Samiti intercepted a shipment of Mauser Pistols and ammunition belonging to Messrs Rodda & co., a Calcutta gun dealer, while these were en route from the Customs house to the company's godown, and were able to make away with a portion the arms. The heist was a sensational incident, being described by The Statesman as the "Greatest daylight robbery". In the following years, the pistols and ammunitions were linked to almost all the incidences of nationalist struggles in Bengal. By 1922, the police had recovered most of the stolen arms.
The Howrah-Sibpur Conspiracy case refers to the arrest and trials of 47 Indian nationalists of the Anushilan Samiti that followed in the wake of the murder of Inspector Shamsul Alam on 24 January 1910 in Calcutta. Alam was Deputy superintendent and intelligence officer in Bengal Police investigating the murder of Naren Gosain, crown-witness in the Alipore bomb case, and other murders including those of Ashutosh Biswas, advocate of Calcutta High Court in charge of prosecution of Gossain murder case, and of Naren Bannerjee, the police officer who arrested Khudiram Bose. Alam had uncovered the underlying Bengali revolutionary network of the Anushilan Samiti that linked the murders and other robberies in this time, and at the time of his own murder in the hands of Biren Dutta Gupta, Alam was preparing to consolidate the charges to bring them all to trial in a single case.
Suniti Choudhury was an Indian nationalist who, along with Santi Ghose, assassinated a British district magistrate when she was 16 years old and is known for her participation in an armed revolutionary struggle.
Parul Mukherjee was an Indian revolutionary active in the Indian independence movement in the early 20th century. Mukherjee was an influential member of the revolutionary organisation Anushilan Samiti, with which she partook in militant activities and helped recruit new members. She was particularly important in strengthening the women's wing of Anushilan Samiti through efforts such as recruitment, the organisation of study circles and the teaching of self-defence techniques.
Anarchism in Bangladesh has its roots in the ideas of the Bengali Renaissance and began to take influence as part of the revolutionary movement for Indian independence in Bengal. After a series of defeats of the revolutionary movement and the rise of state socialist ideas within the Bengali left-wing, anarchism went into a period of remission. This lasted until the 1990s, when anarchism again began to reemerge after the fracturing of the Communist Party of Bangladesh, which led to the rise of anarcho-syndicalism among the Bangladeshi workers' movement.
Communists were actively involved in Indian independence movement through multiple series of protests, strikes and other activities. It was a part of revolutionary movement for Indian independence. Their main thrust was on organising peasants and working classes across India against the British and Indian capitalists and landlords.