surveillance.
Back in November 1907, Har Dayal had written in the Indian Sociologist, “Every Indian must be convinced that if Russian methods are carried on in our country rigorously by our oppressors, the so-called British rulers, we must meet it with measure for measure.”[39] He repeated the argument for learning “the art of organising secret societies and insurrections” from the Russians in the next issue, December 1907: “It seems that any agitation in India now must be carried on secretly, and that the only methods which can bring the English Government to its sense are the Russian methods vigorously and incessantly applied until the English relax their tyranny and are driven out of the country.”[40] In August 1908, he added, “As to the ethics of dynamite, it may be laid down in a general way that where the people have political power there is no need for the use of explosives. It only promotes reaction. But where the people are utterly defenceless, both politically and militarily, then one may look on the bomb or any other weapon as legitimate. Its employment then becomes merely a question of expediency. We hope to discuss this question, particularly with reference to India, in an early issue.”[41]
Back in Maniktola Garden, Hem Chandra Das (Kanungo) had grown impatient with a string of botched bombing and assassination operations followed by a year of relative inactivity. So he took the initiative to seek more advanced revolutionary techniques through an apprenticeship with the Russians in Paris.[42] Funded by Rana ostensibly to study chemistry—often a convenient route to the science of explosives, it would appear—Kanungo was joined by his Maharashtrian friend Pandurang Mahadev Bapat.[43] Das and Bapat were reported to be in contact with a female anarchist from the United States in Paris who Heehs suggests (rather implausibly, I think) could have been Emma Goldman. Whoever she was, she introduced them to a mysterious figure known as PhD, identified only as a leading figure in a French socialist organization. PhD and one of his comrades, “a former officer belonging to his party,” offered them instruction in “history, geography and economics, along with socialism, communism, etc.,” along with notes on the organization of secret societies, and after some initial hesitation, “got a member of their party to instruct Hem and Bapat in explosive chemistry and demolition.” French police reports are vague on which of these was Safranski, since he was both a former “brilliant” officer in the Russian army, and enrolled in l’Ecole des Langues Orientales.[44]
Another student was Miss Perin Naoroji, granddaughter of the renowned parliamentarian Dadabhai Naoroji, best known for his book on the economic drain theory of British colonial rule. The “Grand Old Man” had her educated in Europe along with her three sisters. Since Perin’s boardinghouse was on Cama’s street, the Boulevard Montparnasse, intelligence surmised the girl had “learned politics from her.” Crossing the English Channel to visit one of her sisters in London, she was with Savarkar at the time of his arrest. She followed his case with interest, visiting him in jail and then returning to Paris after it was over. Thereafter she could be found “working hard in the Extremist ranks,” and within a few months she was reportedly being tutored in bomb making by W. Bromjevski, described as “a young Polish engineer, believed to be an anarchist, who visited her and her sister constantly at their flat for months.” The sisters returned to India at the end of the year, yet remained in communication with Cama, “with whom [Perin] had arranged a simple but effective cipher before she left Paris.”[45]
What of the local French anarchists? Soon after arriving in Paris, Kanungo had been introduced to Albert (Joseph) Libertad, founder of the journal L’anarchie, as someone who might be able to provide expertise in explosives and clandestine organization. According to Kanungo’s memoir, when Libertad invited him to attend anarchist meetings, Kanungo went, under the impression that “anarchism was just another word for revolution.”[46] But once he realized what they were talking about, he withdrew. Libertad was an exponent of illegalism, an amoral and extreme individualist school of thought. L’anarchie’s rhetoric favored criminality as an antinomian lifestyle and expressed antipathy to all forms of organization. None of this interested Kanungo, dedicated as he was to a militant cause with a focused goal. The reason he had become so frustrated with his Swadeshi comrades in the first place was what he saw as their aimless ineffectuality; this was not the remedy he sought. Ironically, the fabled rampage of the Libertad-inspired outlaw Bonnot gang in 1911–12 may have borne some resemblance to the Samiti’s dacoities, albeit more purely nihilist in their hatred of the bourgeoisie, lacking the additional motive of funding an anticolonial struggle.[47]
When French law enforcement officials got wind of the rumor that the notorious “Russian anarchist [Safranski was] instructing natives of India . . . in manufacture of explosives,” they were quick to inform their British counterparts.[48] But the detectives arrived too late; the suspect was gone, and the information successfully transmitted to India and the United States. Their prize was “a single cyclostyled copy of a manual of explosives” whose opening sentence declared, “The aim of the present work is to place in the hands of a revolutionary people such a powerful weapon as explosive matter is.”[49]
Full Circle
In late 1907 or early 1908, with their training complete, Kanungo and Bapat left to bear their new skills and information back to India. Thereafter the Criminal Investigation Department recorded, “Special emissaries . . . moved from time to time between India and Europe for arms and bomb manuals.”[50] Kanungo’s manual contained three sections: preparation of explosive substances, fabrication of shells, and use of the finished products. In the estimation of James Campbell Ker, assistant to the director of Criminal Intelligence,
The subject is exhaustively and scientifically treated; the amount of attention given to detail may be gathered from the fact that the composition and manufacture of thirty different explosives of one class only, namely those containing salts of chloric and chlorous acids, are described. The reason why it is necessary to be able to make explosives of various substances is given as follows: “In revolutionary practice we have often to use not the explosives we should like to use, but those which we can prepare with the materials at hand. . . . Again in the time of armed conflict the expenditure of explosives is considerable, and it is necessary to expropriate pharmaceutical shops (just as armouries are expropriated) and out of useful substances to prepare what is needed.”[51]
The remainder of the manual, Ker explained, gave specialized instructions for making percussion and fuse bombs, with fuses ranging from instantaneous detonation through lengths of seconds or minutes, up to eight or nine hours. Possible uses for the results of such handiwork included street fighting, assassination, and destroying bridges or buildings. Heehs too goes into some detail about the explosives used (picric acid, sulfuric acid, fulminate of mercury, and nitroglycerine) and construction of bombs: shells made of forged spheres, or cleverly concealed in hollowed-out bedposts or books, as in the instance of the deadly but maddeningly unexploded Cadbury cocoa tin packed with detonators and explosive material, all encased in a copy of Herbert Broom’s Commentary on the Common Law, intended to kill Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford in 1908.[52]
Above all else, it was the use of the bomb that drew the Bengalis into focus as anarchists in the colonial government’s eyes. More than just a tactical instrument, at times it manifested for them as the focus of a viscerally intense cult of devotion to annihilation that shaded imperceptibly into sacrificial devotion to the mother goddess-as-nation. The bomb was also personified as the “benefactor of the poor . . . [which] has been brought across the seas. Worship it, sing its praises, bow to it. Bande Mataram.”[53]
The quotation is from Har Dayal’s “Shabash! In Praise of the Bomb,” a pamphlet written from San Francisco on the occasion of a grenade blast heard by Indian expatriates around the world—namely, the attempt on Viceroy Lord Hardinge’s life during his elephant-borne ceremonial entrance into Delhi to reinaugurate the city as the seat of empire in December 1912.[54] Maniktola Garden veteran Rash Behari Bose had masterminded the attack. But the actual bomber was a young man named Basanta Kumar Biswas, to whom Bose had imparted both the “political indoctrination and practical training he would need to carry out his mission.”[55] Disguised as a woman with
