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Leena di, (Chatterjee, wife of Tan Lee da) badgers me that I should be doing this or that, and that I am capable to writing poems but do not write on the correct subject etc etc. She also badgers me for not writing on endless different topics. That her faith in my capability is blind and therefore irrational, I have no doubt. However, while discussing issues that could or should have been popularized by a few capable persons for the Indian and Bengali new generation, the topic kept returning to a few known names - Devi Choudhurani, her namesake Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Indira Devi Chaudhurani, and Bankim Chatterjee’s novel of that name. But along with that, there were also others - of which Gandhi, Tagore, Tilak, Subhas Bose, Nehru (both father and son), Annie Bessant, Suren Bannerjee and sister Nivedita, Bipin Pal, Aurobiindo Ghosh, Bagha Jotin etc made their presence.
I remembered a few items from my mother’s tales of her school days, covering visits to Jora Sanko with Rabindranath Tagore. One of them was a wish to see Suren Tagore. He was supposed to be handsome, fiery and a freedom fighter - a biplobi. But Gurudev Rabindranath did not want young students from Santiniketan to have their heads unscrewed by Suren Tagore and others engaged in a type of active and sometimes violent freedom struggle and politics that Tagore did not whole heartedly support, and definitely did not want it to the cause of the students to leave their learning and get into politics of violence. So, he did not allow such a meeting. And that was that.
But today, thinking back about it, I tried to find if there is any picture of Suren Tagore in his youth. I found none on internet. I tried to get any picture whatsoever - alas, I could not find any.
Information about Suren Tagore kept appearing tantalizingly as reference related to the life and time of other freedom fighters, and there are very many such references, including Japan’s Pan-Asia political doctrine being promoted in India about the time Bengal was being partitioned - 1905. I knew Rabindranath himself was at the time sort of a political activist himself, though perhaps not a radical like Aurobindo Ghosh or his brother, or Bagha Jatin, or even his nephew Suren Tagore.
But, no direct information on Suren Tagore and is efforts at freedom struggle ? No picture at all ?
That did not sound right. We need to know a bit more about this nephew. There are records with his name cropping up many places, including his involvement in the Bangladesh Zamindary, and about all kinds of freedom movement events and institutions.
In search of some pictures and a better life story on Suren Tagore, I did some more reading on the fast moving scene in India and Bengal at the turn of the last century, twenty years before my mother was born. Bengal was being partitioned. The Jugantar group in Bengal had declared that complete independence was their goal - fully 25 years before Indian Naitonal Congress was to adopt it. Further, there was the emergence of the first possibly hard core extremism being considered as an acceptable alternative for achieving freedom, especially since negotiations do not work from a position of weakness - or so was the conventional thinking.
There were various factions, of which the Maniktala Secret Society, is briefly touched here because of the mention of fund raising by the revolutionary groups of a hundred years ago, that tried to learn from Europe the process of making home made explosives and employ the knowledge to forcibly push the British masters out of the Indian subcontinent, without the need for a lengthy negotiation. Fund raising was apparently a very important and difficult task for the people, which at the time included Aurobindo Ghosh, much before he became a holy man of Pondicherry.
A Sage Publication online carries an article of Peter Heehs in 1992 about the Maniktala secret society - an early Bengali Terrorist Group, as Heehs describes it. (Ref http://ier.sagepub.com/content/29/3/349.citation).
In that, Haas mentions that Jugantar the Bengali paper and its English counterpart, Bande Mataram, were bringing in some much needed funds. But that was not enough, and hence they also depended on generous donations from the rich and famous, and also, when pressed, a bit of dacoitry as well. The donor list in that article goes to include Subodh and Nirodh Mullick of the Shipbuilder group, Rajendranath Mukherjee, of the Zamindar family of Uttarpara, and Surendranath Tagore, a scion of Bengal’s most prominent Zamindar family. The wording is not mine, but from the article itself. Then there were professionals such as Chittaranjan Das and P. Mitra, both lawyers, and even Aurobindo Ghosh, a professor before he retired from that profession, to take up freedom struggle, and later on Yoga and Hinduism.
The article included notation from from various memoirs and also from captured prisoners in Andaman jail (Upendranath Banneree, prisoner, Port Blair Jail - 1911) that NIrodh Mullick paid Rs 1,000 towards the movement only on condition that Sir Bampfylde Fuller of Shillong was assassinated. Mr. Fuller was reportedly assassinated, and the stated funds was transferred to Barin Ghosh (Aurobindo’s brother). There is also a metion that Suren Tagore was “induced” to pay up Rs 1,000 to Barindra if the Leut. Governor of Bengal, Andrew Fraser, or Mr. Kingsford could be assassinated.
I followed up on these two persons. Fraser, Lt. Governor of Bengal, boasted of ruling over 80 million people, and after retirement, gave a speech in the USA covering the topic of “Victorious Progress of Christianity in India”. The news was covered on New York times on March 29, 1909, which is where I read about it. There, the paper mentions that in Calcutta, once an assailant apparently walked up to him, pulled out a revolver and fired at him twice from close range. The gun misfired both times. Before the man could pull the trigger the third time, a “Raja” that was accompanying him, grabbed Mr. Fraser and swung him around so that the Raja’s own back came between the gunman and the Lt. Governor.
In the report from Heehs, there are mentions of at least four attempts on Frasers life, all unsuccessful. Some of them were direct assassination attempts, while others involve derailment of trains where he was presumed to be traveling.
What I could not find out, was the reason why he was a target. Was he involved in breaking Bengal into two and somehow was very cruel or harsh on the locals or was insulting to the people? His comments on the progress of Christianity in India was, in today’s light, not the politically correct thing to say, but that hardly deserved repeated assassination attempts.
The other person, Kingsford, was an easier to identify figure for me. He was the chief magistrate in Calcutta and was known to be ruthless in handing down punishments to Bengali freedom fighters. A letter bomb was sent to him in an attempt to have him assassinated, but the effort failed. Then, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki were recruited to kill him by bombing his vehicle. A mistaken identity resulted in a different vehicle being bombed, and two innocent English women got killed. Bose and Chaki tried to escape, but got caught. Chaki took his own life. Khudiram Bose was hanged. Bengal at the time got the famous folks song - “Ekbar Biday De Ma, Phire Ashi”.
So, going back to the issue of Rs 1,000 for the assassination of Fraser or Kingsford - well, as far as I can trace now, more than a century later, neither of them were assassinated, though multiple attempts where made on both. So, was the Rs 1,000 eventually transferred to Aurobindo Ghosh’s brother Barin ? Who was trying to coax Suren Tagore ? I read enough to learn that at times the rich and the famous were “coaxed” by means that involved a direct or indirect threat - pay up or be killed yourself. Also - do not snitch to the police, or you and your family will be killed.
So, while I do not know the extent and nature of financial involvement of Suren Tagore with the famous Maniktala Secret Soceity, I can very well understand now, why Rabidnranath wanted my mother and other youngsters of Santiniketan to have nothing at all to do with Suren Tagore, not even to see him for five minutes.
But, he was reportedly a handsome man of fiery oratory.
There must be a picture or two of him surviving somewhere.
No ?
I remembered a few items from my mother’s tales of her school days, covering visits to Jora Sanko with Rabindranath Tagore. One of them was a wish to see Suren Tagore. He was supposed to be handsome, fiery and a freedom fighter - a biplobi. But Gurudev Rabindranath did not want young students from Santiniketan to have their heads unscrewed by Suren Tagore and others engaged in a type of active and sometimes violent freedom struggle and politics that Tagore did not whole heartedly support, and definitely did not want it to the cause of the students to leave their learning and get into politics of violence. So, he did not allow such a meeting. And that was that.
But today, thinking back about it, I tried to find if there is any picture of Suren Tagore in his youth. I found none on internet. I tried to get any picture whatsoever - alas, I could not find any.
Information about Suren Tagore kept appearing tantalizingly as reference related to the life and time of other freedom fighters, and there are very many such references, including Japan’s Pan-Asia political doctrine being promoted in India about the time Bengal was being partitioned - 1905. I knew Rabindranath himself was at the time sort of a political activist himself, though perhaps not a radical like Aurobindo Ghosh or his brother, or Bagha Jatin, or even his nephew Suren Tagore.
 |
| Bagha Jatin |
But, no direct information on Suren Tagore and is efforts at freedom struggle ? No picture at all ?
That did not sound right. We need to know a bit more about this nephew. There are records with his name cropping up many places, including his involvement in the Bangladesh Zamindary, and about all kinds of freedom movement events and institutions.
In search of some pictures and a better life story on Suren Tagore, I did some more reading on the fast moving scene in India and Bengal at the turn of the last century, twenty years before my mother was born. Bengal was being partitioned. The Jugantar group in Bengal had declared that complete independence was their goal - fully 25 years before Indian Naitonal Congress was to adopt it. Further, there was the emergence of the first possibly hard core extremism being considered as an acceptable alternative for achieving freedom, especially since negotiations do not work from a position of weakness - or so was the conventional thinking.
There were various factions, of which the Maniktala Secret Society, is briefly touched here because of the mention of fund raising by the revolutionary groups of a hundred years ago, that tried to learn from Europe the process of making home made explosives and employ the knowledge to forcibly push the British masters out of the Indian subcontinent, without the need for a lengthy negotiation. Fund raising was apparently a very important and difficult task for the people, which at the time included Aurobindo Ghosh, much before he became a holy man of Pondicherry.
A Sage Publication online carries an article of Peter Heehs in 1992 about the Maniktala secret society - an early Bengali Terrorist Group, as Heehs describes it. (Ref http://ier.sagepub.com/content/29/3/349.citation).
In that, Haas mentions that Jugantar the Bengali paper and its English counterpart, Bande Mataram, were bringing in some much needed funds. But that was not enough, and hence they also depended on generous donations from the rich and famous, and also, when pressed, a bit of dacoitry as well. The donor list in that article goes to include Subodh and Nirodh Mullick of the Shipbuilder group, Rajendranath Mukherjee, of the Zamindar family of Uttarpara, and Surendranath Tagore, a scion of Bengal’s most prominent Zamindar family. The wording is not mine, but from the article itself. Then there were professionals such as Chittaranjan Das and P. Mitra, both lawyers, and even Aurobindo Ghosh, a professor before he retired from that profession, to take up freedom struggle, and later on Yoga and Hinduism.
The article included notation from from various memoirs and also from captured prisoners in Andaman jail (Upendranath Banneree, prisoner, Port Blair Jail - 1911) that NIrodh Mullick paid Rs 1,000 towards the movement only on condition that Sir Bampfylde Fuller of Shillong was assassinated. Mr. Fuller was reportedly assassinated, and the stated funds was transferred to Barin Ghosh (Aurobindo’s brother). There is also a metion that Suren Tagore was “induced” to pay up Rs 1,000 to Barindra if the Leut. Governor of Bengal, Andrew Fraser, or Mr. Kingsford could be assassinated.
I followed up on these two persons. Fraser, Lt. Governor of Bengal, boasted of ruling over 80 million people, and after retirement, gave a speech in the USA covering the topic of “Victorious Progress of Christianity in India”. The news was covered on New York times on March 29, 1909, which is where I read about it. There, the paper mentions that in Calcutta, once an assailant apparently walked up to him, pulled out a revolver and fired at him twice from close range. The gun misfired both times. Before the man could pull the trigger the third time, a “Raja” that was accompanying him, grabbed Mr. Fraser and swung him around so that the Raja’s own back came between the gunman and the Lt. Governor.
In the report from Heehs, there are mentions of at least four attempts on Frasers life, all unsuccessful. Some of them were direct assassination attempts, while others involve derailment of trains where he was presumed to be traveling.
What I could not find out, was the reason why he was a target. Was he involved in breaking Bengal into two and somehow was very cruel or harsh on the locals or was insulting to the people? His comments on the progress of Christianity in India was, in today’s light, not the politically correct thing to say, but that hardly deserved repeated assassination attempts.
The other person, Kingsford, was an easier to identify figure for me. He was the chief magistrate in Calcutta and was known to be ruthless in handing down punishments to Bengali freedom fighters. A letter bomb was sent to him in an attempt to have him assassinated, but the effort failed. Then, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki were recruited to kill him by bombing his vehicle. A mistaken identity resulted in a different vehicle being bombed, and two innocent English women got killed. Bose and Chaki tried to escape, but got caught. Chaki took his own life. Khudiram Bose was hanged. Bengal at the time got the famous folks song - “Ekbar Biday De Ma, Phire Ashi”.
So, going back to the issue of Rs 1,000 for the assassination of Fraser or Kingsford - well, as far as I can trace now, more than a century later, neither of them were assassinated, though multiple attempts where made on both. So, was the Rs 1,000 eventually transferred to Aurobindo Ghosh’s brother Barin ? Who was trying to coax Suren Tagore ? I read enough to learn that at times the rich and the famous were “coaxed” by means that involved a direct or indirect threat - pay up or be killed yourself. Also - do not snitch to the police, or you and your family will be killed.
So, while I do not know the extent and nature of financial involvement of Suren Tagore with the famous Maniktala Secret Soceity, I can very well understand now, why Rabidnranath wanted my mother and other youngsters of Santiniketan to have nothing at all to do with Suren Tagore, not even to see him for five minutes.
But, he was reportedly a handsome man of fiery oratory.
There must be a picture or two of him surviving somewhere.
No ?
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