Reminiscences

MURARIPUKUR — (1)

At last I made up my mind finally to take the plunge, that I must now join the Manicktolla Gardens in Muraripukur. That meant goodbye to College, goodbye to the ordinary life.

A little while ago, Prafulla Chakravarti had come and joined. Both of us belonged to Rungpore, both were of nearly the same age, and intimate friends. This too pushed me to my decision.

I had already taken a vow about a year ago, in front of a picture of Kali at a secret ceremony at dead of night, a vow written out in blood drawn from the chest, that I should dedicate my life to the whole-hearted service of the Motherland. With me there was a companion, and also a local leader who had read out the oath. This leader became a Sannyasin later on and rose to be the head of a Math; he has since given up his body, so I have heard. My companion of that day is still alive; he did not give up the world and in fact became a very successful man; at present he is enjoying his rest in retirement.

I lived in a students' Mess, one that had acquired quite a name. Among the inmates were Atul Gupta, Charu Bhattacharya (late of the Visvabharati), and a little before my time there was Naresh Chandra Sengupta. In my first year of College, Atul Gupta was in his fourth year, Charu Bhattacharya in his fifth and Naresh Sengupta had just passed out. I happened once to set foot in the room he used to occupy and there I found scattered about the floor a few pages torn out of a notebook which read very much like love letters. This seemed to me a little strange, but later I. realised these were some pages from the manuscript of one of his novels.

This decision to choose my path came while I was in my Fourth Year. That I would definitely join the Gardens was conveyed to Barin by Prafulla. He had already told

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him about my antecedents, so one day I received a call— Barin would see me, as if at an interview for a post. Escorted by Prafulla, I arrived at his residence in Gopimohan Dutt Lane at Goabagan. This place acquired some renown during the Alipore case as a den of the terrorists. Next to the house there was a gymnasium for the young men of the neighbourhood where wrestling and boxing and all kinds of dangerous martial exercises were practised.

This happened to be my first meeting with Barin. He received me with great kindness and had me seated next to him. I cannot now recall the details of the conversation we had, but perhaps there was nothing much to remember. One thing however I distinctly remember. He asked me if I had read the Gita. I said I had read it in parts. He handed me a copy and asked me to read aloud. I began reciting "Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre..." in a pure and undiluted Bengali style. He stopped me and cried out, "That won't do. One doesn't read Sanskrit here in the Bengali style. Listen, read like this." He gave a recital in the Hindi style, that is, with the pronunciation current in the other parts of India.

That was my first lesson in Sanskrit pronounced in the Sanskrit way. Later I have heard the correct Sanskrit accent so often from Sri Aurobindo himself. I have heard him recite from the Veda, from the Upanishads, from the Gita. Today, I too do not read Sanskrit in the Bengali way, even when reading from an article in Bengali.

It was settled that I would join the Gardens and stay there. But I did not give up my rooms at the Mess. My books and papers and furniture^;—a bedstead and the table-lamp, for there was no electric light in those days—were all left in charge of my room-mate, and I paid only an occasional visit. I attended College as well, but at infrequent intervals. College studies could no longer interest me.

It was about this time that I hovered around the newly founded National College in Calcutta for a short while. My aims were a little "dubious". At the Gardens, there

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used to be discussions about the bomb, so an idea came to my head: could not the National College offer an opportunity to study the subject? I thought of reading Chemistry and by joining the Chemistry practical learn the principles of explosives. At that time the Superintendent (or perhaps Principal) was Satish Chandra Mukeiji, Founder-President of the Dawn Society. I had met him several years ago in the rooms of the Society.

Let me then narrate this earlier story in the present connection. I had just come to Calcutta and joined the First Year. Atul Gupta took me to a meeting of the Dawn Society. Benoy Sarkar was there, Radha Kumud Mukerji too was there, I think—not his younger brother Radha Kamal who became one of my class-fellows in the Third Year after he had passed the F.A. examination from Berhampore. Here is a sketch of one of the Society's meetings. Satish Mukeiji took the chair. We were about twenty or thirty young men in all. He read out a verse from the Gita: yad yad vibhūtimat sattvam, śrīmad-ūrjitameva vā and gave a short explanation in a few words. Then we formed ourselves into small groups of four or five. We were to discuss what is meant by "śrīman" and "vibhūtimān", where is the difference between the two, what do we understand by "ūrjita" ? Each group was to discuss separately, each member was to say what he had to say, and finally all of us were to write out in the form of an essay our respective viewpoints. The essays would then be submitted to the chairman for his consideration and judgment. I sat absolutely dumb in that first session, an ignoramus among the learned, like a goose in the midst of swans. (I must have been about fourteen at that time.) But I did not feel quite at ease in that atmosphere, I had an impression it was all fine talk and dry debate, purely academic, one would say. Satish Chandra had no doubt wanted to use this as a means of forming the character and not merely as an intellectual training, a way of moulding the life, something that had been missing in our college education. I do not know to what extent he succeeded in actual fact.

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This was about the middle of 1904. It was three years later, about the middle of 1907, that I met Satish Chandra again. He could not have remembered about me, nor did I remind him. He asked me, "You are a student of literature and philosophy. Why do you want to read Science? "I have read physics and chemistry for my F.A. (that is Intermediate). I have a special attraction for those subjects, that is why." However, the matter did not proceed very far, for I was getting more and more engrossed in the life at the Gardens.

Almost about the same period, I had thought of another childish plan, again in connection with the making of a bomb: the thing had so got into my head. I was a student of the Calcutta Presidency College where the great Jaga-dish Chandra was professor at the time. Here was the idea and it was approved by my leaders—could I not join his laboratory, as some kind of an assistant? Then one could carry on research and experiments on bombs. But how to get hold of him? I thought of Sister Nivedita. She was a great friend of Jagadish Bose and it was easy to catch hold of Nivedita, for she was one among our circle of acquaintances. But the occasion did not arise for this line of advance, for things had been moving fast at the Gardens.

Let me say a few words about our life there. But may I preface it with an amusing incident? I have said that my attendance at College had been getting more and more irregular. This attracted the notice of some of my class-fellows. One day, I found one of their representatives arriving "on deputation" to meet me at the Mess. He began questioning me as an intimate friend and well-wisher with a show of great kindness and affection. "Tell me," he said, "what has been the matter with you? What makes you keep away from College? Has there been a mishap somewhere? You have been such a good student and so regular in your attendance, what could have come over you all on a sudden?" I could guess what he must have been suspecting: surely it had something to do with my morals—chercher la femme! Was that the case here? Comp-laints

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and entreaties having failed, he finally sought to console and encourage me with these words, "Don't you worry. If Calcutta does not suit you, let us leave the place and go somewhere else. The two of us could stay together, and if we worked hard for, say, three or four months, we would get ready for the examination without fail. Our absence from College would make no difference." To this I replied in a grave tone, "Very well, I shall think it over." Lest there should be similar attacks in the future, I practically gave up the Mess.

One would not say that life at the Gardens had settled down to a definite routine yet, for we had just begun. There were about a dozen or fourteen of us in all. There were occasional visitors from outside who would come for a short stay and then go back to their work. Naren Gos-wami had come like that for a couple of days, so had Bha-vabhushan who later became a Sannyasin. We began with readings from the Gita and this became almost a fixed routine where everybody took part. Even the local Inspector of Police expressed a desire to join in these readings with us Brahmacharins. But he had to pay dearly for that. He did not realise that these were no ordinary lessons in the Gita but served as a fagade for our preparations for the bomb. For this he was, as we heard, later dismissed from the service. The poor fellow had wanted to acquire a bit of spiritual merit which seemed to turn against him.

A beginning however was made to introduce some kind of discipline and organisation. It was decided that the entire group should be formed into two sections, one "civil", the other "military". The "military" section was to include the active members and the others were to serve as auxiliaries. The idea originally was to build up an armed force, a regular army in fact, with its full complement of weapons and equipment and trained by regular drills. The "civil" side was to deal with external work like journalism, propaganda and recruitment. The Yugantar, and later the Navashakti, became our publicity organs. I was not much attracted by this "civil" side; I wanted to become one of

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the "military" men. Prafulla who was one of those dreamy, "introvert", intellectual types and a good writer and speaker took up the "civil" work. They used to say with a touch of humour, no doubt, that he was the Mazzini and I was his Garibaldi. But no provision had yet been made to give this "Garibaldi the necessary training in military drill or the use of weapons. So, I had to begin with the science of warfare rather than its art. Barin was at that time writing his series on The Principles of Modern Warfare for the Yugantar. I too began my study of the subject. I started going to the Imperial Library (now the National Library) in Calcutta for my studies and research. Where could I begin? Well, it was a book called The Art of War by the German military expert, Glausewitz, a book where the very first sentence ran like this, "The object of warfare is to destroy the enemy and finish with him." I am not sure how this helped me add to my knowledge of warfare or my skill in the art of fighting.

During my last days in College, I used to study Mazzini in place of King John or The Faerie Queene. One day I suddenly discovered that they had removed my Mazzini from the shelves of the library, and even the Life and Death of Socrates by Plato had disappeared. These books were no doubt supposed to turn the heads of our Indian students!

About this time, I had been several times to my home town Rungpore. There at the local Library, I discovered a fine book on the history of Secret Societies. The book gave the story of how subject nations aspiring for freedom began their work in secret. In it the story of Ireland and Russia had been given a good deal of space. The secret societies in Russia had a system which was rather distinctive. It should have been taken over by us, so I have heard Sri Aurobindo say. They would divide the underground workers into little groups of not more than five. No group could know the others, only those belonging to a particular group would know its own members. Each group had a leader, who alone would know his immediate superior

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placed in charge of only four or five of such little groups. Similarly, the leader of the higher group would have dealings with the one next higher in rank who would be in charge of the bigger groups, and so on, right to the, topmost man. Such a system was necessary, for in case someone got caught, that could not implicate' the entire organisation but only a handful of his acquaintances. One of the main instruments in the hands of the police or the government for detecting a conspiracy is the confession extracted from the persons caught, whether by torture, through temptations, from sheer bravado, or by whatever other means. Under that system, no one could know anybody except the few members, of his own group with whom he came into immediate contact through his work, nor could he know anything about the general plan of work; he had to carry out only the part assigned to him.

At the Rungpore Library I came across another book, namely, Gibbon's famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I ran through the lengthy volumes from end to end with tremendous enthusiasm and added a great deal to my learning and knowledge. I had a hope that the book might throw some light as to how to bring about the "decline and fall" of the British rule in India. I regret much help did not come that way.

Now, to come back to the Gardens and our organisational system. Nothing could be arranged by way of an armed force, for our work itself took another turn. A military organisation was now to give place to a terrorist organisation. In the earlier stages, we did not have much faith in terrorist methods, for, as we had seen about Russia, this path led only to mutual assassinations, murder and revenge seemed to follow in an endless succession, leading to no final issue. That is why we had decided on the military solution. To that end, our efforts had been directed towards forming a new military force on the one hand and on the other towards sowing the seeds of revolt among the British Indian troops. I remember about a military police force stationed at Rungpore where the commandant had

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been won over to a large extent, although I could not say how it would have turned out at the end.

In the event, it was none of these methods that brought us independence. Indian independence has come in another way, the inscrutable way of Providence.

As I was saying, we gave up militarism and turned towards the terrorist methods. There had awakened in the country a keen demand and aspiration: must we bear in silence and give no answer to this tyranny and oppression that seemed to go on increasing day by day? So, we started getting ready for a fitting reply. It brought in the first place a greater courage to the general public, though it remained doubtful if it helped relieve the oppression. And secondly, it gave some satisfaction to men. Thus we directed our efforts to shooting at the Lieutenant Governor, derailing his train, and assassinating tyrants in the official ranks. Governor Andrew Fraser, the District Magistrates Allen and Kingsford, Mayor Tardivel of Chandernagore, these became the targets of the terrorists. The members of the Manicktolla Garden group were directly connected with these activities. But there is one thing to be noticed about these attempts that at least in the earlier stages almost all of them failed, with only one or two exceptions.

One of the activities of the Gardens, apart from the attempts to manufacture bombs, had been to procure and distribute guns and rifles and pistols. Purchase, theft and loot were the three methods of procurement. In this manner one might gather materials for terrorist purposes, but it could hardly meet the needs of an armed force. At the Gardens there was some shooting practice too, with pistols. The trunk of a mango tree had been riddled with bullets— the police could very easily find that out later. This reminds me of Prafulla Chaki. He used to say taking a revolver in his hand, "I for one am not going to live on if they get hold of me. I shall neither be tortured by the police nor will I let their baits to confess tempt me. Look, this is the way I am going to finish myself." He would then open wide his mouth, push in the revolver muzzle and press the trigger with

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his fingers, adding, "This is the one sure way. In the other methods, one merely wounds oneself, very often with no serious danger to life. But it is much more risky to live on after getting wounded, isn't it?" Prafulla committed suicide after the Muzzaffarpur bomb affair in exactly the way he had rehearsed—I should not say "suicide", for it was really an act of martyrdom.

Now let me come out with some of my own exploits. I did not, as I have said, want to be one of the law-abiding "civilians"; my aim was to be a "military" man with his law of the bomb. But first I must prove my mettle in that line. So, they set me a test. I was to carry a pistol and deliver it to a gentleman in Jalpaiguri. You seem to laugh at this instance of my "military" ability. But perhaps you cannot now imagine what it meant in those days to carry a real pistol. The police had its secret agents all over the place always on the look-out for victims. If you happened to be a young man, if you dressed in a manner even slighdy out of the ordinary, if there was anything the least suspicious about your movements that might attract attention, it was enough. If the police came and searched you and found a lethal weapon like a revolver in your possession, you would get at least seven years—of that you might rest assured. Nevertheless, I managed to carry the weapon in a perfectly easy and natural manner all the way to North Bengal and reached it to the address given. This was the way in which they used to distribute weapons for future use to the different centres at various places.

Now that I had passed the first test almost without effort, there came a second hurdle to cross. Will you be shocked to hear that I was to join a gang of dacoits and take part in a real dacoity? "Very well," I said to myself, for everything is fair in love and war—although I did feel somewhat uncomfortable even without my knowing it, for there was something about the whole affair that was not palatable to me. But this had been decided upon as one of our methods of collecting funds, for the moneys that came from gifts were not sufficient, and people rather shied of making gifts for the

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work of such secret societies. So we had to fix on loot. The mail runner was to be waylaid and his bags looted, somewhat far away in a place in the Khulna district. We left in a body and put up with a friend. There we had to spend a couple of days arranging to stitch up the bags, for the money had to be carried back in bags, you see. But for some reason or other, the plan fell through and I for one heaved a sigh, of relief. However there was one thing I had gained out of all this. It was a glimpse I could have of the river Kapotakshi, no longer limpid like the "pigeon's eye" though, for it was all cluttered up with weeds—on whose banks stood the birthplace of Michael Madhusudan and the mango grove where he used to play about as a child. I did feel as if the breath of his poetry still lingered about the atmosphere.

The household arrangements at our Gardens were of the most simple, natural and unpretentious sort, the aim being to avoid all unnecessary complications and save our time and labour. The cooking was done perhaps only once a day and almost every day it was khichri. For the second meal, something readymade bought from the market was found enough. We did the cooking ourselves and washed the dishes. The dishes and utensils were not of brass, they were all earthenware vessels, I believe. And the washing was done in the waters of the pond. What kind of pond it was could only be described by a Kalidasa, but perhaps some idea, could be had from Bankimchandra's description of the Bhima tank: "the dark shades of the palms dancing to the rhythms of the dark waters" and so on... . That is to say, it had more of weeds and mud than water, not to speak of the fish and the frogs and other animal species, including a fair complement of serpents and things. But to us it seemed good enough and we used to take our dips there with great glee. In fact I had my first lessons in swimming in that very pool. There were actually two pools and not one. and it would be difficult to decide which was the more "untouchable" of the two. The gardens around were in an equally poor condition. They were no gardens at all, for all was primitive jungle, a tangle of shrubs and trees and creepers, with all

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sorts of insects and reptile roaming within. And the house where we were supposed to live was in ruins.¹

But in spite of all, the place was absolutely quiet and silent, a reason being that it was practically outside th^ city limits. The life we lived in such surroundings could be compared with that of nomads. The strange thing is that despite such irregular habits, or rather the habitual irregularities of our life there, we never fell ill. The abundance of vitality and the enthusiasm and joy kept at bay all attacks of disease. It was very similar to the kind of life we lived here in Pondicherry during the first few years. Motilal when he saw us then exclaimed in utter surprise, "What! Is this the way you live? And you keep him (Sri Aurobindo) too like this?" Perhaps some day I may give you a picture of that life of ours, that life of utter freedom which looked so rustic in the eyes of "civilised" people.

Let me end this story today with something nice and sweet. It was during my stay at the Gardens that I had my first meeting and interview with Sri Aurobindo. Barin had asked me to go and see him, saying that Sri Aurobindo would be coming to see the Gardens and that I should fetch him. Manicktolla was in those days at the far end of North Calcutta and Sri Aurobindo lived with Raja Subodh Mullick near Wellington Square in the South Calcutta area. I went by tram and it was about four in the afternoon when I reached there. I asked the doorman at the gate to send word to Mr. Ghose—this was how he used to be called in those days at the place—saying that I had come from Barin of the Manicktolla Gardens. As I sat waiting in one of the rooms downstairs, Sri Aurobindo came down, stood near me and gave me an inquiring look. I said, in Bengali, "Barin has sent me. Would it be possible for you to come to the Gardens

¹ I have been there once later. It was no longer the old Gardens but a ploughed field. There was no trace of the jungle left, it had all been dug up. The pools too had been drained and filled and the house razed to the ground. The British authorities had dug up every inch of the area to see if any weapons might have been kept hidden anywhere. I have found in the case of the Yugantar office also which stood next to the Medical College that it too had been pulled down and there was only a little plot of open ground left in its place.

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with me now?" He answered very slowly, pausing on each syllable separately—it seemed he had not yet got used to speaking Bengali—and said, "Go and tell Barin, I have not yet had my lunch. It will not be possible to go today." So, that was that. I did not say a word, did my namaskāra and came away. This was my first happy meeting with him, my first darśhan and interview.

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