Indu Bhushan Roy

Indu Bhushan Roy (1890-1912) was born and raised in the town of Khulna. After finishing high school, he left home in order to lead the single life of a spiritual seeker. During his travels he met Barindra Ghose, who told him of the Maniktola secret society with its spiritual-political ideal. Indu Bhushan joined the revolutionary group in February 1908 at the age of eighteen. Two months later he accompanied Barin and Narendra Nath Goswami in an attempt to kill Mayor Tardivel of Chandernagore in French India. At nine in the evening of April 11, while the mayor was having supper at his home, Indu hurled a bomb into the dining room. The detonator exploded, but failed to ignite the picric acid core of the bomb. The three revolutionaries escaped, but less than a month later they were arrested for conspiracy and tried in the Alipore Bomb Case. Indu Bhushan was sentenced to transportation for life, a term that was later reduced to ten years.

Indu Bhushan was shipped to the Andamans in December 1909. For three years he suffered the extreme hardship of forced labour in the penal colony. In 1912 his work was to make white flax out of the rambash plant. Due to acids in the juice of the plant, his hands swelled up and blistered; they were so painful that he could not sleep at night or even hold food to eat. On April 28 he reported to the jailor and asked to be hospitalised until his hands healed or else to be given a change of work. The jailor refused and told him to return to his job. When Indu insisted that he must see the medical officer, the jailor denied permission, shouting, "You must follow my or-ders!" Then after a pause he said, "All right, I will change your work" and ordered him to show up the next morning for work at the oil mill, the most gruelling form of labour in the Andamans. The prisoner returned to his cell. Late that night he took off his shirt, tore it into strips, made a rope and hung himself from the bars of a high window. He was found strangled to death at one in the morning of April 29. Two days later there was an investigation into the cause of the suicide. The jail authorities accepted the jailor's false statement that Indu Bhushan had been suffering from the hallucination that his fellow-prisoners were planning to kill him.

Word of Indu Bhushan's tragic end reached mainland India many weeks later. The helpless despair of this young Swadeshi prisoner deeply moved Nationalists everywhere; saddened by his death and angered by this instance of cruel callousness in the British penal system, they renewed their determination to free the country from foreign rule.