Chapter 27 - Making A Bomb, Weaving A Flag

A crossover episode

I found this chapter equal parts exciting to write, and like I’m not doing it enough justice.

This chapter covers a lot of ground. So far, Hemachandra Das has a dubious bomb manual in French and is trying to figure out if it would work or convey him to an early grave. Madame Cama has been invited to the International Socialist Conference and needs a flag that represents India.

Everyone talks about the flag Madame Cama used to represent India at the Socialist Conference. It’s this one:

The flag was a version of the flag designed by Hemachandra Das and raised in Calcutta in protest against the Carlyle Circular. It led to everyone associated ending up in prison in Rawalpindi.

Now, the connection that no one really talks about is — how did a version of this flag by a member of the Anushilan Samiti end up with a Parsee lady in Paris? It’s almost like we assume all freedom fighters hung out at the freedom fighter club and exchanged ideas and don’t think too much about it.

There are two ways we simultaneously view the Indian freedom struggle

• It was all centrally managed with a figure at the helm, who could be Gandhi, Bose, or Savarkar, depending on your inclination. They were all the same age and hung out together, and had collar-grabbing arguments.

• Randos were indulging in violence, which wasn’t approved of by the central figures.

The view of the freedom struggle as a Revolutionary project turns this on its head.

There were small tightly-connected revolutionary groups loosely collaborating with each other, to share strategy, tools and ideas, often at great personal cost. And here, the violence was the important part that required a lot of coordination.

Never did just one person hang for a violent act - his entire supporting ecosystem was rooted out of the mainland and sent off to Kalapani. Khudiram Bose might seem like a lone wolf, but no, his act led to a few hundred arrests and a dozen life terms.

So when we look at it like this, I was curious - how did Madame Cama meet Hemachandra Das? How did Hemachandra Das meet Vinayak Savarkar? How did they coordinate? I didn’t find many historians getting down to the specifics of all of this.

This is an imagined meeting of all these great folk.

The anecdote that Hem relates below about having difficulty finding drinking water in Paris comes from the memoir of a different revolutionary - Niranjan Pal. So, it’s a completely true story!

Another part of this story has been trying to figure out how someone would figure out that a bomb recipe was fraudulent. I have made an attempt here. I harked back to my high school chemistry days (why do all girls like chemistry and all boys like physics?) to figure this out. I then realized this was well before IUPAC nomenclature, which standardizes what the names of elements and the format of compound names, especially hydrocarbons. IUPAC itself was formed in 1919, so this was way before there was even the possibility of standardized names.

So yeah, they still call it picric acid and guncotton and pyridine, and they get confused when they are called different things in different languages. This part was exciting to write.

Making a Bomb, Weaving a Flag

Tatya and Aiyar walked down Rue De Ponthieu, marveling at its polished shopfronts, the clatter of carriage wheels over cobblestones, and the scent of perfume wafting from a milliner’s boutique. The boulevard had the sleek, expensive sheen of a Paris determined to forget the revolution that had once rattled its bones. Men in tailored frock coats tipped their hats as they passed; women in feathered hats and rustling silks glanced at the two Indian men with polite curiosity.

They turned into a narrower side street, where elegance gave way to age. The building they sought stood squeezed between a modiste’s atelier and a shuttered café, its grey stone façade streaked with years of rain. Inside, the staircase creaked under their steps. Tatya noted the scent of old wood and beeswax, faint tobacco smoke, and something faintly floral—lavender, perhaps. From behind closed doors, someone played a mournful tune on a violin; a child cried out, then was hushed.

Madame Cama had telegrammed Tatya to come to visit. She had not specified why. It must have to do with his book, he thought. Would it be good news, he wondered, a sense of futility enveloping him. He knocked on the door.