When I first envisioned India House, I thought it would be set in the Bombay Presidency and London.
But then I came across the interesting character of Hemachandra Kanungo Das. He was a Bengali who was incensed by the partition of Bengal, and had decided to kill Bampfylde Fuller, the Governor of East Bengal. Frustrated by his failed attempts, he sold his house and went to Europe to learn how to make bombs.
In this, he joined forces with Senapati Bapat, an associate of Savarkar. They used all the guile they had to hack through the secret social groups of French anarchists, American fugitives, and Russian emigres in Paris, and finally ended up with a 70-page bomb manual. This manual was then cyclostyled by the inmates of India House, and sent off to Abhinav Bharat in Bombay and the Anushilan Samiti in Calcutta.
This felt very vital to the story, and I dug deeper.
What followed was Babarao Savarkar, Vinayak Savarkar’s brother, traveling far and wide as secretly as he could, to teach Abhinav Bharat members all around the Bombay presidency how to make and use bombs.
But in Bengal, Hem Das joined back up with Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh, and decided to set up a bomb factory. He made several bombs that failed, before making a grenade that he sent with Khudiram Ghosh and Prafulla Chaki to assassinate a judge. Unfortunately, they threw the grenade at the wrong carriage, leading to the death of the British judge’s wife and her friend.
Prafulla Chaki shot himself when he was confronted on a train while trying to escape. Khudiram Bose was caught, tried and hanged.
After this, the police arrested Aurobindo, Barin, Hem, Ulhaskar Dutt and several others. Naren Goswami, one of their associates, had turned approver. They got a gun smuggled into prison and shot him dead. With the death of Naren Goswami, the case against Aurobindo collapsed and he was acquitted, as were several others. But Hem and Ulhaskar were sentenced to life in prison and Barin was sentenced to death (which was somehow later commuted to life).
Now this interesting story is more than just a sidetrack to the story of India House. Once these men were captured, the bomb manual was discovered, and the Calcutta CID began asking themselves where this manual had come from.
Hem had been in Paris. And they did know Senapati Bapat was his associate. They knew Bapat had met with Babarao Savarkar after he had come back to India. The very reason Bapat had been a person of interest was 1) he had lost his scholarship in Edinburgh for writing a paper titled “India Wants Home Rule” and 2) After this, he had lived at India House.
Now they knew enough to increase surveillance on India House, as well as on Babarao Savarkar, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
Additionally, the Alipore Bomb Case as it was known had other repercussions on India House.
Now Bipin Chandra Pal, of Lal-Bal-Pal fame, was also one of the accused in the Alipore Bomb Case. Ulhaskar Dutt was engaged to his daughter Lila. His own son Niranjan, had been getting too inspired by Ulhaskar and his revolutionary friends and trying too hard to be troublesome to the British. So when Shyamji Krishna Varma, the owner of India House, called him to Europe to spread propaganda for the Indian cause with a generous paycheck, he immediately took Niranjan along and got to London, where he set up base. Additionally, Ulhaskar’s brother Sukhsagar was also shipped off to London, so he didn’t follow in the footsteps of his brother.
Bipin Pal set up a home in London and tried to make his house a hub of Indian nationalist activity. It didn’t take long before Niranjan and Sukhsagar fell under the spell of Savarkar at India House.
However, at around this time, a man was spying for Scotland Yard at India House named Sukhsagar Dutt. It could be the same as Ulhaskar’s brother, but it could also be a different person; the sources are British documents saying so and so was their inside man. We don’t know his antecedents.
Anyway, this increased surveillance led to the arrest and trial of Babarao Savarkar, who was then sentenced to two life terms at Kalapani. This triggered Madanlal Dhingra, an inmate of India House, to go shoot Sir Curzon-Wyllie, after which Scotland Yard moved heaven and earth to arrest and deport Savarkar.
My motive with the novel has always been to follow the most interesting person in the narrative at any given time, so I had to follow Hem for a significant section of the book, from London to Paris, to Berlin, and then the whole way to Calcutta and Muzzafarpur. I ended up finding out more than I meant to about the Calcutta revolutionaries. I need to do a whole different post just talking about Aurobindo Ghosh and his brother Barin, but here are a few interesting snippets:
Ulhaskar Dutt was thrown out of Presidency College where he was studying chemistry because he beat up a British professor who spoke ill of Bengalis.
He however went back to Presidency College as a lab assistant for Prof. JC Bose. Yes, that same JC Bose who proved plants have life. In his lab, he learned to make bombs.
And how did he end up there? Aurobindo and Barin Ghosh were close to Sister Nivedita, an Irishwoman who was a disciple of Swami Vivekananda. Sister Nivedita was a close family friend of JC Bose, who she lovingly called ‘bairn’ or ‘khokha’.
And JC Bose’s working on proving plants have life was deeply tied to Sister Nivedita asking him if there was some scientific way to prove that all things in the universe are connected to the same consciousness. That just changes the whole game for me right there.
When Ulhaskar Dutt sustained injuries from experimenting with explosives, he obviously couldn’t go to the hospital to be treated. Instead, he went to Indumadhab Mallick. Please read the link there, it has great details on his life.
But the short version: He had degrees in philosophy and physics, and became a lawyer. He then studied medicine and became a qualified doctor. He also invented the icmic cooker (ic = hygienic, mic = economic), a precursor to the pressure cooker, which graces nearly every Indian household today. The cooker was inspired by watching how the Jagannath temple in Puri cooks meals for the public. And he was also the go-to doctor for the revolutionaries. He unfortunately passed away at the early age of 47, from an infection he contracted during surgery.