India House Chapter 23 - Comfort Food, Radical Company

A very home-cooked chapter

This chapter introduces quite an interesting character - Chaturbhuj Amin Patidar. He joins as the chef at India House. Eventually, he smuggles guns to India under Savarkar’s instruction. Those guns find their way to Nashik. They lead to his brother Babarao Savarkar’s arrest. The cruelty of his arrest and trial radicalizes Anant Laxman Kanhere, who then uses one of those guns to shoot the magistrate responsible for Babarao’s arrest and trial.

The British manage to catch Chaturbhuj Amin, and get him to turn Crown’s Witness against Savarkar, proving that he sent the guns that led to Magistrate Jackson’s assassination.

However, such a key character doesn’t find all that much mention in any of the sources I’ve looked at (I should probably look more!) So this is all pure imagination!

I also introduce VV Subramania Aiyar and Dr. TSS Rajan, who were both key members of India House. A lot of what I know about life and living in London of the inmates of India House comes from Dr. TSS Rajan’s memoir - the travel to London, the difficulty finding vegetarian food, and what housing and tenancy was like. It is sparse on actual incidents, though — Dr. Rajan was a minister in the 1950s, when it was probably a good idea not to publicly associate oneself with Savarkar, and he kept his revolutionary activities quiet in his memoir.

Aiyar’s biography details all the relevant incidents much better, given that he was a key associate of Savarkar’s. That book shows a much more important role for Dr. Rajan, which he doesn’t write about in his own book.

The challenge here was to ensure this scene isn’t just a series of introductions. I did know that Aiyar’s help in finishing the book on 1857 was crucial, as Savarkar was banned from the India Office library, so I tied that in to make it move the plot forward. The actual meeting of Aiyar with Savarkar is somewhat different, but the key points are similar.

Comfort Food, Radical Company

“What’s your favorite dish to cook?” Tatya asked the thin, gangly lad in front of him.

“Country Captain Chicken”.

“What do you like to eat at home?”

“Khichdi.”

His ad for a cook hadn’t brought in very many responses. Just this boy, Chaturbhuj Amin, and an elderly English lady who had grown up in Darjeeling. Though she had made a delicious Mulligitawny soup, he knew she wouldn’t enjoy cooking for a dozen Indian men all day.

“Why don’t we go to the kitchen, we have some rice and dal and spices, you can make us some khichdi.”

“Sure you don’t want any Country Captain Chicken? Even the white men enjoy how I make it. I even brought in the chicken myself,” Amin said holding up his jhola.

“We’re simple boys here. We’d like khichdi.”.