Virendranath Chattopadhyaya
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Virendranath Chattopadhyaya alias Chatto (1880-1937 ?) was a prominent Bengali Indian revolutionary with a vast and varied international career directed against British imperialism. This colourful character has been portrayed as "Chandralal" by Somerset Maugham and as "Ananda" in Daughter of Earth, novel by Agnes Smedley.
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[edit] Early life
Nicknamed Binnie, Biren or Virendranath was the eldest son of Dr Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya (Chatterjee), ex-principal and Professor of Science in the Nizam’s College, Hyderabad. Among Aghorenath’s other children Sarojini Naidu and Harindranath Chattopadhyay were famous poets. Viren received a truly secular education, beginning with Bengali, Urdu, Persian, Hindi, English; later he was to learn French, Italian, German, Dutch, Russian and the Scandinavian languages. He matriculated at the University of Madras and received a B.A. degree from the University of Calcutta. In Kolkata, through his sister Gannu or Mrinalini, already known to be an advanced Nationalist, Viren was introduced to Bejoy Chandra Chatterjee, a barrister known as an extremist, as well as to Sri Aurobindo’s family, especially his cousins, Kumudini and Sukumar Mitra; the former was editress of the seditious Suprabhat magazine. For years Viren maintained contact with all of them. [1]
[edit] In England
In 1902, Viren joined the Oxford University, preparing for the Indian Civil Service, before becoming a law student of the Middle Temple. Frequenting Shyamji Krishnavarma’s “India House” at 65 Cromwell Avenue in London, Viren knew V.D. Savarkar since 1906. In 1907, Viren was on the editorial board of Shyamji’s Indian Sociologist and, in August, along with Madame Cama and S.R. Rana he attended the Stuttgart Conference of the Second International where they met delegates like Hyndman, Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, Ramsay Macdonald. In spite of Lenin’s presence, it is not certain if Viren met him on this occasion.
In 1908, at “India House” he came in contact with a number of important “agitators” from India : G.S. Khaparde, Lajpat Rai, Har Dayal, Rambhuj Dutt, and Bipin Chandra Pal. In June 1909, at an India House meeting, Savarkar violently advocated the whole-sale murder of the English in India. On 1 July, Sir William Curzon-Wyllie, Political Aide-de-camp at the India Office, was assassinated by Madanlal Dhingra under the influence of Savarkar, at the Imperial Institute in London. Viren published a letter in The Times on 6 July in support of Savarkar, and was expelled by the Benchers of the Middle Temple. In November 1909, he edited the short-lived but virulent periodical Talvar (‘The Sword’). In May 1910, seizing the opportunity of a tension between England and Japan over Korea, Viren was found discussing the possibility of a Japanese help to Indian revolutionary efforts. On 9 June 1910, along with D.S. Madhavrao, he followed V.V.S. Aiyar to Paris, avoiding a warrant for his arrest, whereupon almost immediately he joined the French Socialist Party.
[edit] In Paris
Aiyar left for Pondicherry, publishing the Dharma newspaper and a number of stirring pamphlets in Tamil, maintaining a regular contact with Madame Cama. Chatto and some other revolutionaries stayed with her at 25 rue de Ponthieu and helped her editing the Bande Mataram : its April 1911 issue “was one of the most violent that ever appeared” praising outrages in Nasik and Kolkata, claiming
- "With gentlemen we can be gentlemen, but not with rogues and scoundrels. (…) Our friends the Bengalis have also begun to understand. Blessed be their efforts. Long be their arms." [2]
In connection with the Tinnevelly Conspiracy Case in February 1912, Madame Cama published an article showing that these political assassinations were in accordance with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. Earlier in the year, Viren married Miss Reynolds. Demoralised by the War, his wife went back to England while Viren reached Berlin in April 1914, immediately before sending Herambalal Gupta to Japan via USA.
[edit] In Germany
A student in comparative linguistics at the University of Saxe-Anhalt, in April 1914, Viren met Dr Abinash Bhattacharya alias Bhatta and some other patriotic Indian students. The former was well-known to the influential members belonging to the Kaiser’s immediate circle. Early in September 1914, they formed a “German Friends of India” Association and, received by the brother of Wilhelm II, they signed a treaty in favour of German help to oust British rule in India. With the help of Baron Max von Oppenheim, who was an expert in Middle Eastern affairs in the German Foreign Office, Viren informed Indian students in thirty-one German universities about the Association’s plans.
Among its first members were Viren alias Chatto, Bhatta, Dr Moreshwar Govindrao Prabhakar (Cologne), Dr Abdul Hafiz (Leipzig), C. Padmanabhan Pillai (Zurich), Dr Jnanendra Dasgupta (Zurich), Dhiren Sarkar, Narain S. Marathé, Vishnu Suktankar, Gopal Paranjapé, Karandikar, Shrish Chandra Sen, Satish Chandra Ray, Sambhashiva Rao, Dadachanji Kersasp, Mansur Ahmad, Siddiq. Other prominent revolutionaries who soon found their way to Berlin were Har Dayal, Taraknath Das, Mahomed Barakatullah, Bhupendranath Datta, Chandrakanta Chakravarti, M.P. Tirumal Acharya, Herambalal Gupta, Jodh Singh Mahajan, Jiten Lahiri, Satyen Sen, and Vishnu Ganesh Pingley [3] <[4] [5]
On 22 September 1914, Sarkar and Marathé left for Washington with a message for the German Ambassador, Von Bernstorf]]. The latter got Von Papen, his Military Attaché, to arrange for steamers, purchase arms and ammunition, to be delivered on the eastern coast of India. On 20 November 1914, Viren sent Satyen Sen to Kolkata with V.G. Pingley and Kartâr Singh with a report for Jatindranath Mukherjee or Bagha Jatin ; the latter conveyed a note through Pingley and Kartar Singh to Rash Behari Bose to expedite preparations for the proposed armed rising. [6] In 1915, when Viren went to meet Raja Mahendra Pratap in Switzerland and convey him the Kaiser’s personal invitation, there was an attempt to murder Viren, while he was dogged by Donald Gullick, a British agent.
[edit] A Revolutionary Vagabond
With the failure of the Indo-German Zimmermann Plan, in 1917 Viren shifted the Berlin Committee to Stockholm. In 1918, he contacted the Russian leaders Troinovski and Angelica Balabanova, the First general Secretary of the Communist International. In December, he dissolved the Berlin Committee, and arranged for a secret meeting of Indian revolutionaries in Berlin, in May 1919. In November 1920, in search of financial and political support exclusively for the revolutionary nationalist movement in India, wherein he was encouraged by M.N. Roy (and with Borodin’s approval) Viren went to Moscow with Agnes Smedley. The latter shared her life with him till 1928. Under her influence, Viren coveted the influential position M.N. Roy enjoyed in Moscow. The next year, he was received by Lenin, along with Bhupendra Nath Datta and Panduranga Khankoje. From May to September, he attended the Indian Committee of the 3rd Congress of Communist International in Moscow. In December 1921, he founded in Berlin an Indian News and Information Bureau with his correspondent Rash Behari Bose in Japan. According to Sibnarayan Ray, in spite of a climate of rivalry created between Roy and Viren by Agnes,
- "Roy would have liked to work with him since he admired the latter’s intelligence and energy. (…) By early 1926 Chatto had got into good terms with Roy."
At Roy’s instance, Willi Muenzenberg “took Chatto under his wings” in organising an international conference in Europe to inaugurate the League against Imperialism. On the eve of Roy’s mission to China, in January 1927, Viren wrote to Roy asking “if there is anything further you wish me to do…” On 26 August 1927, he wrote to M.N. Roy, after the latter’s return to Moscow from China, asking to help him “directly” to gain admission to the Communist Parties of India and Germany and, advised by Roy, he joined the German Communist Party (KPD).[7]
In 1927, while working as the head of the Indian Languages Section of the KPD, he accompanied Jawaharlal Nehru to the Brussels Conference of the League against Imperialism; Viren was its General Secretary. His younger brother Harin went to Berlin this year to meet him and Agnes. On hearing about Nehru’s becoming President of the Indian National Congress, Viren proposed him – in vain - to split the party for a more revolutionary programme for full independence from British Imperialism. Inprecor, the Comintern organ, published 28 articles by Viren (27/20/1930-3/12/1932) about an ultra-leftist sectarian turn of the Communist Party of India. Between 1931 and 1933, Viren went on advocating anti-Hitler activities, Asian emancipation from Western powers, independence of India, Japanese intervention into Chinese revolution. Among his bunch of Korean, Japanese and Chinese friends was Zhou Enlai, the future Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China.
Agnes saw him for the last time in 1933 and remembered later
- "…He embodied the tragedy of a whole race. Had he been born in England or America, I thought, his ability would have placed him among the great leaders of his age… He was at last growing old, his body thin and frail, his hair rapidly turning white. The desire to return to India obsessed him, but the British would trust him only if he were dust on a funeral pyre." [8]
In January-February 1934, he had a correspondence with Krupskaya (Lenin’s widow) and on 18 March 1934 he gave a talk about his reminiscences of Lenin. [9] He wrote to Georgi Dimitrov, Comintern’s Secretary-General, on 9 September 1935 : “For three years I have been kept away from active work in the Comintern.” In a letter to Muzaffar Ahmad, Clemens Palme Dutt, Rajni’s brother, mentions having seen him for the last time in 1936/37 at the Department of Ethnography of the Academy of Science in Leningrad. According to Dr Lydia Karunovskaya, his colleague and the last woman who shared his life, Viren was arrested in 1937 and shot thereafter by a firing squad of Joseph Stalin. And in 1940 she learnt that he was no more. [10] On 10 July 1938, Nambiar, Viren’s brother-in-law, wrote to J. Nehru about this arrest and the latter replied on 21 July agreeing to find out about Viren’s fate.
[edit] Evaluation
More information is found on Viren alias Chatto in James Campbell Ker’s Political Trouble in India: 1907-1917; but the author’s personal animosity brings out a seamy aspect of a man who was, nevertheless deeply admired by his colleagues (like M.N. Roy, Dr Abinash Chandra Bhattacharya) for his able leadership, sharp intelligence and sincere emotion. An abridged tribute from Jawaharlal Nehru will better define and defend the unique personality that was Chatto
- "A very able and a very delightful person… His humour and light heartedness never left him… A fit of homesickness came to him when he longed to be back… No exile can escape the malady of his tribe, that consumption of the soul, as Mazzini called it… Of the few I met, the only persons who impressed me intellectually were Virendranath Chattopadhyay and M.N. Roy." [11]
Virendranath's family line survives today in Kolkata. His grandnephews Chironmoy, Jyotirmoy and Hironmoy live there as do all his granddaughters Krity, Dipty, Samapti and Sruti. His eldest greatgrandnephew Rishin, ironically has returned to Hyderabad and lives there.
[edit] References
- Political Trouble in India:1907-1917, A Confidential Report, by James Campbell Ker, 1917, repr. 1973
- Europé bharatiya biplaber sadhana, by Dr Abinash Chandra Bhattacharya, 2nd ed., 1978
- Bahirbharaté bharater muktiprayas, by Dr Abinash Chandra Bhattacharya, 1962
- Dictionary of National Biography, ed. S.P. Sen, Vol. I, “Chatterjee Birendra Nath”, 272-4
- Chatto: the Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe, by Nirode K. Barooah, Oxford University Press, 2004
- The above, reviewed by Aditya Sinha in Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 14 August 1904
- Les origines intellectuelles du movement d’indépendance de l’Inde (1893-1918), by Prithwindra Mukherjee (PhD Thesis, Paris Sorbonne University), 1986
- In Freedom’s Quest: Life of M.N. Roy, Vol. II, III (Part 1), by Sibnarayan Ray
- Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, by A.C. Bose, Patna, 1971
