Tarak Nath Das
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Taraknath Das or Tarak Nath Das (Bengali: তারকানাথ দাস)(June 15, 1884–December 22, 1958), anti-British Bengali Indian revolutionary who, as a pioneer in the west coast of North America and Canada, discussed his plans with Tolstoy, while organising the Asian Indian immigrants in favour of a freedom movement. Teaching at Columbia and several other American universities, this “intense man” fought for social justice and international fraternity.
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[edit] Early life
Tarak was born at Majupara near Kanchrapara in the district of 24 Parganas in West Bengal. Coming from a lower middle-class family, his father Kalimohan was a clerk at the Central Telegraph Office in Kolkata. Noticing the flair of this brilliant student with the pen, his headmaster encouraged him to appear in an essay contest on the theme of patriotism. Impreesed by the quality of the paper by a school boy of sixteen years, one of the judges, the Barrister Pramathanath Mitra alias P. Mitter, founder of the Anushilan Samiti, asked his associate Satish Chandra Basu to recruit the boy. On passing his Entrance Examination with very high marks, in 1901, Tarak went to Kolkata and got himself admitted to the General Assembly’s Institution for university studies. In his secret patriotic activity, he found full support from his elder sister Girija. When, in November 1905, P. Mitter went to Dhaka along with Bepin Chandra Pal, to inaugurate the local branch of the Anushilan, Pulin Behari Das, a former university student and Taraknath Das, a student leader, accompanied him. Both Mitter and Pal had been inspired by the writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rajnarayan Basu; and it was the moment when the latter’s grandson, Sri Aurobindo, set ablaze the hearts of young Indians with his radical project for freedom. The fiery presence of B.G. Tilak and the celebrations of the Hindu visionary Shivaji electrified the country on the foil of the Partition of Bengal. Around Sri Aurobindo as Founder Principal of the National College, came forward Rabindranath Tagore and other stalwarts of the epoch; among the younger batch of intellectuals, Tarak with his friend Guran Ditt Kumar as well as Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Radhakamal and Radhakumud Mukherjee were fully active.
[edit] Genesis of a Mission
In order to stir Bengali enthusiasm, in addition to Shivaji, the most Bengali figure of Raja Sitaram Ray was introduced as cult for a festival; in the early months of 1906, Bagha Jatin or Jatindra Nath Mukherjee was accompanied by Tarak when the former was invited to preside over the Sitaram Festival at Muhammadpur in Jessore, ancient capital of Sitaram. On this occasion, during a closeted meeting around Jatin were present, in addition to Tarak, Shrish Chandra Sen, Satyendra Sen and Adhar Chandra Laskar : all the four, one after the other, were to leave for higher studies abroad. Nothing was known about the object of this meeting till in 1952 when, during a conversation, Tarak spoke of it : along with specific higher education, they were all to acquire a military training and a knowledge of how to prepare explosives; especially they were urged to create a climate of sympathy among people of the free Western countries in favour of India’s decision to win freedom. (Source: Sadhak biplabi jatindranath, by Prithwindra Mukherjee, West Bengal State Book Board, 1990, pp442-3).
[edit] Life in America
Disguised as a monk under the name of Tarak Brahmachari, he left for Madras (Chennai) on a lecture tour. After Vivekananda and Bepin Chandra Pal he was the first person in the region who raised such a passion by his patriotic speeches. Among young revolutionaries he particularly inspired Nilakantha Brahmachari, Subrahmania Shiva and Chidambaram Pillai. On 16 July 1907, via Japan, Tarak reached Seattle. After earning his livelihood as a farm-worker, he got appointed at laboratory the University of California, Berkeley, before enrolling himself as a student. Simultaneously, qualifying as translator and interpreter of the American Civil Administration, he entered the Department of Immigration, Vancouver, in January 1908. There he discovered the arrival of William C. Hopkinson (1878-1914) of the Kolkata Police Information Service, appointed as Immigration Inspector and Interpreter for Hindi, Punjabi and Gurumukhi. During seven long years – till his assassination by a Sikh - WCH was to send detailed and regular reports to the Government of India about the presence of such student radicals as Tarak, and monitor a group of pro-British Sikh informants headed by Bela Singh. (Source: Ker, pp247, 251).
Tarak with Panduranga Khankoje (B.G. Tilak’s emissary) founded the Indian Independence League. Adhar Laskar arrived from Kolkata with funds sent by Jatin Mukherjee alias Bagha Jatin, permitting Tarak to start his journal Free Hindustan in English, as well as its Gurumukhi edition, Swadesh Sevak (‘Servants of the Motherland’) by Guran Ditt Kumar alias Kumar who came from Kolkata on 31 October 1907. Free Hindustan has been claimed by Constance Brissenden as "the first South Asian publication in Canada, and one of the first in North America." They were assisted by Professor Surendra Mohan Bose, expert in explosives. Through regular correspondence, personalities like Tolstoy, Hyndman, Shyamji Krishnavarma, Madame Cama encouraged Tarak in his venture. Described as "community spokesman", he had established Hindustani Association in Vancouver in 1907. Fully conversant with existing laws, Tarak served his compatriots, most of them illiterate. In Millside, near New Westminster, he founded the Swadesh Sevak Home, a boarding school for Asian Indian immigrants, with evening classes on English and mathematics, helping them to write letters to their family or to their employers, to understand their duties towards India and their rights in their new country. There were about two thousand Indians, mostly Sikh, on the west coast of Canada and North America. The majority worked in agriculture and construction. After an initial flop, these Indian farmers succeeded in obtaining a bumper crop of rice in California in the early 1910s, and a good number of them worked on the building of the Western Pacific Railway in California, along with immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Italy. (Source: Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America). Radicals like Tarak mobilised the Indian community to strike back against anti-Indian violence and politics of exclusion : he was the designated spokesman. (Source: The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, by Constance Brissenden, Harbour Publishing).
Rightly suspected of extracting bribes from the Asian Indian immigrants, WCH utilised Tarak as a scapegoat and got him expelled from Canada by the middle of 1908. Leaving Bose, Kumar and Chagan Khairaj Varma alias Husain Rahim in charge of the compatriots’ fate, Tarak left Vancouver for better concentrating on the areas from Seattle to San Francisco. On reaching Seattle, since its July 1908 issue, Free Hindustan became a more overtly anti-British organ, with a motto from Tarak : “To protest against all tyranny is a service to humanity and the duty of civilisation.” The Irish revolutionary George Freeman alias Fitzgerald of the Gaelic American newspaper in New York was looked upon as the real leader of the anti-British movement, closely connected with two Indians, Samuel L. Joshi and Barakatullah. Invited by Fitzgerald, Tarak issued the August and the succeeding numbers of Free Hundustan from New York. In 1908, Tarak joined the Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, “a high-class engineering and military establishment, in order to receive military training. He also applied for enlistment (…) in the Vermont National Guard…” But, in spite of his extreme popularity among the students of all origin, owing to his anti-British activities such as editing Free Hindustan, he was rusticated. By the end of 1909 he returned to Seattle. (Source: Ker, pp119-120, 221-2).
[edit] Founding the Ghadar Party
"A direct appeal to the Sikhs" appeared in the September-October 1909 issue of the Free Hindustan, reproduced by the Swadesh Sevak; the article ended with : “Coming in contact with free people and institutions of free nations, some of the Sikhs, though labourers in the North American Continent, have assimilated the idea of liberty and trampled the medals of slavery…” (Source: Ker, pp229-231). In March 1912 a letter published in The Punjabee' asked for a leader to come and help organise Indians in the area in view of the rising revolutionary spirit. Originally they discussed inviting Kumar and then Sardar Ajit Singh. However when Tarak arrived he suggested inviting the Aryan Anarchist Lala Hardayal, who he knew from his days at Stanford University. Hardayal agreed to work with him setting up the Hindi Association of ther Pacific Ocean, which provided the first basis for the Gadhar. “Many of the leaders were of other parties and from different parts of India, Hardayal, Ras Bihari Bose, Barakatulah, Seth Husain Rahim, Tarak Nath Das and Vishnu Ganesh Pingley… The Gadar was the first organised violent bid for freedom after the rising of 1857. Many hundreds paid the price with their lives,” wrote Khushwant Singh. (Source: Illustrated Weekly of India, 26 February, 1961). (Source: Ghadar Movement:Ideology, Organisation and Strategy by Harich K. Puri, Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983
[edit] Berlin to Kabul
In 1914, admitted as a Research Fellow to the University of Berkeley, Tarak passed his M.A. and started his PhD thesis on International Relationship and International Law while joining the teaching staff of the university. In order to have a greater freedom of action, this year he acquired American citizenship. With the help of professors like Robert Morse Lovett, Upham Pope, Arthur Rider of Berkeley and David Starr Jordan and Professor Stuart of Palo Alto (Stanford), Tarak established the East India Association. Invited by the International Students’ Association as a delegate of the American universities, he had already been intimated about the Indo-German Plan and met Chatto in Berlin in January 1915. Barakatullah and Hardayal too reached Berlin to see Tarak. They all formed party to accompany Raja Mahendra Pratap in his Kabul expedition. In April 1916 the Shiraz-ul-Akhbar of Kabul reproduced from a Constantinople paper a speech by Tarak : it praised the work of the German officers busy training the Ottoman army and the intrepidity abd bravery of the Turks. He pointed out that it was germany and Austria who declared war and not the allies; that their reason for doing so was to purify the earth of the brutal atrocities practised on mankind by their enemies, and to save the unfortunate inhabitants of India, Egypt, Persia, Morocco and Africa from the English, French and Russians who had forcibly seized their countries and reduced them to slavery. Tarak laid stress on the point that Turkey entered the war not only to defend her own country and to maintain her liberty, but also to put new life into 300 million Muslims, and to establish the Afghan on a firms basis with 350 million Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, as its supports and helpers. (Ker, p304). Tarak returned to California in July 1916, before setting out for Japan with the project of a vast study on Japanese Expansion and its Significance in World Politics; with a foreword by the former Chinese Prime Minister Shao-I Hong Tong appeared in 1917 his book, Is Japan a menace to Asia ? In collaboration with Rasbehari Bose and Herambalal Gupta, he was about to leave on a mission to Moscow, when Tarak was called back to appear in the famous Hindu German Conspiracy Trial; accusing him as “the most dangerous criminal” it was proposed to withdraw his American citizenship and surrender him to the British Police. As a more lenient measure, on 30 April 1918, he was sentenced to twenty-two months in the atrocious Leavenworth Federal prison.
[edit] Academic Career
After his release, in 1924, Tarak married Mary Keating and paid an extended visit to Europe with Munich as his headquarters, where he founded the India Institute, awarding scholarships to meritorious Indian students. Remaining in touch with Sri Aurobindo, he pursued an inner spiritual discipline. On his return to the United States, Tarak became a Professor of Political Science at the Columbia University and a Fellow of the Georgetown University. With Mary, he opened the resourceful Taraknath Das Foundation to promote educational activities and, especially, to foster cultural relations between the U.S.A. and the other countries. Tarak was among those who suffered emotionally from the 1947 explosion of India and advocated vehemently against this balkanisation till his last day. After forty-six years he re-visited his Motherland in 1952 as a Visiting Professor of the Watumull Foundation. He founded the Vivekananda Society in Kolkata and, on 9 September, presided over the public meeting to celebrate the 37th anniversary of Bagha Jatin’s heroic martyrdom, urging the youth to revive the values upheld by his mentor, Jatindâ. (Source : Anandabazar Patrika, Kolkata, 10 September 1952). On reaching back the U.S.A., on 22 December 1958, he passed away.
[edit] References
“Das, Taraknath (Dr.)” in Dictionary of National Biography, (ed.) S.P. Sen, 1972, Vol I, pp363-4
Political Trouble in India: A Confidential Report, by James Campbell Ker, 1917, reprinted 1973
Sadhak biplabi jatindranath, by Prithwindra Mukherjee, West Bengal State Book Board, 1990, pp441-469
San Francisco Trial Report, 75 Volumes; Record Groups 49, 60, 85 & 118 (U.S. National Archives, Washington D.C. & Federal Archives, San Bruno)
M.N. Roy Library & Gadhar Collection (South/Southeast Library, University of California, Berkeley)
“Taraknath Das” by William A. Ellis, in Norwich University 1819-1911, Vol. III, 1911
“Deportation of Hindu Politics” by Sailendra Nath Ghose, in The Dial, August 23, 1919, pp145-7
“The Vermont Education of Taraknath Das: An Episode In British-American-Indian Relations” by Ronald Spector, in Vermont History, Vol.48, No.2, 1980 (illustrated), pp88-95
“Taraknath in Madras” by Akoor Anantachari, in Sunday Standard, Chennai, 31 May, 1964
Taraknath Das: Life and Letters of a Revolutionary in Exile, by Tapan K. Mukherjee, National Council of Education, Kolkata, 1998, 304pp Op. cit.: a review by Santosh Saha, in Journal of 3rd World Studies, Spring, 2000
