Atulkrishna Ghosh - in Need of Arms

In Need of Arms

“The outbreak of war revivified the vague ideas of revolution which had been floating about in the mind of young Bengal for the last ten years and the hopes of those who had throughout been waiting for the opportunity, and the possibility of a successful revolt seemed imminent,” wrote Nixon. “It was probably some time in September 1914 that Jatin Mukherjee came to Calcutta in order to take such steps as England’s participation in a war with Germany seemed to call for in this direction.”. Judging the time ripe for them to make full preparations for a revolution, Jatin’s men undertook taxi-cab robberies to provide funds for this purpose, as described in the Rowlatt Report. Hence, on 26 August 1914, Shrish Chandra Mitra, one of his loyal associates, smuggled fifty Mauser pistols and forty-six thousand cartridges from the Rodda (arms dealers) in Kolkata, handed them over to Atul, before disappearing for good. Jatin Mukherjee distributed these dreadful arms to various units. Conceived by Jatin, as does a skilful stage manager, Atul chalked out a series of daring overt acts under the immediate leadership of Naren Bhattacharya alias M.N. Roy: these are all duly catalogued in the Rowlatt Report. Successive emissaries returned from Europe and America with the good news of the arrival of arms obtained from German authorities by the Berlin Committee. Balasore was chosen by Germany to land a shipment. Jatin with a handful of associates took shelter there. Then Atul dispatched Harikumar Chakravarti, Dr Jatin Ghoshal, Satish Chakravarti and a batch of workers with boats, rifles and other requisites to the other selected port at Raymangal in the Sundarbans. When information came that the Police had discovered Jatin's hideout in Balasore, Naren Ghose Chaudhury proposed spontaneously to rush to the spot for a showdown; Jadugopal Mukherjee objected: "Dada is big enough to look after himself. Let us disperse." Atul was stunned by this cynical order. After the failure of the Indo-German conspiracy and after Jatin’s untimely death, disheartened Atul and other Jugantar leaders went underground in 1915, remaining so for about seven years. Even then, for several years, the revolutionaries entertained the hope of smuggling arms for an insurrection. In June 1916, Atul sent through Ananta Haldar a letter for Bhavabhushan Mitra at Deoghar, “who was one of the trusted men of the party. Both Ananta and Bhava Bhushan were dealt with under the Defence Rules and interned in Bengal.” (Sealy, p24). In the teeth of sporadic Police attempts to arrest them, once, in Chandernagore, while nursing Charu Ghose, Atul with the ailing co-worker on his shoulders, scaled the hospital wall. Dr Govindin, the Civil Surgeon, narrated this to Bhupendrakumar Datta. According to Nixon: “Jatin Mukherjee had at this time gone to Balasore, and Atul Ghosh was a big figure in the arrangement for these outrages.” In July 1916, “Atul Ghosh was still the prompting spirit of all these gangs, and in the Barisal party, too, he seems to have wielded some influence.”.