The Alipore Bomb Case

Instead of the rising political consciousness and opposition to British Raj in Bengal in the late nineteenth century, by 1902, Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) saw the emergence of secret societies that aimed at a violent overthrow of British rule in India, of which Aurobindo Ghose and his brother Brindra Kumar Ghose were among the strongest proponents, leading the youth of Bengal. On 30 April 1908, two teenage revolutionaries—Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki—hurled a bomb at a carriage in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, in an attempt to assassinate Douglas Kingsford, who had gained notoriety among Bengali nationalists. Forty-nine were accused, and 206 witnesses appeared in court, and a young lawyer, Chittaranjan Das, who would later become a significant figure in the independence movement, appeared for the defence. Judge Beachcroft finally delivered the judgment on 6 May 1909, and the case came to be recorded as one of the most sensational trials in the history of the Indian independence movement! The Alipore Bomb Case: A Historic Pre-Independence Trial by Noorul Hoda recounts the same, and the contributions of intellectual revolutionaries like Aurobindo Ghose and his brother, as well as stalwarts like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, to the nationalist struggle of a colonised India aspiring to complete freedom from the oppressive British rule.