Preface
This book is about a man almost nobody remembers.
If you ask an educated Indian today to name the makers of Bengal's revolutionary movement, the names come quickly. Khudiram Bose. Prafulla Chaki. Bagha Jatin. Surya Sen. Subhas Bose, who is not quite of that lineage but is somehow always there. Aurobindo Ghosh, who became a saint. And, in certain circles, Veer Savarkar, whose Marathi memoir of the Andamans has been turned into a flag.
Ullaskar Dutta is not on that list. He was once, briefly, perhaps the most famous revolutionary in India. He was, with Barindra Kumar Ghosh, sentenced to death in 1909 in what was then the largest state trial in colonial Indian history. The newspapers of the time, both Indian and British, knew his name. The viceroy's secret files knew his name. The young students of Calcutta and Dacca who whispered in alleyways about the future of the country knew his name. He was the man who made the bombs.
And then he disappeared. Not in the simple sense of dying. He was made to disappear. The British shipped him across the black water to Port Blair, locked him in the new Cellular Jail, harnessed him to an oil-mill in place of a bullock, hung him by his wrists from iron bangles bolted into a stone wall, and finally, in the summer of 1912, attached the terminals of an electric battery to his body for three days running. By the time that was done, the man who emerged was not exactly the man who had gone in. He was sent to the lunatic asylum in Madras, where he stayed for eight years. By the time he came back to Bengal he was thirty-five, half-broken, and politically obsolete. The revolution had moved on without him. Gandhi was rising. The world was elsewhere.
He lived for another forty-five years after that. He wrote a memoir in which the central trauma of his life is recounted in the language of Hindu metaphysics, as if torture had been the unintended doorway into the noumenal world. He was arrested again in 1931. He drifted in and out of poverty. After Partition the village where he had been born ended up in East Pakistan, and so he became, in the country he had given his sanity to, a kind of refugee. He spent ten lonely years in that village before crossing back into India. He married, at the age of seventy-two, the woman he had loved at twenty-two, who had waited for him, given up, married someone else, been widowed, and finally come to him paralysed from the waist down. She died within a few years. He died alone, in Silchar, Assam, on the seventeenth of May, 1965, and nobody much noticed.
I came to him through a footnote. I was reading, years ago, about the Alipore Bomb Case - the great 1908 conspiracy trial whose closing arguments turned a junior barrister named Chittaranjan Das into Deshbandhu, whose accidental defendant Aurobindo Ghosh would emerge from his prison cell as a mystic, whose central piece of physical evidence was a bomb. The footnote mentioned the bomb's maker. The footnote was about him. The page of the book moved on. I did not.
It became impossible, for me, after that, to think about the Indian revolutionary movement without thinking about Ullaskar Dutta. He is the figure who tells the story that the official commemorations cannot. He is the figure who shows what it actually cost to do what they all did, in a way that no statue or stamp or street name will ever quite reckon with. He is, in some sense, the price.
This book is my attempt to give him back to himself, and to give him back to a country that has, perhaps, earned the right to know him. I have written it for general readers, not for specialists. I have tried to keep the historian's machinery in the background and to put the man in the foreground. I have invented nothing of consequence. Where the record is silent, I have said so. Where the sources contradict, I have said that too.
