Chapter 03
Muzaffarpur
On the evening of 30 April 1908, a bomb was thrown at a carriage in a small town in north Bihar. The man it was meant for was not inside it. Two women were, and both of them died.
Background
Why Muzaffarpur mattered
Muzaffarpur is a district town in north Bihar, several hundred kilometres from Calcutta and far outside the centre of Bengal’s political conflict. It became significant in 1908 for one reason: Douglas Kingsford had been posted there.
Kingsford had served as Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta, where he passed severe sentences on nationalist editors and on young political workers. He was widely resented in Bengal, and the resentment sharpened after he ordered the whipping of a young man named Sushil Sen for his part in protests linked to the prosecution of the newspaper Jugantar. He was later transferred to Muzaffarpur as District and Sessions Judge.
The transfer did not end the matter. An attempt had already been made on Kingsford’s life in March 1908, when a parcel containing a concealed explosive device, disguised as a book, was sent to him. It was never opened, and he was unaware of how close the attempt had come. The revolutionary group in Calcutta then selected two young men — Khudiram Bose, eighteen, and Prafulla Chaki, about nineteen — and sent them to Muzaffarpur.
Geography
The places in this chapter
Four locations account for almost everything that happened between 30 April and 1 May 1908.
Sequence of events
Thirty-six hours
Muzaffarpur
Two young men arrive
Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki travelled from Bengal to Muzaffarpur and spent a period observing Kingsford’s daily movements between his residence, the courts and the European Club, where he regularly spent his evenings.
Evening
The attack outside the European Club
As a carriage left the club that evening, a bomb was thrown at it in the belief that Kingsford was inside. He was not; his own carriage was of a similar type, and the wrong vehicle was identified in the dark.
Muzaffarpur
The deaths of Mrs. Kennedy and her daughter
The carriage carried Mrs. Kennedy and her daughter, the wife and daughter of Pringle Kennedy, a leading barrister of the Muzaffarpur bar. Miss Kennedy was fatally injured and died within about an hour. Mrs. Kennedy died of her injuries on 2 May. Neither had any connection to the political dispute that produced the attack. Douglas Kingsford, the intended target, was unhurt.
30 April – 1 May
Flight on foot
The two separated and left the town in different directions on foot. Khudiram Bose walked through the night towards the east, covering a distance usually given as around twenty-five miles, and reached Waini railway station by morning.
Waini station
Arrest
He was recognised at the station, questioned, and taken into custody. He was found to be carrying items that connected him to the attack, and he was brought back to Muzaffarpur.
Mokamaghat
The death of Prafulla Chaki
Prafulla Chaki reached Mokamaghat, on the Ganges to the south, where he too was recognised. Rather than be taken alive he shot himself. He was about nineteen years old.
Aftermath
What the attack set in motion
The political consequences of Muzaffarpur were immediate, large, and almost entirely the opposite of what the organisers had intended.
Within days the police in Calcutta acted against the revolutionary network on a scale not previously attempted. In early May 1908 a series of raids led to a mass of arrests and to the prosecution known as the Alipore Bomb Case, in which Aurobindo Ghosh, Barindra Kumar Ghosh and a large number of others were charged. The trial ran into 1909 and effectively broke the Calcutta organisation for a period.
More broadly, the case gave the colonial government the justification it needed for a substantial expansion of policing and emergency legislation across Bengal and beyond. Nationalist opinion outside the revolutionary groups was divided: many who wanted the British out of India nonetheless condemned an act that had killed two women who were not participants in the conflict.
And yet the case also produced something the government had not anticipated. The trial and execution of an eighteen-year-old was reported at length in the Indian press, and the figure of the schoolboy on the scaffold entered Bengali public feeling in a way that no argument about tactics could dislodge. That is the subject of the two chapters that follow.
The Muzaffarpur case
- Date
- Evening of 30 April 1908
- Place
- Outside the European Club, Muzaffarpur, Bihar
- Intended target
- Douglas Kingsford, District and Sessions Judge, formerly Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta. Unharmed.
- Killed
- Miss Kennedy, died within about an hour. Mrs. Kennedy, died 2 May 1908. Wife and daughter of the barrister Pringle Kennedy.
- Accused
- Khudiram Bose (18), arrested 1 May 1908 at Waini. Prafulla Chaki (c. 19), died by his own hand at Mokamaghat, 1 May 1908.
- Related prosecution
- The Alipore Bomb Case, Calcutta, 1908–1909