Trial &
Final Days

Having walked through the night from Muzaffarpur, Khudiram Bose reached Waini railway station on the morning of 1 May. He was recognised there, questioned and taken into custody. He was carrying items that linked him to the previous evening’s attack, and he was returned to Muzaffarpur.

He did not deny his part in what had happened. Contemporary press reporting recorded that he acknowledged responsibility from the outset, and much of the case against him proceeded on that basis.

The trial began at Muzaffarpur on 21 May 1908 before Judge Corndoff. The charge was murder, arising from the deaths of Mrs. Kennedy and her daughter.

The prosecution was conducted by Mannuk and Binod Bihari Majumdar. The defence was undertaken by Kalidas Basu, Upendranath Sen and Kshetranath Bandopadhyay, later joined by Kulkamal Sen, Nagendra Lal Lahiri and Satischandra Chakraborty. That a group of Indian lawyers appeared for him without fee, in a case that was politically hazardous to touch, was itself widely noticed at the time.

The evidence before the court concerned identification, the circumstances of the arrest at Waini, and the material recovered. The defence was directed less at disputing the events than at the question of the accused’s age and degree of responsibility, and at procedural questions that would later form the substance of the appeal.

The court convicted Khudiram Bose and sentenced him to death on 13 June 1908. He was eighteen years old.

The sentence was reported across India. The fact of a schoolboy being sentenced to hang — whatever view was taken of what he had done — became a matter of public argument in the Indian press in a way the administration had not expected.

An appeal was filed and heard in the Calcutta High Court from 8 July 1908, with Narendrakumar Basu appearing for the appellant. The appeal raised objections to the conduct of the trial rather than a denial of the underlying events.

On 13 July 1908 the High Court, sitting with two British judges, confirmed both the conviction and the sentence of death.

Khudiram Bose was hanged at Muzaffarpur on the morning of 11 August 1908, four months short of his nineteenth birthday.

The most quoted contemporary description of that morning comes from the Calcutta newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika, which reported that he walked to the gallows ‘firmly and cheerfully’. Reports of this kind circulated widely and shaped the public memory of his death almost immediately.

It should be read as what it is: a newspaper account, written for a readership that had already begun to make a symbol of him. It is quoted here because it is the source of the image of his death that Bengal carried forward, and because that image mattered historically. It is not a neutral record of his final minutes, and no such record exists.