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DEOGHAR
The scene was Deoghar, though not exactly the town itself. About five miles before you reach the town, there is the Jesidih Junction on the main railway line. Nearly a mile from there, close to the railway line there was a house with only a ground floor and quite neat and clean on the whole. All around were open fields—not the green meadows of Bengal but the barren red moorlands of Bihar. Not entirely unpleasant scenery though, for it breathed an atmosphere of purity and peace and silence. A little farther away there stood a larger two-storied mansion, perhaps the comfortable holiday retreat of some rich man. The time was towards the end of 1907 and the beginning of 1908. I was about seventeen or eighteen and had just finished with my college life. The dramatis personae were (1) Barindra Kumar Ghose, (2) Ullaskar Dutt, (3) Prafulla Kumar Chakravarti, (4) Bibhuti Bhushan Sarkar, and (5) Nolini Kanta Gupta. The plot was to manufacture bombs. Hitherto, there had been only preliminary investigations and initial experiments and efforts. Now Ullaskar came out with his Eureka. "All is ready," he said, "now there is going to be a real test. We have to demonstrate with a live bomb in action." But here I must add that although we had made the preparation of bombs our first object when we chose this lonely and out of the way place, we were not entirely heartless men, that is, atheistic and given wholly to a materialistic philosophy. It had been part of our plan to devote some time to the cultivation of an inner life too in that solitude. I remember how we would get up an hour before sunrise and sitting down in that calm atmosphere in a meditative pose we would recite aloud with deep fervour and joy the mantra of the Upanishad: Page-27 tilesu tailam dadhaniva sarpir āpah srotahsu aranisu cāgnih evam ātma ātmani grhyatè sau satyena enam tapasā yo nupasyati. , "As one gets oil out of oilseeds, as one gets butter out of curds, as one gets water out of the stream, as one gets fire out of wood, even so one seizes the self out of the self, one who pursues it in truth and tapasya." Who could say at that hour that this was a place of the manufacture of bombs? It would not have been far out to call it an Ashram, "the abode of quiet joy", in the Kalidasian phrase, sānta-rasspadam-āsramam-idam. And it was precisely because of this that Barin got Lele Maharaj down here for our initiation and training in sadhana, the discipline of yoga, the same Lele who had been of particular help to Sri Aurobindo at a certain stage of his own sadhana. But it was our bad luck that the whole thing misfired. When Lele Maharaj came to know that we had accepted the cult of the bomb, he raised an objection. Sadhana and the bomb, he said, did not go well together and the kind of violent rajasic action we had in view was not at all conducive to the purification of the heart. Besides, he added, although the freedom of India was a desirable thing, was indeed desirable and necessary for all, it would come about by another method, it would come inevitably and in a peaceful way, there would be no need for bloodshed. We got disgusted and smiled at him with incredulity and even perhaps in derision. Englishmen would pack up their belongings and leave of their own accord without as much as a grumble, like thorough gentlemen,—this looked rather like a fairy tale if not "a tale told by an idiot". We were no Vaishnava devotees. We were Tantriks, worshippers of Kali. Our chosen deity was the Goddess of Death incarnate, with her garland of skulls. Ours was the heroes' worship of strength. We had long been singing the proud refrain: Page-28 Have the hero-sons, O men, Adorned the Mother's forehead With the blood-red mark?
There was also a time when we had been proclaiming loudly at meetings and shouting to the four quarters:
Counting the beads and doing austerities, All your yoga and prayers and worship, Oblations and sacrifice and honouring the image of gods,— Nothing of this will now avail in the least. Make of the arrow's sheath and the sword thy cult, For the olden days are no more. India will not be saved, it cannot, Through the worship of the gods. Unsheath now the sword, For these demons are not as of yore.
Lele Maharaj threatened us with another warning, "If you do not give up this, you will not only not succeed but are bound to meet with danger, if not catastrophe." How true his prophecy was we all know from the concrete evidence of what came to pass. However, we did not confine our studies to religious books alone, we had with us some secular literature as well. It was precisely at this period that a collection of Matthew Arnold's poems came to my hands. The book belonged to Sri Aurobindo and must have been brought along by Barin. That Sri Aurobindo had studied it minutely was evident from the book itself, for he had marked in red the passages or lines which he had particularly liked. I still remember a couple of lines that had the good luck to get a red mark: Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! The simplicity of feeling, the deep pathos, the fine felicity of rhythm in these lines had stirred my young heart too a great Page-29 deal. That was my first introduction to Matthew Arnold. The greatness of the poet-laureate Tennyson had already reached the ears of even the ordinary student at college, but Matthew Arnold and Browning were still unknown. , All this is however quite beside the point. Let me come back to the story. The bomb was ready, I said, a real live bomb. It was mainly Ullaskar's handiwork, we others had acted as assistants. It was now decided that the testing would be done on top of a hill known as Dighiriya—it was not much of a hill but only a low range of hillocks—across the railway line, beyond the level crossing. (There was an amusing incident in the Sessions Court in connection with the man at this level crossing about which I may say something another day.) Of an afternoon, the five of us made for the hill. It fell to my lot to carry the bomb. I carried it along with due care no doubt, but I had no idea of the risks I carried. We were quite ignorant and inexperienced at the time. It was nothing short of a miracle that we had no accident, the way I carried the thing; I realised that only a little later. We broke through the thickets and chose a spot right on top of the hill. There we came across a huge boulder rising steep and straight on one side about breast-high and on the other sloping gradually to a distance of some ten or twelve yards. The plan was that Prafulla would take his shelter behind the steep and abrupt side as he threw the bomb at the sloping rock and sit down behind the slab as soon as he made the throw, so that no splinters might hit him after the explosion, as the bomb was to explode only on the slope by friction of the impact. Ullas was to stand by Prafulla to see that everything got on well and both were to duck behind the slab right after the throw. I climbed up a tree a little farther away so as to have a clear view of the whole scene. Barin and Bibhuti took their positions around. As we lay in wait, —my eyes were glued to the boulder,—suddenly I saw a spark of fire flash out over there with a puff of smoke and such a terrific noise! The whole sky seemed to be getting broken up into bits, and waves of sound went echoing forth Page-30 from one end to the other as if in a hundred simultaneous claps of thunder. Never again have I heard a noise like that. I was of course beside myself with excitement and joy. With great glee I climbed down the tree and ran towards the boulder, shouting at the top of my voice, "Successful, successful!" But how is this? What is this? What a gruesome spectacle! Prafulla lay limp on Ullas's chest, Ullas held him in his arms. Slowly the body was laid down. One side of the forehead was broken through and a portion of the brain coming out. It was an unbearable sight. We sat around and no one spoke a word. At last Barin said, "It's all over, there is not a hope." The body lay motionless, showed no signs of life. The eyes were closed, the face looked serene. This is how it happened. We had thought that the explosive would catch fire only after the bomb touched the ground and rubbed against a hard surface. But instead of that, the explosive had been so powerful, that is, so easily inflammable that it caught fire as soon as it came into contact with air on being thrown up. I said I had been carrying it in my hands: it might have caught fire and exploded even by that slight swing. That it did not was my sheer good luck. Now the problem was what to do next. What was to be done with the body? Burn it? or give it a burial? To bury it was out of the question, for to dig a hole in that hard stone was impossible. Give it a cremation by lighting a fire in the bush? But that might attract people and the news might spread in the neighboring villages. Barin said, "We need not do anything, let us go away leaving it as it is. This is a field of battle. Our first soldier has given up his body in the battlefield, this is our first casualty." So far, our eyes had all been riveted on the corpse. And now, suddenly, someone cried, "Ullas too has been wounded." His clothing was riddled with holes and covered with marks of blood all over. We removed the clothing and examined him as far as we could. Barin said, "Our first task now is to look after him. Who is gone is gone. Now he must be saved. We must therefore hurry back. There is no Page-31 time now to discuss what is to be done with the dead body. We have to return to Calcutta this very evening and consult the doctor." There was a special doctor, the renowned Indu Mallick, so far as I remember, who looked after us terrorists. We started down the hill, with not a word on our lips, our throats all choked with emotion, our minds stunned. The picture of the English poet came to mind: "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note..." I once blurted out with a suppressed feeling, "We were five when we came, only four are now returning." Barin gave me a rebuke, "No sentimentality, please." As we walked down, I wondered if the frightful noise had not reached the people around. There was of course nothing like a human habitation anywhere in the neighbourhood. But people did come from the surrounding country to gather fuel in the thickets. However, nothing untoward happened and we returned safely. Barin and Ullas left for Calcutta that very night. Early next morning I looked towards Dighiriya and seemed to see some kites and vultures flying over the hill. That evening, or it was perhaps the next morning, Upen arrived with Barin. Ullas was all right, they said, there was nothing to fear about his wounds. Upen wanted to have a look at the place. We started again for that holy spot, and arrived on the scene. Even from a distance we could see the body lying exactly as we had left it, dressed exactly in the same way, there was no change whatever. Nor was there a sign of decomposition, on this the third day. We came back just as we had gone, leaving the body as it was. It was decided to end this particular chapter here. Lest the police should get scent, it would be wiser to break up camp and get away. Whatever materials we had in our possession for the manufacture of bombs were packed up in a couple of trunks and dispatched to the shop of a friend in Deoghar. The trunks were left hidden among other things in the godown at the back of the shop. What happened to them afterwards I do not know. Page-32 Before leaving for good, we felt a desire to have a last look at Dighiriya hill. It was the fourth day after the event. We climbed to the spot. But how strange! Where was the body? There was not a trace of it anywhere. We searched about here and there but did not find even a shred of clothing. Could it have been carried away by beasts? But without leaving the slightest trace? The whole thing remained a mystery. Afterwards, many kinds of rumours got afloat. Some, they said, had seen him in the streets of Calcutta, a Sannyasin was supposed to have come across the dead body and revived it, and so on. To set my doubts at rest, I once asked Sri Aurobindo if there could be any truth in these stories, and what exactly had happened to Prafulla. Sri Aurobindo said, "All that is sheer myth. Prafulla is really dead". Let me end this Deoghar episode with a little picture that still sticks in my memory. Within about a mile from our camp there was a village called Rohini. There in a garden-house—it was almost covered with jungle when we saw the place—still lived Sri Aurobindo's mother, Swarnalata Devi. The garden was full of various kinds of trees and shrubs. The house was a large-sized cottage, though the walls and flooring were of masonry work; it had an old dilapidated look for want of repairs. The local people called it the Memsahib's Kothi, the Lady's House. Everybody called Sri Aurobindo's mother a Memsahib, the Fashionable Lady. At that time, she was out of her mind and always remained shut up in her rooms. We passed several times through the gardens by the house, but she could not be seen. The holy legend of sacred Deoghar would not be complete if I were not to mention in this context the name of Sri Aurobindo's maternal grandfather, Rishi Rajnarayan, who is called the Grandfather of Indian Nationalism. We saw the house where he once lived, where Sri Aurobindo used to come often. It stood in an open compound—it may have been a bed of flowers once—now a white mansion where no one lived, left lonely as a dream. Page-33 |