Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908

Abstract

Writing to John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, a few days after the first terrorist bomb was thrown by a Bengali, the Viceroy Lord Minto declared that the conspirators aimed ‘at the furtherance of murderous methods hitherto unknown in India which have been imported from the West, and which the imitative Bengali has childishly accepted’.This notion later was taken up and developed byTimescorrespondent Valentine Chirol, who wrote that Bengalis had ‘of all Indians been the most slavish imitators of the West, as represented, at any rate, by the Irish Fenian and the Russian anarchist’. Chirol went on to say that ‘European works on various periods of revolutionary history figure almost invariably amongst seizures of a far more compromising character whenever the Indian police raids some centre of Nationalist activity.’ This indicated that Bengali revolutionary terrorism was simply a takeoff on the European variety. The only indigenous element in it was the dangerous infusion of Hindu religious fanaticism.