Anushilan Samiti: Founders, the Jugantar Wing and the Alipore Bomb Case
Anushilan Samiti explained: how a Calcutta physical-culture club became Bengal's best-known revolutionary network, its two wings and what came after it.
The Anushilan Samiti was a secret revolutionary society of Bengal that began in Calcutta around 1902 as a club for the physical and moral training of young men. Within six years its two wings, the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti under Pulin Behari Das and a Calcutta circle known as the Jugantar group, had moved to bombs and attacks on officials, the best known being the Muzaffarpur bombing of 30 April 1908. The old NCERT history calls it the most famous of the secret societies of those years, and every account of revolutionary nationalism before the First World War passes through it.
Most readers walk in with one muddle. They picture Anushilan and Jugantar as two rival parties that different men founded at different times. That picture is only half right. Jugantar began as a Bengali weekly, started in March 1906 by Barindra Kumar Ghosh‘s circle inside the Calcutta Samiti, and the police later used the paper’s name for the whole western network. This note settles how the two wings related, then follows the Samiti from a Calcutta gymnasium to a party that still sits in the Lok Sabha.
What Was the Anushilan Samiti?
The Anushilan Samiti was an underground network of revolutionary societies, active in Bengal from about 1902 into the 1930s, that aimed to end British rule by armed action rather than by petitions. The word anushilan means practice or cultivation, and the founders took it from the writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay; the Sedition Committee of 1918 rendered the name as a society for the promotion of culture and training.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | Calcutta, 1902 in most accounts; an IGNOU course unit gives 1901 |
| Founders | Satish Chandra Basu and barrister Pramathanath Mitra; a 2022 PIB release also names Aurobindo Ghosh and Sarala Devi |
| Public face | A physical-culture club for exercise, drill and moral training |
| Eastern wing | Dhaka Anushilan Samiti, organized by Pulin Behari Das in 1906; about 500 branches at one point |
| Western wing | Barindra Kumar Ghosh’s Calcutta circle, called the Jugantar group after its weekly of March 1906 |
| Best-known action | Muzaffarpur bombing, 30 April 1908, by Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki |
| Trial | Alipore Bomb Case; judgment on 6 May 1909, with Aurobindo Ghosh acquitted |
| Ban | Dhaka Samiti declared unlawful in January 1909 under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908 |
| Later offshoots | Revolutionary Socialist Party, formed by Anushilan Marxists in March 1940 |
How Did a Calcutta Gym Become a Revolutionary Society?
It started as one of many Bengal youth clubs built around exercise and character, and the anger over the partition of 1905 pushed its inner circle toward conspiracy. Accounts credit a Calcutta student, Satish Chandra Basu (also spelled Bose), and the barrister Pramathanath Mitra, known as P. Mitra, who led the society. Banglapedia adds that two men helped Mitra: Jatindranath Banerjee, who had trained in the army of the Maharaja of Baroda, and Barindra Kumar Ghosh, the younger brother of Aurobindo Ghosh.
Clubs of this kind set out to build body and character together, and Banglapedia notes that Swami Vivekananda’s works headed the reading recommended to members. Barindra, who reached Calcutta from Baroda in 1902, wanted something harder. In his statement after the 1908 arrests, printed by the Sedition Committee, he said he had become convinced that political propaganda alone would not do and that “people must be trained up spiritually to face dangers.”
The trigger was the partition. The Partition of Bengal in 1905, along with Curzon’s unpopular education reforms, gave these clubs a cause. The Swadeshi movement supplied volunteers and readers, and it convinced the boldest members that peaceful protest had hit a wall. After the Barisal Conference, the Jugantar wrote on 22 April 1906 that “force must be stopped by force,” a line the old NCERT text quotes at the point where Bengal turned to what it calls revolutionary terrorism.
The change came in three steps:
- 1902 to 1905: exercise and moral training in the open, with any revolutionary aim kept quiet.
- 1906 to 1907: a newspaper and a Dhaka branch in 1906, then the first attempts on senior officials in December 1907.
- 1908: the Muzaffarpur bombing in April and the conspiracy trial it set off.
The Sedition Committee noted that the Dhaka Samiti flourished openly for its first two years, presenting itself as a society for physical and religious culture. That double life is the key to the whole organization. The gymnasium was real, and it gave cover to the cell inside it.
How Were the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar Related?
They were two parts of one movement rather than two rival parties. Jugantar was the Calcutta wing’s newspaper, and the police used the name for the western Bengal network; the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti was the eastern wing, organized separately by Pulin Behari Das. Banglapedia describes a loose central committee in which Mitra sat with the two wing leaders above samitis that were otherwise independent, and it records that the government sorted them into two groups: the Jugantar group and the Dhaka Anushilan group.
One way to hold this is to treat Anushilan as the family name and Jugantar as the nickname the police gave the Calcutta household. The comparison breaks at one point. The Dhaka household didn’t take orders from Calcutta. It had its own leader and its own rulebook, and by the Sedition Committee’s account it was the most powerful of all the Bengal groups.
The Jugantar Group in Calcutta
The Jugantar weekly first appeared in March 1906. In Barindra’s own statement, he started it with Abinash Bhattacharya and Bhupendranath Datta. The Sedition Committee put its circulation at 7,000 in 1907, and the paper stopped in 1908 after the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act let the government forfeit presses that printed incitement.
From early 1907 Barindra gathered a band of 14 or 15 young men at a garden house in Maniktala, a Calcutta suburb, and began collecting arms. Aurobindo Ghosh had joined his brother from Baroda and was editing Bande Mataram, an English nationalist paper. The Sedition Committee identifies Hem Chandra Das of this group as the maker of the bomb used at Muzaffarpur.
The Dhaka Anushilan Samiti
Pulin Behari Das, a former teacher at Dhaka Government College who became the first headmaster of Dhaka’s National School, formed the Dhaka Samiti with about 80 young men after Bipin Chandra Pal spoke in Dhaka against the partition. Banglapedia dates the founding to September 1906, while a few accounts put it in late 1905. The old NCERT text says the Dhaka section alone had 500 branches.
Its organization was unusually formal for a secret society. A circular signed by Pulin Das, seized when police searched the Samiti’s Dhaka premises in November 1908, divided Bengal into a ladder of units:
- district samitis at the top;
- mahakuma (subdivision) samitis below them;
- pargana samitis, a pargana being a cluster of villages in the revenue records;
- central samitis, each looking after a few small local samitis.
Entry came with vows. A witness in the Barisal conspiracy case, whose evidence the court accepted, described taking the adya (first) and antya (final) vows and a special vow before the goddess Kali at a Dhaka temple, with Pulin Das officiating. Banglapedia notes that the Gita was used in these vows, which was one reason Muslims could not be admitted, and that members were mostly school and college students from Hindu bhadralok families, bhadralok being Bengal’s educated upper and middle classes.
Not every member was comfortable with this. IGNOU’s course unit records that Bhupendranath Datta refused to take a vow on Hindu scriptures alone and that some early revolutionaries complained the rituals kept away possible Muslim sympathizers. Much of the money came from armed robberies, which the records call dacoities.
The Muzaffarpur Bombing and the Alipore Bomb Case
On 30 April 1908 a bomb meant for Douglas Kingsford killed two Englishwomen at Muzaffarpur, then in the Bengal Presidency and now in Bihar. Two days later the Calcutta police searched the Jugantar group’s garden house at Maniktala, and the trial that followed, the Alipore Bomb Case, put Barindra and Aurobindo Ghosh in the dock for a year.
Kingsford had been Chief Presidency Magistrate of Calcutta, where he tried and convicted men connected with nationalist newspapers; IGNOU’s unit adds that he had ordered young men to be flogged. By 1908 he was the judge at Muzaffarpur. Khudiram Bose, then 18, and Prafulla Chaki threw the bomb into a carriage they took for his. It carried Mrs and Miss Kennedy, and both were killed.
What happened next is where revision notes often swap the two names. Prafulla Chaki shot himself when he was about to be arrested. Khudiram Bose confessed in court, was tried and was hanged at Muzaffarpur Central Jail on 11 August 1908.
The Maniktala searches of 2 May 1908 turned up bombs and a trail of correspondence. The Sedition Committee records that 34 people were charged with conspiracy and that one of them, Narendranath Gosain, became an approver, an accused who agrees to give evidence for the Crown. Pending the trial he was shot dead inside the jail by two fellow accused, who were later executed, and on 10 February 1909 the Public Prosecutor in the case was shot dead in Calcutta.
The Sessions trial opened in October 1908 before Judge C. P. Beachcroft, with Chittaranjan Das defending Aurobindo. On 6 May 1909 Beachcroft acquitted Aurobindo Ghosh, holding that the evidence fell short of the proof needed to find him guilty. Barindra and Ullaskar Dutt were sentenced to death, and on appeal to the High Court both sentences were commuted to transportation for life. The Sedition Committee counts 15 accused found guilty of conspiring to wage war against the King-Emperor.
If the court acquitted Aurobindo, why do textbooks keep him at the center of this story? The acquittal was about proof of his part in the conspiracy, not about his politics. His writing had given the movement much of its language, which is why IGNOU’s unit counts him among the main contributors to the revolutionary creed.
For two articles in the Kesari in May and June 1908 about the Muzaffarpur killings, Bal Gangadhar Tilak was convicted and sentenced to six years, as the Sedition Committee records. IGNOU’s unit quotes his argument that the answer to the bomb was political reform and not repression.
How Did the Government Respond to the Samiti?
The government answered with a run of special laws between 1908 and 1916 that let it ban the societies and hold suspects without trial. The Sedition Committee’s record gives the order:
- 1908: the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act allowed presses to be forfeited, and the Jugantar ceased to appear.
- 11 December 1908: the Criminal Law Amendment Act (Act XIV of 1908) allowed trial by a special bench of three High Court judges without a jury and let the Governor-General in Council declare associations unlawful.
- End of 1908: Pulin Behari Das and eight others were deported under Regulation III of 1818, an old regulation that allowed detention without trial; Pulin was released in 1910.
- January 1909: the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti and four other East Bengal samitis were declared unlawful.
- 9 February 1910: the Indian Press Act let the government demand security from printing presses, which drove seditious literature to secret presses.
- 1915: the Defence of India Act, used sparingly at first and heavily in Bengal after mid-1916.
Then came the inquiry. On 10 December 1917 the Government of India appointed the Sedition Committee, with Justice S. A. T. Rowlatt as President, to report on the revolutionary conspiracies and advise on legislation. Its report, signed in Calcutta on 15 April 1918, gives the Bengal numbers: 210 revolutionary outrages and 101 attempts since 1906, with police information on 1,038 people but only 84 convictions. That is about one conviction for every 12 suspects, and the gap was the committee’s main argument for special powers.
On the societies themselves, the committee was blunt. It called the Dhaka Samiti the most powerful of the Bengal associations and wrote that its existence alone would have constituted a public danger. It is wise to read these lines as the government’s case. The committee was set up to recommend laws, and its report became the basis of the Rowlatt Act of 1919 and the protests that followed.
How Did the Samiti Spread Beyond Bengal?
Its methods traveled with Bengali students and exiles, first to Benares and Delhi and later into the revolutionary groups of north India in the 1920s. The Sedition Committee found Dhaka Samiti members at work in five other provinces and at Poona, from Assam in the east to the Punjab in the north-west.
In Benares, a young Bengali student, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, started a club called the Anushilan Samiti in 1908, borrowing the Dhaka name. When the Dhaka body faced prosecution, the Benares club renamed itself the Young Men’s Association, and the Sedition Committee found that nearly all the Benares residents later accused in the Benares conspiracy case belonged to it.
In Delhi, a group organized by the Bengali revolutionary Rash Behari Bose threw a bomb at the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, as he rode on an elephant in a state procession on 23 December 1912. The old NCERT text and the Sedition Committee both record that he was wounded, though IGNOU’s unit says he escaped unhurt.
During the First World War the western groups under Jatindranath Mukherjee, known as Bagha Jatin, planned a rising with German arms. In April 1915 they sent Naren Bhattacharji to Batavia to meet German agents. The plan failed, and Jatin died of his wounds in September 1915, days after an encounter with a police party led by the Magistrate of Balasore.
The Bengal model resurfaced in the 1920s. The old NCERT text says the Hindustan Republican Association was founded in October 1924 to organize an armed revolution, and IGNOU’s unit calls Jogesh Chandra Chatterji its principal founder and notes that its members still drew on Anandamath and Aurobindo. The HRA’s best-known action was the Kakori train action of 1925, and in September 1928 it became the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the organization of Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad.
Anushilan Samiti Today
The Anushilan Samiti no longer exists as an organization, but two threads from it are still visible:
- A political party. A section of the Anushilan men turned Marxist, and in March 1940, at the time of the Congress’s Ramgarh session, these Anushilan Marxists formed the Revolutionary Socialist Party, according to Buddhadeva Bhattacharya’s history of the party. Its member N. K. Premachandran won Kollam in Kerala in the 2024 Lok Sabha election and sits in the 18th Lok Sabha.
- Official remembrance. On 24 July 2022, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan hoisted the national flag at the Samiti’s building and urged NCERT to give it space in the new National Curriculum Framework, according to a PIB release. On 11 August 2026, Akashvani reported programs across the country marking the anniversary of Khudiram Bose’s hanging.
The legal thread runs from the special bench of 1908 to the Rowlatt Act of 1919, and it rests on one claim: that ordinary courts could not deal with political conspiracy.
How to study Anushilan Samiti for exams
The Samiti belongs to modern Indian history, which serves both GS Paper I and Prelims, and it has its own place in History optional Paper II under revolutionary movements. Prelims tends to test it as matching, founder to society or event to year. Mains tests it as one strand of the national movement, and the strongest answers explain why it rose after 1905 and why it stayed small.
Mains 2020 GS Paper I asked “Evaluate the policies of Lord Curzon and their long term implications on the national movement.” The partition and the revolutionary societies it produced are among those long-term implications. History optional Paper II in 2022 asked “Analyse how the revolutionaries taught people self confidence and widened the social base of the freedom movement.” For Prelims, history accounts for 184 of the 1,403 questions in the Prelims previous-year question bank, which is the best place to see how these matches are framed.
Revise these facts until you can write them without notes:
- 1902, Calcutta: Satish Chandra Basu and P. Mitra; the name comes from Bankim’s idea of anushilan.
- March 1906: the Jugantar weekly, started by Barindra Kumar Ghosh’s circle.
- September 1906, Dhaka: Pulin Behari Das founds the Dhaka Samiti, which grows to about 500 branches before its ban in January 1909.
- 30 April 1908: the Muzaffarpur bomb, meant for Kingsford, killed two Englishwomen; Khudiram Bose was hanged on 11 August 1908.
- 6 May 1909: the Alipore judgment by C. P. Beachcroft; Aurobindo acquitted, Barindra’s death sentence later commuted.
- 15 April 1918: the Sedition Committee report, the basis of the Rowlatt Act of 1919.
- March 1940: Anushilan Marxists form the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
The mix-ups that cost marks, and how to keep them apart:
- Anushilan versus Jugantar. Anushilan is the society; Jugantar is the Calcutta paper and the police label for the western wing.
- Kingsford versus the Kennedys. Kingsford was the target and survived; the two women were the victims.
- Chaki versus Khudiram. Chaki shot himself; Khudiram was tried and hanged.
- Aurobindo versus Barindra. Aurobindo was acquitted; his younger brother was convicted.
- Anushilan versus Abhinav Bharat. The first is Bengal, 1902; the second is V. D. Savarkar’s society of 1904 in Maharashtra.
The table sets the Samiti beside its siblings:
| Organization | Founded | Key figures | Base | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anushilan Samiti | 1902 | Satish Chandra Basu, P. Mitra | Calcutta | The physical-culture parent body |
| Dhaka Anushilan Samiti | 1906 | Pulin Behari Das | Dhaka and East Bengal | About 500 branches; banned in 1909 |
| Jugantar group | 1906 | Barindra Kumar Ghosh, later Jatindranath Mukherjee | Calcutta and West Bengal | Muzaffarpur, Maniktala and the 1915 German plot |
| Abhinav Bharat | 1904 | V. D. Savarkar | Nasik, later Poona | Maharashtra’s secret society |
| HRA, later HSRA | 1924 and 1928 | Jogesh Chandra Chatterji; Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad | United Provinces and Punjab | Kakori in 1925 and the socialist turn of 1928 |
For a first reading, IGNOU’s unit on revolutionary trends is short and free. Check its dates against the old NCERT text, since the two disagree on details such as the founding year and the outcome of the Hardinge attack.
The Anushilan Samiti rewards one careful evening more than a week of notes. If you can explain why a gymnasium became a conspiracy and why the conspiracy never became a mass movement, you have what most questions on revolutionary nationalism are really asking. For Prelims the dates matter most, and for Mains the reasons do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded the Anushilan Samiti?
Accounts credit a Calcutta student, Satish Chandra Basu, and the barrister Pramathanath Mitra, who led the society from around 1902. A 2022 release of the Ministry of Education also names Aurobindo Ghosh and Sarala Devi among its founders. Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Jatindranath Banerjee helped turn it toward revolutionary work.
When was the Anushilan Samiti founded?
Most accounts, including Banglapedia, date the Calcutta Samiti to 1902, while an IGNOU course unit gives 1901. The Dhaka branch followed in 1906 under Pulin Behari Das. For exam purposes, 1902 is the safer year to write.
What is the difference between Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar?
They were parts of one movement. Jugantar was a Bengali weekly started in March 1906 by Barindra Kumar Ghosh’s circle, and the police used its name for the revolutionary network of western Bengal, while the eastern network was the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti. The two wings shared a loose leadership but largely ran themselves.
Who founded the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti?
Pulin Behari Das, a teacher who became the first headmaster of Dhaka’s National School, organized it with about 80 young men in 1906 after Bipin Chandra Pal spoke in Dhaka against the partition. It grew to about 500 branches. The government declared it unlawful in January 1909.
What was the Alipore Bomb Case?
It was the conspiracy trial that followed the police search of a garden house at Maniktala in Calcutta on 2 May 1908, two days after the Muzaffarpur bombing. Aurobindo Ghosh, Barindra Kumar Ghosh and others were charged with conspiring to wage war against the King. Judge C. P. Beachcroft delivered judgment on 6 May 1909.
Was Aurobindo Ghosh convicted in the Alipore Bomb Case?
No. Judge Beachcroft acquitted him on 6 May 1909, holding that the evidence fell short of proof, with Chittaranjan Das as his counsel. His brother Barindra and Ullaskar Dutt were sentenced to death, and the High Court later commuted both sentences to transportation for life.
What happened to the Anushilan Samiti later?
Its methods spread to Benares and Delhi and fed the revolutionary groups of north India in the 1920s, including the Hindustan Republican Association of 1924. A section of its members turned Marxist, and in March 1940 these Anushilan Marxists formed the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which won the Kollam seat in Kerala in 2024.
What does Anushilan mean?
Anushilan means practice or cultivation, a word the founders took from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s writings. The Sedition Committee of 1918 rendered the society’s name as a society for the promotion of culture and training. The name suited its public face as a club for exercise and moral training.
Practice Questions
Prelims
1. Consider the following statements about the Anushilan Samiti: 1. It began in Calcutta as a society for the physical and moral training of young men. 2. Its Dhaka branch was organized by Pulin Behari Das. 3. It was founded by V. D. Savarkar at Nasik. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
- (a) 1 and 2 only
- (b) 2 and 3 only
- (c) 1 and 3 only
- (d) 1, 2 and 3
Answer: (a) Savarkar organized Abhinav Bharat in 1904 in Maharashtra; the Anushilan Samiti was a Bengal society.
2. The bomb thrown at Muzaffarpur on 30 April 1908 by Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki was intended for:
- (a) Lord Minto
- (b) Douglas Kingsford
- (c) Lord Hardinge
- (d) Charles Tegart
Answer: (b) It struck a carriage carrying Mrs and Miss Kennedy instead, and Kingsford was unhurt.
3. Consider the following statements about the Alipore Bomb Case: 1. It followed police searches of a garden house at Maniktala in May 1908. 2. Aurobindo Ghosh was convicted and transported for life. 3. Chittaranjan Das defended Aurobindo Ghosh. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
- (a) 1 only
- (b) 1 and 3 only
- (c) 2 and 3 only
- (d) 1, 2 and 3
Answer: (b) Aurobindo was acquitted on 6 May 1909; his brother Barindra was the one sentenced.
4. With reference to the Jugantar, which one of the following statements is correct?
- (a) It was a Marathi weekly edited by Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
- (b) It was a Bengali weekly started in Calcutta in 1906 by Barindra Kumar Ghosh and his associates.
- (c) It was an English daily of the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti.
- (d) It was a newspaper started by the Hindustan Republican Association in 1924.
Answer: (b) It ceased to appear in 1908 after the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act.
5. Consider the following statements: 1. The Dhaka Anushilan Samiti was declared an unlawful association in January 1909 under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908. 2. The Revolutionary Socialist Party was formed in 1940 by Marxists from the Anushilan tradition. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
- (a) 1 only
- (b) 2 only
- (c) Both 1 and 2
- (d) Neither 1 nor 2
Answer: (c) Both are on record: the ban of January 1909 and the RSP’s formation in March 1940.
Mains
- Since the decade of the 1920s, the national movement acquired various ideological strands and thereby expanded its social base. Discuss. (15 marks, 250 words) Previous year: Mains 2020, GS Paper I.
- How did the Swadeshi movement turn Bengal’s physical-culture societies into revolutionary organizations? Illustrate with the Anushilan Samiti. (15 marks, 250 words)
- Why did revolutionary nationalism in Bengal between 1905 and 1918 fail to become a mass movement? Assess with reference to the Anushilan Samiti and the Jugantar group. (15 marks, 250 words)
- Examine how colonial legislation between 1908 and 1919 responded to the Bengal revolutionary societies. (10 marks, 150 words)
- Trace the links between the Bengal revolutionary societies and later organizations such as the Hindustan Republican Association and the Revolutionary Socialist Party. (10 marks, 150 words)