Khudiram Bose

The Muzaffarpur bombing

Khudiram Bose became involved as a teenager in the revolutionary underground active in Bengal in the early twentieth century, part of a wider network of secret societies pursuing armed resistance to British rule as an alternative to constitutional agitation. On the night of 30 April 1908, in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, Bose and a fellow revolutionary, Prafulla Chaki, threw a bomb at a carriage they believed carried Douglas Kingsford, a district judge and former Calcutta chief presidency magistrate known for harsh sentencing of nationalist agitators and a particular target of revolutionary anger. The carriage in fact carried two British women, the wife and daughter of a local barrister, both of whom were killed; Kingsford was not in the vehicle.

Capture and execution

Chaki shot himself when confronted by police to avoid capture. Bose was arrested the following morning near Waini railway station, some twenty-five miles from Muzaffarpur, after being pursued on foot through the night. Investigators traced the bombing to a wider conspiracy centred on a garden house in Calcutta's Maniktala suburb, associated with Barindra Kumar Ghosh (Barin Ghosh), which police raided soon afterward and which became the basis of the Alipore Bomb Case. Bose himself was tried separately, and convicted of murder. He was hanged on 11 August 1908, aged eighteen, making him one of the youngest revolutionaries executed by the colonial government. The bombing and Bose's trial were part of the wider crackdown associated with the Alipore Bomb Case, which also implicated other figures in the Bengal revolutionary movement, including Aurobindo Ghosh. Bose's youth and execution made him a widely commemorated martyr figure in nationalist memory, the subject of songs and popular verse in Bengal in the years that followed.