Virendranath Chattopadhyay - An Indian Anti-Imperialist
Virendranath Chattopadhyay-Chatto In 1915, British intelligence sent a secret service to Zurich with orders to kill him. He never fired a gun in his life. Yet he was one of the most dangerous men in Europe. His name was Virendranath Chattopadhyay aka Chatto. History remembers his sister better — Sarojini Naidu, the poet who'd one day govern a free province. Europe remembered him differently. Feared him. Chased him across three countries and never quite caught him. He arrived in London in 1902, meant for the Indian Civil Service. He failed the entrance exam and found something else instead — a house on Cromwell Avenue where Indian students gathered under Shyamji Krishna Varma, reading sedition over tea, dreaming of a country none of them could return to. By 1907 he was writing for their journal. By 1909 one of their own had shot dead a British official on English soil, and the hunt began. He fled to Paris. Even there, the ground wasn't stable. In 1910 he pulled his own s...
