Virendranath Chattopadhyay - An Indian Anti-Imperialist
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| 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 sister Mrinalini into a smuggling scheme — rifles hidden
inside furniture crates, bound for India. British agents intercepted his
letters before a single crate shipped, and his father's house in Hyderabad was
raided.
The pressure kept landing on the family, not just on him. When
police once cornered his father demanding a letter from Chatto, Aghorenath
calmly let them search and found nothing — then told them, "My son Viren
will bring them independence." Yet when Sarojini, pushed by officials close
to the Nizam's court, publicly disowned her brother in a letter, an outraged
Aghorenath barred his own daughter from the house. He'd defend his son to the
police, but not forgive a daughter for turning on him in print.
Then, in 1914, the world handed Chatto an opening no
revolutionary could have dreamed up. Britain went to war with Germany, and he
walked straight into Berlin.
He built something there. The Indian Independence Committee —
exiles, students, defectors — backed openly by the German Foreign Office. For a
few electric years, Chatto ran what was effectively a shadow
government-in-exile, striking deals with the Kaiser's men, plotting an armed
rising back home timed to Britain's weakest hour. He reached further still —
Irish republicans, Egyptian nationalists, anyone the British Empire had made an
enemy. He sent missions toward Constantinople. He dreamed of Indian prisoners
of war turning their coats and marching home through Persia and Afghanistan to
fight the men who'd captured them.
By late 1915 the British had had enough of chasing. In Zurich
that year, on his way to a secret meeting with the exiled Raja Mahendra Pratap,
Chatto was stalked by a British agent named Donald Gullick, sent specifically
to kill him. He survived — barely, the way he survived everything — and the
near-miss was strange enough that Somerset Maugham later turned it into
fiction, a thinly disguised episode in his Ashenden stories.
By 1917 the German gamble was dying with the war. Chatto moved
to Stockholm, still hunting for backers, then spent a decade shuttling through
Berlin — where in 1927, on a colleague's advice, he formally joined the German
Communist Party, throwing in his lot with a cause bigger than any one empire.
Then he went further east, toward a revolution young enough to
still need him.
Moscow. He arrived with the American journalist Agnes Smedley
beside him, and for eight years they built a life amid Comintern congresses and
back-room politics. He met Lenin. He had, for the first time since Oxford,
something like standing.
It should have been the safest place on earth for a
revolutionary.
It wasn't. Chatto's sympathies drifted toward Trotsky, and in
Stalin's Soviet Union that drift was a death warrant with no appeal. On 15th
July 1937 they arrested him. His name sat on a list of 184 others, signed by
Stalin himself. On 2nd September, he was executed by firing squad. His own
family didn't even know — his brother-in-law wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru in July
1938 asking him to find out what had happened. Nehru wrote back agreeing to
try. Chatto had already been dead for ten months.
The empire that hunted him across London, Paris, Berlin, and
Zurich for three decades never laid a finger on him. It took a paranoid
dictator, turning on his own allies, to finish what the British Raj couldn't —
and by the time anyone close to power thought to ask after him, it was already
too late to matter.
His sister's stories survived. So did many others' close to the
power center. But his story vanished from Indian memory. The fullest account
left is Nirode K. Barooah's biography, *Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian
Anti-Imperialist in Europe.*
