Tarak Nath Das

Taraknath Das or Tarak Nath Das (15 June 1884–22 December 1958), anti-British Bengali Indian revolutionary and internationalist scholar. He was a pioneering immigrant in the west coast of North America and discussed his plans with Tolstoy, while organizing the Asian Indian immigrants in favor of the Indian freedom movement. Once a professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting faculty in several other American universities, this “intense man” fought for social justice and international fraternity.

Early life

Tarak was born at Majupara near Kanchrapara in the district of 24 Parganas in West Bengal. Coming from a lower middle-class family, his father Kalimohan was a clerk at the Central Telegraph Office in Calcutta. Noticing the flair of this brilliant student with the pen, his headmaster encouraged him to appear in an essay contest on the theme of patriotism. Impressed by the quality of the paper by a school boy of sixteen years, one of the judges, the Barrister P. Mitter, founder of the Anushilan Samiti, asked his associate Satish Chandra Basu to recruit the boy. On passing his Entrance Examination with very high marks, in 1901, Tarak went to Calcutta and got himself admitted to the well-known General Assembly’s Institution (now Scottish Church College) for university studies. In his secret patriotic activity, he found full support from his elder sister Girija. When, in November 1905, P. Mitter went to Dhaka along with Bipin Chandra Pal, to inaugurate the local branch of the Anushilan, Pulin Behari Das, a former university student and Taraknath Das, a student leader, accompanied him. Both Mitter and Pal had been inspired by the writings of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rajnarayan Basu; and it was the moment when the latter’s grandson, Sri Aurobindo, set ablaze the hearts of young Indians with his radical project for freedom. The fiery presence of B.G. Tilak and the celebrations of the Hindu visionary Shivaji electrified the country on the foil of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. Around Sri Aurobindo as Founder Principal of the National College, came forward Rabindranath Tagore and other stalwarts of the epoch; among the younger batch of intellectuals, Tarak with his friend Guran Ditt Kumar as well as Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Radhakamal and Radhakumud Mukherjee were fully active.

Genesis of a mission

In order to stir Bengali enthusiasm, in addition to Shivaji, the most Bengali figure of Raja Sitaram Ray was introduced as cult for a festival; in the early months of 1906, Bagha Jatin or Jatindra Nath Mukherjee was accompanied by Tarak when the former was invited to preside over the Sitaram Festival at Muhammadpur in Jessore, the ancient capital of Bengal. On this occasion, during a closeted meeting around Jatin were present, in addition to Tarak, Shrish Chandra Sen, Satyendra Sen and Adhar Chandra Laskar : all the four, one after the other, were to leave for higher studies abroad. Nothing was known about the object of this meeting till in 1952 when, during a conversation, Tarak spoke of it : along with specific higher education, they were all to acquire a military training and a knowledge of how to prepare explosives; especially they were urged to create a climate of sympathy among people of the free Western countries in favor of India’s decision to win freedom. [1]

Life in North America

Disguised as a monk under the name of Tarak Brahmachari, he left for Madras on a lecture tour. After Swami Vivekananda and Bipin Chandra Pal he was the first person in the region who raised such a passion by his patriotic speeches. Among young revolutionaries he particularly inspired Nilakantha Brahmachari, Subrahmania Shiva and Chidambaram Pillai. On 16 July 1907, via Japan, Tarak reached Seattle. After earning his livelihood as a farm-worker, he was appointed at the laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, before enrolling himself as a student. Simultaneously, qualifying as translator and interpreter of the American Civil Administration, he entered the Department of Immigration, Vancouver, in January 1908. There he witnessed the arrival of William C. Hopkinson (1878-1914) of the Kolkata Police Information Service, appointed as Immigration Inspector and interpreter for Hindi, Punjabi and Gurumukhi. During seven long years, until his assassination (by a Sikh), Hopkinson was required to send detailed and regular reports to the Government of India about the presence of such student radicals as Tarak, and monitor a group of pro-British Sikh informants headed by Bela Singh. [2]
With Panduranga Khankoje (B.G. Tilak’s emissary), Tarak founded the Indian Independence League. Adhar Laskar arrived from Calcutta with funds sent by Jatin Mukherjee (also known as Bagha Jatin), permitting Tarak to start his journal Free Hindustan in English, as well as its Gurumukhi edition, Swadesh Sevak (‘Servants of the Motherland’) by Guran Ditt Kumar who came from Calcutta on 31 October 1907. Free Hindustan has been claimed by Constance Brissenden as “the first South Asian publication in Canada, and one of the first in North America.” They were assisted by Professor Surendra Mohan Bose, who was an expert in explosives. Through regular correspondence, personalities like Tolstoy, Hyndman, Shyamji Krishnavarma, Madame Cama encouraged Tarak in his venture. Described as “community spokesman”, he had established Hindustani Association in Vancouver in 1907. Fully conversant with existing laws, Tarak served the needs of his compatriots, most of whom were illiterate migrants from the Punjab region. In Millside, near New Westminster, he founded the Swadesh Sevak Home, a boarding school for the children of the Asian Indian immigrants. Apart from that, this school also held evening classes on English and mathematics, and thus helped the immigrants to write letters to their families or to their employers. This also helped them in fostering greater awareness of their duties towards India and their rights in their adopted homeland. There were about two thousand Indians, mostly Sikh, on the west coast of Canada and North America. The majority worked in agriculture and construction. After an initial setbacks, these Indian farmers succeeded in obtaining a bumper crop of rice in California in the early 1910s, and a good number of them worked on the building of the Western Pacific Railway in California, along with indentured immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Italy. [3] Radicals like Tarak mobilized the Indian community to retaliate against anti-Indian violence and politics of exclusion. He was in effect, their designated spokesman. [4]
Being a suspect of extracting bribes from the Asian Indian immigrants, Hopkinson utilized his influence to make Tarak a scapegoat and eventually got him expelled from Canada by the middle of 1908. Leaving Bose, Kumar and Chagan Khairaj Varma (also known as Husain Rahim) in charge of the compatriots’ fate, Tarak left Vancouver to better concentrate on the areas from Seattle to San Francisco. On reaching Seattle, since its July 1908 issue, Free Hindustan became a more overtly anti-British organ, with a motto from Tarak : “To protest against all tyranny is a service to humanity and the duty of civilization.” The Irish revolutionary George Freeman (alias Fitzgerald) of the Gaelic American newspaper in New York was looked upon as the real leader of the anti-British movement, closely connected with two Indians, Samuel L. Joshi and Barakatullah. Invited by Fitzgerald, Tarak issued the August and the succeeding numbers of Free Hindustan from New York. In 1908, Tarak joined the Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, “a high-class engineering and military establishment, in order to receive military training. He also applied for enlistment (…) in the Vermont National Guard…” But, in spite of his extreme popularity among the students of all ethnic origins, owing to his anti-British activities (such as editing Free Hindustan), he was rusticated from that institution. By the end of 1909, he returned to Seattle.[5]