“Chatto was intellectual and witty, but he impressed me as a somewhat crafty individual. He called himself an anarchist, though it was evident that it was Hindu nationalism to which he devoted himself entirely.” – Emma Goldman, an anarchist political activist, and writer.
Virendranath Chattopadhyaya remains to date one of the most enigmatic revolutionary figures, who lived outside and fought from foreign soil for the cause of India’s freedom. He belonged to the transnational networks of Indian political activists who, during the first decades of the 20th century carried out anti-imperial and anti-colonial propaganda outside India, in Europe, and North America. During the First World War, Chattopadhyaya became a leading member of the Indian Independence Committee in Berlin. His intriguing manners and nature of a revolutionary vagabond had aspired famous British Writer Somerset Maugham to create the character ‘Chandra Lal’, who was portrayed as an Indian revolutionary in his short story ‘Giulia Lazzari’.
Virendranath’s passion and his astuteness with regard the radical approach he acquired, can be gauged by the following words of eminent historian Nirode K. Barooah:
“Perhaps no other freedom fighter was as persistently and steadfastly anti-imperialist as Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, whose field of operations was Europe ….Chatto, as Virendranath Chattopadhyaya was popularly known, never made any compromises with imperialism, except using the German’s imperial power against that of the British rulers in India during WWI… Chatto’s tireless energy enabled him to involve the Indian freedom struggle with different anti-British and anti-imperialist forces in Europe such as the German Foreign Office, the 1917 Stockholm peace initiatives of the Socialist International, the Bolsheviks, the League against Imperialism, and the Communist International. The effectiveness of his propaganda against the British in India in the foreign press, and his political activities in Europe before, during, and after WWI, remained a constant thorn in the side of the British government and the British Secret Service made strenuous efforts until 1931, in Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany either to capture or kill him.
Early life
Virendranath Chattopadhyaya was born on 31 October 1880. He was the eldest son of Agonerath Chattopadhyaya, a Western-educated journalist and the principal of a college in Hyderabad. Virendranath was the second of eight children born to Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya and his wife; his siblings include Sarojini Naidu (an Indian political activist and poet) and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya (an Indian English poet, a dramatist, an actor, a musician and a member of the first Lok Sabha from Vijayawada constituency in Andhra Pradesh).
Virendranath matriculated from the University of Madras and received an undergraduate degree in Arts from the University of Calcutta. In Kolkata, his sister Mrinalini, who was already an advanced Nationalist by then, introduced him to Bejoy Chandra Chatterjee - a barrister and extremist.
In 1902, he joined the University of Oxford, while preparing for the Indian Civil Service and later became a law student of the Middle Temple. Six years later (1908), he was among those firebrand Indian students in London, who were radical nationalists and visited the “India House”, a north London hostel founded by Shyamji Krishna Varma that became a ‘home to a group of revolutionary Indian students.’
In 1908, he was the secretary of the Indian nationalist journal ‘Swaraj’ in London. Swaraj was founded and edited by Veer Savarkar. Chatto took charge of Swaraj when Savarkar was imprisoned in the Andaman Islands post-deportation. He started publishing supporting articles that applauded the activities of the Gaddar Party revolutionaries, in particular those of Madan Lal Dhingra. Resultantly, the British Secret Service wanted to arrest him too but he escaped to France, in 1910, supported by Madame Bhikaji Cama.
Source: IGNCA, Ministry of Culture, Government of India