Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya was born in India in 1880. He was the eldest son of
Agonerath Chattopadhyaya, a Western-educated journalist and the principal
of a college in Hyderabad.
Chattopadhyaya
moved to Britain in 1901 to study law. A strong Indian nationalist,
Chattopadhyaya established the Indian Sociologist journal in
1907.
In
1910 Chattopadhyaya escaped arrest by moving to France.
He joined the French Socialist Party
and wrote for the radical newspaper L'Humanité.
He also established a new journal, Talwar.
On
the outbreak of the First World War in 1914
he was once again threatened with arrest. Chattopadhyaya moved to
Germany.
In
1920 Chattopadhyaya met the radical American journalist, Agnes
Smedley, and together they set up Berlin's first birth-control
clinic.
Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya remained
active in the Indian independence movement until his death in 1941.
(1)
Agnes Smedley,
Battle Hymn (1943)
Virendranath was the epitome of the secret Indian revolutionary movement,
and perhaps its most brilliant protagonist abroad. He was nearly twenty
years my senior, with a mind as sharp and ruthless as a saber. He
was thin and dark, with a mass of black hair turning grey at the temples,
and a face that had something fierce about it. He might easily have
been taken for a southern European, a Turk, or a Persian. To me he
seemed something like thunder, lightning, and rain; and wherever he
had sojourned in Europe or England, he had been just about that to
the British. His hatred for the islanders who had subjugated his country
knew no bounds.
When Virendranath
and I began life together, two eras and two cultures met. I was an
American working woman, the product of a distorted commercial civilization,
he a high-caste Indian with a cultivated, labyrinthine Brahminmind
and a British classical education. Though he hated everything British,
he had an even deeper contempt for an American capitalism which judged
all things by their money value. His mind was modern, but his emotional
roots were in Hinduism and Islam.
(2)
Emma Goldman wrote
about Agnes
Smedley
and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya in her book
Living My Life (1931)
Agnes Smedley was a striking girl, an earnest and true rebel,
who seemed to have no interest in life except the cause of the oppressed
people in India. 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.
(3)
Agnes
Smedley,
wrote a letter about Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya to Florence Lennon (4th June, 1923)
I've married an artist, revolutionary in a dozen different
ways, a man of truly "fine frenzy", nervous as a cat, always
moving, never at rest, indefatigable energy a hundred fold more than
I ever had, a thin man with much hair, a tongue like a razor and a
brain like hell on fire. What a couple. I'm consumed into ashes. And
he's always raking up the ashes and setting them on fire again. Suspicious
as hell of every man near me - and of all men or women from America.
My nervous collapse quieted him much. I told him once when I was on
the verge of unconsciousness: "Leave me in peace; leave me alone
personally; if I can't have complete freedom I shall die before your
eyes." But he is ever now and then blazing up again. And he is
always smouldering. I feel like a person living on the brink of a
volcano crater. Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture
to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won't hear of anything
but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
We make a merry hell for each other, I assure you. He is rapidly growing
grey, under my influence, I fear. And that tortures me.
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