Chittaranjan Das

Chittaranjan Das (born November 5, 1870, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died June 16, 1925, Darjeeling ) was an Indian politician, a leader of the Indian National Congress, a lawyer, and a poet. He was an integral part of the Indian Independence Movement and the founder of the Swaraj (“Self-Rule”) Party in Bengal under British rule. The people of India honored him with the title Deshbandhu (“Friend of the Country”).

Family and education

Das was born to a renowned family originally from Bikrampur in present-day Bangladesh. His father, Bhuban Mohan Das, was an attorney at the Calcutta High Court, and his mother was Nistarini Devi. His uncle Durga Mohan Das was a social reformer who ardently advocated for women’s rights and liberation. Both Bhuban Mohan and Durga Mohan Das were part of the theistic sect of Hinduism Brahmo Samaj, of which Chittaranjan Das too became a member. The progressive outlook of both his uncle and his father, along with their social activism, influenced Das. He studied in London Missionary Society’s institution in Calcutta (now Kolkata). After graduating from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1890, Das traveled to England to appear for the Indian Civil Service examination but, failing to qualify, chose to enter the legal profession. He went on to defend many Indians accused of political offenses and took an active part in nationalistic journalism.

Career and politics

He began his career as a lawyer at the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in London. While Das was in the United Kingdom, Indian nationalist leader Dadabhai Naoroji was fighting for a seat in the House of Commons. Das, who was already politically active and vocal about issues related to India, took part in Naoroji’s campaign. A few years later Das returned to India as a barrister in the Calcutta High Court. He became well known after defending the Indian revolutionary and philosopher Aurobindo Ghose in the Alipore Bomb case, in 1908. The case resulted from the police investigation of a bombing in Muzaffarpur, in present-day Bihar state, which was an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate British official Douglas Kingsford. Das’s efforts helped acquit Ghose, who was one of the main defendants in the case as a coconspirator and part of a group of revolutionaries. Das defended many other revolutionaries who were accused of political offenses and sedition against the ruling British government. One of his other notable cases was the Dacca Conspiracy case (c. 1910–12), which followed the discovery of bombs and swords that the British government thought were meant for a revolutionary conspiracy. Bitterly opposing British rule in India and rejecting all ideas of political or economic development of India along Western lines, he idealized the life of the ancient Indian village and saw a golden age in ancient Indian history.

Das joined the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) and became part of the noncooperation movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi against British rule. Das was a prominent leader of this movement, particularly in Bengal, and in 1921 he was held for six months as a political prisoner. Das was a strong critic of British rule and a staunch nationalist who believed in empowering Indians. He played a key role in encouraging Indians to shun British textiles, burning his own foreign clothes as an example.

In 1922 he became president of the Congress Party. A violent incident at Chauri Chaura that same year, however, not only dealt a blow to the noncooperation movement but also led Gandhi to withdraw his civil disobedience movement. Following this, differences arose between members in the Congress Party who were divided into “no-changers” and “pro-changers.” The latter believed that they should contest elections to provincial councils and facilitate changes in the government from within the system. The no-changers wanted to boycott the elections. This rift led Das, a pro-changer, to break away from the Congress Party. He founded the Swaraj Party in 1923 with Motilal Nehru, another well-known leader of India’s freedom movement. Some other Congress Party members who joined Das and Nehru were Hakim Ajmal Khan, Vithalbhai Patel, Narasimha Chintaman Kelkar, and Mukund Ramrao Jayakar. But the Swarajists and the Congress Party leadership realized that it was necessary to put up a united front against British rule and often strategized together.

Under Das’s guidance, the Congress Party abandoned its intentions to boycott colonially sponsored elections for provincial councils. It decided instead to participate in order to seek positions that would permit the elected representatives of the Swaraj Party and the Congress Party to obstruct governmental business from within. Swaraj Party members won more than 40 seats in the new Central Legislative Assembly in 1923.

The Swarajists had emerged as the largest party in Bengal’s provincial council elections, and the governor asked Das to form the government and become the chief minister. But Das declined the post, stating that his aim was to wreck the existing government, not to cooperate with it, and the Swaraj Party acted as the opposition. Das became the first mayor of the Calcutta in 1924, following a 1923 act that reformed the city’s government and tried to improve the lot of the city’s neglected Indian population.

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Das’s health started failing soon thereafter, and he succumbed to a severe fever the following year. Although his political career lasted less than a decade, he left a great impact on the freedom movement and mentored and inspired revolutionaries such as Subhas Chandra Bose. Upon Das’s death, Gandhi said of him:

He dreamed and thought and talked of freedom of India and of nothing else.