Virendranath Chattopadhyaya [1880-1937] – India | United Kingdom | Germany | Belgium | France | Sweden | Russia
Life stories
Toby Housden, 2024
The epitome of a transnational revolutionary, Virendranath Chattophadyaya, or ‘Chatto’, dedicated his entire adult life to the cause of Indian nationalism and the fight against British colonialism. His revolutionary fervour led him from his studies in London across Europe – in search of support and a willing audience for the global campaign against the British Raj.
The central node of his European Odyssey was Berlin. Here he cofounded the Berlin Committee, later known as the Indian Independence Committee (Indisches Unabhängigkeitskomite), an organisation that forged an alliance with Germany during the First World War to aid Indian sedition.
During and after the war from bases in Berlin and Stockholm, Chatto travelled to conferences and built personal connections to other socialist and anti-imperial radicals and government figures, securing vital funding and cooperation across Europe. He brought such further afield colonial locations as Singapore, Constantinople and Afghanistan into a global network, spreading anti-British propaganda to fellow Indians displaced across the globe by the military and labour needs of the empire.
Chatto’s life shines a light on Berlin as an anti-imperial hub and gives insight into the life of the cosmopolitan revolutionary, being forced to migrate for personal safety and in the service of the anti-colonial cause. At once intellectually stimulated and put in acute danger by his life work, Chatto also underwent political disappointments and transformations as his revolutionary journey pulled him further to the left ideologically and to the east spatially. As Communism developed after the Russian Revolution, he saw the far left as the only true ally to the anti-colonial cause. He moved to Moscow, where he would eventually meet his end at the hands of Stalin, leaving behind a legacy of great admiration in anti-imperial circles.
Contact:
Toby Housden: tmehousden(at)gmail.com
References:
Barooah, Nirode K.: Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe, 2004.
Callahan, Kevin: “Performing inter-nationalism” in Stuttgart in 1907: French and German socialist nationalism and the political culture of an International Socialist Congress’, 2000.
Laursen, Ole Birk: Anti-Colonialism, Terrorism and the ‘Politics of Friendship’: Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the European Anarchist Movement, 1910-1927, 2019.
Laursen, Ole Birk: The Hunt for Chatto W. Somerset Maugham, Revolutionary Reminiscences and the Fiction of Indian Nationalist Terrorism‘, The Anarchist Library, URL: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ole-birk-laursen-the-hunt-for-chatto, 2017 (last accessed 11.6.2024).
Lindener, Thomas: A City Against Empire: Transnational Anti-Imperialism in Mexico City, 1920-30, 2023.
Louro, Michele L.: Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism, 2018.
Petersson, Frederik: Subversive Indian Networks in Berlin and Europe, 1914 – 1918. The History and Legacy of the Berlin Committee, 2014.
Stationen
Poetry and Politics in the Hyderabadi Family
From Student to Activist in the Centre of the Empire: Britain
Meeting International Socialism: The Stuttgart Conference
Publicists and Anarchists in Paris
The Berlin Committee, an Indian Nationalist Centre
Swiss Gun Running and the Zurich Bomb Plot
Asylum, Rejections and Disillusionment in Stockholm
Back in Berlin
The League Against Imperialism and the Brussels Conference
Summoned to Russia