Bipin Chandrapal Indian Freedom Fighter

BIPIN CHANDRA PAL
Date of Birth: 7^th November, 1858 and Date of Death: 20^th May, 1932
Pal was born on November 7, 1858 in at Sylhet (now in Bangladesh). He came to Calcutta and got admitted in the Presidency college but left studies before graduating. However he had remarkable Literacy competence and studied various books extensively. He started his career as school master andworked as a librarian in the Calcutta Public Library. Here he came in contact with Keshav Chandra Senand others like Shivnath Shastri, B.K.Goswami and S.N.Banerjee. Their influence attracted him to join active politics. Soon he got inspired by the extremist patriotism of Tilak, Lala and Aurobindo. In 1898 he went to England to study comparative theology but came back to preach ideal of Swadeshi through himself in the non cooperation movement due to his difference of view points with other leaders of the movement.
Bipin Chandra was the only son of his parents, but he had a sister, Kripa by name. In December 1881, he married his first wife, Nrityakali Devi, a Brahmin widow, in Bombay, and after her death nine years later he married again (1891), this time also a Brahmin widow, Birajmohini Devi, who happened to be a distant cousin of Surendranath Banerjea. He had by his two wives three sons and five daughters.
Through his weekly journal, the New India (1992), he preached the ideal of Swaraj or complete political freedom to be achieved through courage, self-help and self-sacrifice. He did not agree with Tilak’s concept of Hindu nationalism, but preached a “composite patriotism.” which was better suited for a country of so many diversities like India. The partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905 caused an unprecedented political upheaval in the country. In 1996 Bipin Chandra started a daily paper, the Bande Mataram, as the Editor of which Aurobindo Ghose appeared “like a stormy petrel in Bengal politics”. He also started a monthly journal, the Hindu Review (1973), and tried to popularise the idea, though without much success. He then joined the Home Rule Movement of Besant and Tilak and rejoined the Congress in 1916. He tried to make the people conscious of the great dangers which political pan-Islamism presented to the future of India. The empire-idea alone, in his opinion, could provide an effective remedy for this evil.
Bipin Chandra was not only a great preacher but also a prolific writer. Besides regularly contributing to the journals of his day, he wrote on the philosophy of Bengal Vaishnavism, contributed a series of studies on the lives of some of the makers of modern India like Rammohan Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen, Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, Asutosh Mukherjee and Annie Besant, gave expositions of some of the fundamental aspects of Indian culture, attempted an interpretative history of the modern renaissance in Bengal and left for us memoirs of his own life and times.
Bipin Chandra Pal was an Indian nationalist.  He was among the triumvirate of Lal Bal Pal.  Bipin Chandra Pal was born in Poil Village, Habiganj District, Bangladesh, in a wealthy Hindu Vaishnava family.  His father was Ramchandra Pal, a Persian scholar and small landowner.  His son was Niranjan Pal, one of the founders of Bombay Talkies.  B.C. Pal is known as the ‘Father of Revolutionary Thoughts’ in India and was one of the freedom fighters of India.
Bipin Chandra Pal was a teacher, journalist, orator, writer and librarian; he was famous as one of the triumvirate of three militant patriots of the Congress – the “Pal” of Lal Bal Pal.  The trio was responsible for initiating the first popular upsurge against British colonial policy in the 1905 partition of Bengal, before the advent of Gandhi into Indian politics.  Pal was also the founder of the journal Bande Mataram.
Even thought he understood the positive aspects of Empire as a ‘great idea’, the ‘Federal-idea is greater’.  In both public and private life he was radical.  He married a widow (he had to sever ties to his family for this).  At the time of B.G. Tilak’s (“Bal”) arrest and government repression in 1907, he left for England, where he was briefly associated with the radical India House and founder the Swaraj journal.  He was among the first to criticize Gandhi or the ‘Gandhi cult’ since it ‘sought to replace the present government by no government or by the priestly autocracy of the Mahatma’.  His criticism of Gandhi was persistent beginning with Gandhi’s arrival in India and open in 1921 session of the Indian National Congress he delivered in his presidential speech a severe criticism of Gandhi’s ideas as based on magic rather than logic, addressing Gandhi: “You wanted magic.  I tried to give you logic.  But logic is in bad odour when the popular mind is excited.   You wanted mantaram, I am not a Rishi and cannot give Mantaram…. I have never spoken a half-truth when I know the truth…. I have never tried to lead people in faith blindfolded’, for his ‘priestly, pontifical tendencies’, his alliance with pan-Islamism during the Khilafat movement, which led to Pal’s eclipse from political life from 1922 till his death in 1932 under conditions of object poverty.  Comparing Gandhi with Leo Tolstoy during the year he died, Pal noted that Tolstoy ‘was an honest philosophical anarchist’ while Gandhi remained in his eyes as ‘a papal autocrat’ Firm and ethically grounded, not only did he perceive the ‘Congress Babel’ in terms of its short-sightedness in late 1920s or, Congress as an instance of repudiating debt’s folly, composed of a generation ‘that knows no Joseph’, Pal’s critical comments should be located in context, since nobody can jump out of his skin of time.
The trio had advocated radical means to get their message across the British, like boycotting British manufactured goods, burning Western clothes made in the mills of Manchester or Swadeshi and strikes and lockouts of British owned businesses and industrial concerns.
He came under the influence of eminent Bengali leaders, not as a hero-worshipper or somebody looking for a guru for guidance, of his time such as Keshab Chandra Sen and Sibnath Sastri, as his family were in Brahmo Samaj.  He was imprisoned for six months on the grounds of his refusal to give evidence against Sri Aurobindo in the Vande Mataram sedition case.  He died on 20^th May, 1932.

Bipin Chandra Pal was born at Sylhet (now in Bangladesh) in a wealthy Kayastha family. His father was Ramchandra Pal. He was a teacher, journalist, orator, writer and editor, who also started the journal ‘Bandematarm’. He advocated extremist means to get the message to the British like boycotting goods.
Bipin Chandrapal Indian Freedom Fighter