Jadugopal Mukherjee | |
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 Jadugopal Mukherjee on floor of his home at Ranchi, 1960 | |
| Born | (1886-09-18)18 September 1886 |
| Died | 30 August 1976(1976-08-30) (aged 89) |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | Freedom fighter |
| Organization(s) | Jugantar,Hindustan Republican Association |
| Movement | Indian Independence Movement |
Jadu Gopal Mukherjee (18 September 1886 – 30 August 1976) was aBengaliIndian revolutionary who, as the successor ofJatindranath Mukherjee orBagha Jatin, led theJugantar members to recognise and acceptGandhi's movement as the culmination of their own aspiration.
Jadugopal or Jadu was born atTamluk in the district ofMedinipur on the bank of theRupnarayan River in West Bengal, where his father Kishorilal practised law and distinguished himself as aKheyal singer. The family came from Beniatola in northKolkata. Jadu's mother Bhubanmohini hailed from aVaishnava family and transmitted in her children a spirit of devotion. Jadu's younger brother was to settle in the US and to be known in the West the famous writer and cultural scholarDhan Gopal Mukerji. As an upper class student of theDuff School in Kolkata, Jadu learnt to think patriotically, thanks to one of his teachers. He became a member of the KolkataAnushilan Party in 1905, attracted by its physical culture and, on the foil of the Partition, by its political climate. He writes in his autobiography that the single-handed fight ofBagha Jatin with a Royal Bengal tiger thrilled him and his friends in 1906, and he had an impression of belonging to a heroic epoch. After the F.A. examination, in 1908, Jadu entered theCalcutta Medical College. Fond of observing and analysing the rising tide of patriotism and the Government measures to repress them, Jadu preferred remaining aloof, confining himself to a couple of close friends.[1]
Relief work during the 1913Damodar floods brought Jadu close toBagha Jatin and the latter's important associates. Busy cementing the regional units for organising an armed insurrection during the forthcoming War, Jatin designatedRash Behari Bose as the responsible for Upper India. Though jealous ofNaren Bhattacharya's proximity with Jatin, Jadu received the charge of developing the external links, mainly withTaraknath Das in California andVirendranath Chattopadhyay in Germany. With the failure of theIndo-German Plan and Bagha Jatin's sudden death in 1915, findingAtulkrishna Ghosh, the legitimate right-hand man of Jatin, plunged in a momentary despair, Jadu replaced him and asked the revolutionaries to disperse. During Jadu's absence,Bhupendra Kumar Datta maintained the leadership till his arrest in 1917.
Hiding in the hilly forests of Assam-Burma and Tibeto-Bhutan frontiers, Jadu was informed about the impact of the revolutionaries' activities on the Imperialists and about the question of a possible concession of constitutional reforms with the Rowlatt Act at the end of World War I. Returning home in 1921, Jadu obtained a special permission to sit for the Medical degree Examination and passed it with record results in 1922. After Gandhi's first failure, according to their initial contract, theJugantar members worked under DeshbandhuChittaranjan Das andSatyendra Chandra Mitra to form the alternativeSwaraj movement and they declared their new programme by celebrating the 8th anniversary ofBagha Jatin's self-giving on 9 September 1923, from Bengal to Punjab.
After receiving a message fromLala Har Dayal, PanditRam Prasad Bismil went toAllahabad where he drafted the constitution ofHindustan Republican Association in the winter season of 1923 with the help of Dr. Jadugopal Mukherjee andSachindra Nath Sanyal both of these revolutionaries were fromBengal.[2] The basic name and aims of the organisation were typed on aYellow Paper in Allahabad.
Alerted by this, the British authorities immediately arrested the radicals; arrested for the first time, Jadu was detained under the State Prisoners' Regulation for four years. Released in 1927, he was externed from Bengal. Settled in Ranchi, he earned an outstanding reputation in TB treatment. He married Amiyarani Chaudhuri in 1934 and had two sons. At this juncture, he succeeded in bringing together theJugantar and theAnushilan radicals, creating the short-lived federated Karmi-Sangha; under the pretext thatSubhas Chandra Bose and theJugantar leaders were indifferent to their efficiency, the members of theAnushilan put an end to this fusion.
Jadu took the initiative, in 1938, and announced that theJugantar stopped existing as a Party distinct from the Congress, extending its full support to Gandhi. Arrested again for helping Gandhi to organise theQuit India movement, in 1942, he was released two years later. He disagreed with the Congress compromise on vital issues such as complete independence and partition of India, and he resigned in 1947. He died in 1976.[3]
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