From Effeminacy to Revolutionary: A Historical Analysis of the Rise of the Revolutionary Movement in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

In India, the origins of the revolutionary movement had a long-term historical process. In the early decade of the twentieth century, the revolutionary movement was mainly confined to Bengal, Maharashtra, and Punjab. This article focuses on the origins of the revolutionary movement in colonial Bengal. In Bengal, the revolutionary movement had a historical root. It was the result of the physical culture movement in Bengal. This paper is trying to argue that the concept of the revolutionary movement was not exported from Maharashtra. However, historians like Peter Heehs, Partha Chatterjee, and Bimanbehari Majumdar have argued that the idea of the Bengali revolutionary movement came from Maharashtra. This article discusses that the Bengali revolutionary movement started against the charge of effeminacy and cowardice of Bengali people. Some Bengali intellectuals, like Rajnarayan Bose, Nabagopal Mitra, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, later Sarala Ghosal, Pramatha Nath Mitra, Aurobindo Ghosh, Sister Nivedita, and Jatindranath Banerjee, played a crucial role in forming a revolutionary organisation in Bengal.