Chapter Five · 1915
The road to Balasore
From Bengal into the forests and river country of coastal Odisha — a journey undertaken to meet a ship that had already been intercepted on the other side of the world.
Geography
Why this coast
The Odisha coast offered what Bengal could not: distance from the centres of colonial policing, and a shoreline of creeks and river mouths where a landing might go unnoticed.
Sequence
A group under pressure
Five men, an unfamiliar landscape, no supply line, and a deadline set by an event none of them could see.
From Bengal to coastal Odisha
Jatindranath left Bengal for the Odisha coast during 1915. The move was deliberate and strategic: to be near the point where a shipment was expected, and far from the concentration of police attention around Calcutta.
The hideout at Kaptipada
He established himself outside Kaptipada, in the princely state of Mayurbhanj, more than thirty miles from Balasore. Princely territory sat outside the direct administration of British India, which offered a degree of insulation — though not, as it turned out, enough.
Waiting for support
This is the longest and least dramatic phase, and the most decisive. The group waited for a landing that could not happen, in country where they were conspicuous, dependent on local assistance and on money that was running out.
Changing circumstances
Police attention closed in. Enquiries in Balasore connected the commercial cover in Calcutta with activity on the coast, and the search narrowed toward a small group of outsiders. Once the presence of strangers was known locally, concealment was a matter of days.
The approach of the confrontation
By early September the group had moved out of the hideout and was in the open country near the Buribalam river. On 9 September 1915 they took position on a low, scrubby rise at Chashakhand, and were surrounded.
The group
Who was there
No photographs of the four companions are held in this archive. They are represented here by name only rather than by an image that is not theirs.
Accounts of the size of the force deployed against the group, and of casualties on the government side, vary considerably and some figures rest on local recollection rather than official record. Where this archive is uncertain it says so rather than choosing the most striking version.