Bengal's Tiger Jatin earned his nickname by killing a tiger with a small blade
In 1906 Jatindranath Mukherjee went looking for a tiger troubling his home village, fought it at close quarters and killed it with a short dagger to the neck. Bengal's colonial government gave him an engraved silver shield. The same man was soon building secret revolutionary cells aimed at ending British rule.
He was born on 7 December 1879 into a Bengali Brahmin family in Kayagram, in what is now Bangladesh, and lost his father at five. His mother, a poet who read the leading essayists of the day, raised him and his sister in her parents' home; her brother, a lawyer, counted Rabindranath Tagore among his clients. Young Jatin was known for strength, good humour and staging religious plays, and he encouraged patriotic drama for city theatres and village singers alike.
At Calcutta Central College he studied fine arts and took shorthand lessons, but Swami Vivekananda shaped him most. The Swami's vision of a free India and his call for young volunteers of iron muscle to serve during famines and floods drew Jatin in, and Vivekananda sent him to a wrestling gymnasium. A colonial police superintendent later attributed Jatin's standing among revolutionaries partly to his reputation as a celibate devoted only to the cause. He married Indubala Banerjee in 1900; the death of their first son sent the couple on a pilgrimage to Haridwar.
Several accounts place him among the founders of the Anushilan Samiti in 1902, running a strong branch at Kushtia, and he later became a principal leader of the Jugantar group. He set up a bomb workshop near Deoghar, yet he opposed premature attacks and favoured a loose federation of autonomous regional cells. Relief missions at floods and religious festivals doubled, the authorities suspected, as recruiting grounds.
His defiance was public. During the Prince of Wales's 1905 procession in Calcutta he climbed onto a cab and knocked off English soldiers who were harassing Indian women. In 1908 at Siliguri station he fought several British officers single-handed; the case was quietly dropped. Asked how many men he could fight alone, he said none if they were honest, and countless otherwise. He died on 10 September 1915.
Source: Bagha Jatin
