Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

68 I Ramnath
or nine hours. Possible uses fo r the results of such handiwork
included street fighting, assassination, and destroying
bridges or buildings. Heehs too goes into some detail about
the explosives used (picric acid, sulfuric acid, fu lminate of
mercury, and nitroglycerine) and construction of bombs:
shells made of forged spheres, or cleverly concealed in
hollowed-out bedposts or books, as in the instance of the
deadly but maddeningly unexploded Cadbury cocoa tin
packed with detonators and explosive material, all encased
in a copy of Herbert Broom's Commentary on the Common
L1UJ, intended to kill Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas
Kingsford in 1908.'2
Above all else, it was the use of the bomb that drew
the Bengalis into focus as anarchists in the colonial government's
eyes. More than just a tactical instrument, at times it
manifested fo r them as the focus of a viscerally intense cult
of devotion to annihilation that shaded imperceptibly into
sacrificial devotion to the mother goddess-as-nation. The
bomb was also personified as the "benefactor of the poor . ..
[which 1 has been brought across the seas. Worship it, sing its
praises, bow to it. Bande Mataram.")3
'The quotation is from Har Dayal's "Shabash! In Praise
of the Bomb;' a pamphlet written from San Francisco on
the occasion of a grenade blast heard by Indian expatriates
around the world-namely, the attempt on Viceroy Lord
Hardinge's life during his elephant-borne ceremonial enuance
into Delhi to reinaugurate the city as the seat of empire
in December 1912.'4 Maniktola Garden veteran Rash
Behari Bose had masterminded the attack. But the actual
bomber was a young man named Basanta Kumar Biswas,