Chatto
The Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe
Nirode K Barooah
Oxford University Press
2004
Pages: 370
Price: Rs 645
ISBN: 0195665473
Paperback
The Oxford Book of Spy Stories contains W Somerset Maugham’s ‘Giulia Lazzari’, a story based on the 1915 British attempt to murder Virendranath Chattopadhaya (nicknamed “Chatto”) on the Swiss border with France or Italy.
Maugham was in the British Secret Service during the first world war, and he based seven stories on his experiences (Winston Churchill reportedly advised him to burn 14 other stories), modelling the main character John Ashenden after himself. Not just that: Alfred Hitchcock used two of the Ashenden stories for his 1936 film Secret Agent; and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels draw many inspirations from Maugham’s spy stories.
It is telling that we know all this, but very few of us know much about Chatto (Chandra Lal in Maugham’s story). To many he’s nothing more than a single-line footnote: the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu who lived in Germany during WW I and advocated insurrection against the British Empire; the man who drew Nehru into the League Against Imperialism but then was disappointed with Nehru’s and Subhash Chandra Bose’s “compromise” with ‘reactionaries’ in the Congress; and the man who was executed by Stalin in 1937. Till now there have not been many details about Chatto himself.
Why is it there’s been no book on a man regarded by the British Empire as a dangerous anarchist who needed to be bumped off?
Part of the problem is that Chatto’s life in Germany and finally in the Soviet Union meant that his writings and correspondence have been inaccessible to the majority of historians whose foreign language proficiency does not extend beyond English. Furthermore, the Soviet files were not available till the demise of the USSR (and then only in 1998 due to the efforts of our Ambassador in Moscow then, Ronen Sen).
Why is it there’s been no book on a man regarded by the British Empire as a dangerous anarchist who needed to be bumped off?
Part of the problem is that Chatto’s life in Germany and finally in the Soviet Union meant that his writings and correspondence have been inaccessible to the majority of historians whose foreign language proficiency does not extend beyond English. Furthermore, the Soviet files were not available till the demise of the USSR (and then only in 1998 due to the efforts of our Ambassador in Moscow then, Ronen Sen).