Jatindranath Mukherjee
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In brief
Written by Shriya Dasgupta and Oyeshi Ganguly, Sep 18, 2026: The Indian Express
Waiting for Jatin
When the First World War broke out, revolutionaries of the Jugantar group sought to procure arms from Europe and use them to overthrow British rule in India. The plan, known as the Indo-German Conspiracy, was developed with the support of the Berlin Committee in Germany and revolutionaries operating in India.
Jatindranath Mukherjee was one of Bose’s co-conspirators in the plot. The two also worked closely within the wider revolutionary network, with Bose coordinating efforts with secret societies across North India.
The Indo-German Conspiracy ultimately failed after some conspirators acted as police informers and revealed the plan to the British authorities. The ammunition the revolutionaries were expecting never reached them. Jatindranath was killed in a frontal battle with the police in Balasore, Odisha, during the Battle of Buribalam in September 1915, and Jugantar lost one of its most prominent leaders.
Despite this setback, revolutionaries continued trying to arrange weapons through the eastern Indian route via China and Assam under the leadership of Jadugopal Mukherjee, Jatindranath’s erstwhile foreign secretary and the man in charge of the group’s transnational dealings.
While the world remembers the bravado of Jatindranath, his granddaughter Manjusha Chatterjee remembers the price his family paid for it. When he died, he left behind a young widow and three children, aged two-and-a-half, five, and seven. But the sacrifices at home had begun long before his death.
“My Dadu (grandfather) would give away all of his monthly salary to the revolutionaries for nationalist activities,” Manjusha recalls. “So much so that, most months, my grandma Indubala had barely enough money to buy food for the family.
“Slowly, his fellow revolutionaries learnt of this precarious situation at home and decided to take matters into their own hands. On a particular payday, a friend approached Jatin and cried to him about a family member’s illness, saying he urgently needed money. Jatin gave away his entire salary, keeping only the money needed for the tram ride home. When he returned home empty-handed, the friend was already there. He smiled and said he had given the salary directly to Indubala, reprimanding Jatin that his generosity was becoming a cause for his family’s starvation.”
Manjusha recalls how Jatindranath’s death in 1915 left Indubala suspended between grief and hope. On hearing the news, she refused to believe that her husband was dead. Their family guru, Bholananda Giri, comforted her with the assurance that Jatindranath was alive and would one day return.
Indubala held on to those words for the rest of her life. Until her death in 1937, she continued to dress as a married woman, wearing sindoor and the sankha-pola (conch-shell bangles), as though Jatin had never left.
