Jatindranath Mukherjee
Bagha Jatin · 1879–1915
Seriously wounded during the confrontation. Carried to Balasore and died in the district hospital on 10 September 1915, aged thirty-five.
Chapter Six
Buribalam,
September 1915
Seventy-five minutes on a low rise near a river in Balasore district, and the deaths and executions that followed from it.
9 – 10 September
What happened, in the order it happened
Five men had been waiting on the Odisha coast for a shipment of arms that had already been intercepted thousands of miles away. On the morning of 9 September 1915, they were located.
The confrontation took place at Chashakhand, near the Buribalam river, in Balasore district. The group took position in low scrub on a rise. They were surrounded by an armed police force, which was reinforced by troops.
The exchange of fire is recorded as having lasted around seventy-five minutes. It ended when the group’s ammunition was exhausted.
The revolutionaries
Five men, and what became of each
Naming them individually is deliberate. Accounts that centre on Bagha Jatin alone tend to reduce four other people to the word “companions”.
Chittapriya Ray Chaudhuri
Killed in action · d. 1915
Killed during the fighting at Chashakhand. He is the one member of the group who did not leave the rise alive, and is commemorated alongside Jatindranath in accounts of the engagement.
Manoranjan Sengupta
b. 1898 · d. 3 December 1915
Taken when the group’s ammunition ran out. Sentenced to death on 16 October 1915 and hanged at Balasore on 3 December 1915. He was approximately seventeen years old.
Nirendranath Dasgupta
Known as Niren · d. 3 December 1915
A maternal cousin of Manoranjan Sengupta. Taken with him, sentenced on the same day, and hanged alongside him at Balasore on 3 December 1915.
Jyotish Chandra Pal
Seriously wounded · transported
Badly wounded in the fighting and taken. Sentenced to transportation and sent to the penal settlement in the Andaman Islands. Later accounts describe lasting damage to his health.
The people not recorded
Unnamed in the sources
Villagers who gave or withheld shelter, informants, constables, and members of the police force who were themselves killed or wounded. Their names are largely absent from the record on both sides.
10 September
The final hours
Jatindranath was taken from the field to Balasore, where he died in the district hospital on 10 September 1915 of the wounds he had received the previous day.
The sequence afterwards is a matter of court record. Manoranjan Sengupta and Nirendranath Dasgupta were tried and sentenced to death on 16 October 1915. Both were hanged at Balasore on 3 December 1915. Jyotish Chandra Pal, who survived his wounds, was sentenced to transportation and sent to the Andamans.
Within three months of the confrontation, three of the five men were dead and a fourth was in a penal colony.
Established by the record
- The confrontation occurred on 9 September 1915 at Chashakhand, Balasore district, near the Buribalam river.
- Five revolutionaries were present, named in the accounts consistently.
- Chittapriya Ray Chaudhuri was killed; Jatindranath Mukherjee and Jyotish Chandra Pal were seriously wounded.
- Jatindranath died on 10 September 1915 at the Balasore district hospital.
- Sengupta and Dasgupta were sentenced on 16 October and hanged on 3 December 1915.
Where accounts vary
- The size of the force deployed. Figures differ substantially between sources.
- Casualties on the government side, which some accounts base on local eyewitness recollection rather than official returns.
- The precise duration of the exchange; roughly seventy-five minutes is the figure most often given.
- Words spoken during or after the fighting, which appear in later narrative accounts and cannot be verified.
Object
What survives
Very little material connected to Jatindranath Mukherjee survives, and what does has the quality of accident rather than intention. Clothing kept because someone thought to keep it. A handful of photographs reproduced until the originals were no longer needed.
Museum objects of this kind do a particular thing to a historical figure. They make him physically real in a way that text does not, and they also invite a kind of reverence that can get in the way of understanding what he was actually trying to do.
Afterwards
The historical memory of Buribalam
For Odisha, Buribalam is a local as well as a national memory. The confrontation happened on Odia ground, and the state’s connection to it is often overlooked in accounts written from Bengal. There is a statue at Balasore.
For Bengal, it is the end of a chapter that had begun with Partition ten years earlier — and the point at which the revolutionary current associated with Jugantar lost the figure who had held it together.
The centenary in 2015 brought renewed attention, as centenaries tend to. So did the 2023 Bengali feature film, which introduced the story to an audience that had not encountered it in school.
Each retelling makes choices. This archive’s choice is to keep the dates precise, to name all five men, and to resist the pull toward a final scene with dialogue in it.
A note on imagery
A photograph taken after the confrontation, showing Jatindranath Mukherjee gravely wounded, exists and is historically significant. It is held in the archive section of this site behind a deliberate content notice rather than displayed within the narrative, so that visitors — including younger readers — choose whether to view it.