Political history of Sri Aurobindo
Anushilan Samiti was founded as an attempt to organize Bengali youth through a program of physical fitness and spiritual training for a nationalist program. By 1902, Calcutta had three societies working under the umbrella of Anushilan Samity, a society earlier founded by a Calcutta barrister by the name of Pramatha Mitra. These included Mitra's own group, another led by a Bengali lady by the name of Sarala Devi, and a third one led by Aurobindo Ghosh. The Anushilan Samiti had Aurobindo and Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das as the vice-presidents, Suren Tagore the treasurer. Jatindra Nath Banerjee (Niralamba Swami), Bagha Jatin, Bhupendra Nath Datta (Swami Vivekananda's brother), Barindra Ghosh were among other initial leaders.
By 1905, the work of Aurobindo and his brother Barin Ghosh allowed Anushilan Samity to spread through Bengal.
History of the Anushilan Samiti
Between 1919 and 1922, the first of the noncooperation movement began with the Rowlatt Satyagrahas under the call of Gandhi. This received widespread support both amongst leading luminaries of the Indian political movement. In Bengal, "Jugantar" agreed to the request of Chittaranjan Das, one of the most prominent and respected leaders of Congress at the time, and abstained from violence. However, "Anushilan" did not subscribe to the agreement but sponsored no major actions between 1920 and 1922, when the first non-Co-operation Movement was suspended. The years after saw both "Jugantar" and "Anushilan" becoming active again. The activity and influence of the Bengal terrorists led to the passage in 1924 of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, extended as an Act the next year. This again gave the police extraordinary powers, and between 1924 and 1927 almost 200suspects were imprisoned, among them Subhas Bose. Acts of terrorism in Bengal dropped off Branches of "Jugantar" formed in Chittagong and Dhaka (present day Bangladesh). The Chittagong branch found particularly strong leadership in Surya Sen and in December 1923 staged a daring robbery of the Chittagong office of the Assam-Bengal Railway. In January 1924, a young Bengalee Gopi Mohan Saha shot dead a European he mistook to be Calcutta Police Commissioner Charles Tegart. The assassin was openly praised by the Bengali press and, to Gandhi’s chagrin, proclaimed a martyr by the Bengal provincial branch of the Congress. Around this time "Jugantar" became closely associated with the Calcutta Corporation, headed by Das and Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose apparently ‘‘met with active revolutionaries and knew in a general way what they planned to do’’. Terrorists and ex-terrorists would be factors in the Bengal local-government equation from this point on.