Anushilan Samiti
Anushilan Samiti (Ōnūshīlōn sōmītī, "lit": body-building society) was a Bengali Indian organisation that existed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and propounded revolutionary violence as the means for ending British rule in India. The organisation arose from a conglomeration of local youth groups and gyms ("Akhara") in Bengal in 1902. It had two prominent, if somewhat independent, arms in East and West Bengal identified as Dhaka Anushilan Samiti centred in Dhaka (modern day Bangladesh), and the Jugantar group (centred at Calcutta) respectively.
History of the Anushilan Samiti
Bengal itself was relatively quiet during the 1857 uprising, although minor uprisings broke out in Chittagong, Dhaka and a number of other places. However, by the last quarter of the century, the Raj was firmly established in the Bengal Presidency and educated Bengali "Babu", the middleclass "Bhadralok" community were amongst the largest numbers who filled civil and administrative offices throughout British India. In traditional British stereotype, the Bengali race was considered "feeble even to effeminacy" and the least martial of all Indian races. However, the Bengalee propensity to form public bodies and organised protests were noted from early on, which piqued the British observers. 1876 saw the foundation of The Indian Association in Calcutta under the leadership of Surendranath Banerjea. This organisation successfully drew into its folds students and the urban middle–class, for which it served as a mouthpiece. The Association became the mouthpiece of an informal constituency of students and middle-class gentlemen. The Association sponsored the Indian National Conference in 1883 and 1885, which later merged with the Indian National Congress. Calcutta was at the time the capital of British India, and the most prominent centre for organised politics, and some of the same students who attended the political meetings began at the time to organise "secret societies" which cultivated a cultural of physical strength and nationalist feelings. In Bengal at large, through the decades 1860s and 1870s, there arose large numbers of "akhras", or gymnasiums consciously designed along the lines of the Italian Carbonari which drew the youth. These were influenced by the writings of the Bengalee nationalist author Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and by the works of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and his Young Italy movement. To this was later added the philosophies and teachings of Swami Vivekananda, which emphasised a "Strong muscles and nerves of steel". This marked the beginnings of interest in physical improvement and proto-national spirit among young Bengalees, and was driven by an effort to break away from the colonial stereotype of effeminacy imposed on the Bengalee. Physical fitness was symbolic of the recovery of masculinity, and part of a larger moral and spiritual training to cultivate control over the body, and develop national pride and a sense of social responsibility and service.