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.
Anushilan Samiti
Between 1919 and 1922, the first non-cooperation movement began with the Rowlatt Satyagrahas under Gandhi and received widespread support from luminaries of the Indian independence movement. In Bengal, Jugantar agreed to a request by Chittaranjan Das (a prominent and respected leader of the Indian National Congress) to refrain from violence. Although Anushilan did not adhere to the agreement, it sponsored no major actions between 1920 and 1922 (when the first non-cooperation movement was suspended). During the next few years, Jugantar and Anushilan became active again. Resurgence of radical nationalism linked to the Samiti during the 1920s led to the passage of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance in 1924, enacted the following year. The act restored extraordinary powers of detention to the police; by 1927 more than 200 suspects were imprisoned under the act, including Subhas Chandra Bose. Its implementation curtailed a resurgence of nationalist violence in Bengal. Branches of Jugantar formed in Chittagong and Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh. The Chittagong branch found a strong leader in Surya Sen, and in December 1923 robbed the Chittagong office of the Assam-Bengal Railway. In January 1924 a young Bengali, Gopi Mohan Saha, shot dead a European he mistook for Calcutta police commissioner Charles Tegart. The assassin was praised by the Bengali press and, to Gandhi’s chagrin, proclaimed a martyr by the Bengal branch of the Congress. Around this time, Jugantar became closely associated with the Calcutta Corporation headed by Das and Subhas Chandra Bose and terrorists (and ex-terrorists) became factors in local Bengali government.