Not till some years later did a Committee, presided over by a British
High Court judge sent out from England for the purpose, fully explore
the many ramifications of a revolutionary movement which had one of its
head centres in London, until the murder of Sir W. Curzon-Wylie by an
Indian student during a crowded reception at the Imperial Institute
aroused the attention of the authorities to the activities of the "India
House," and Mr. Krishnavarma, its familiar genius, had to transfer to
Paris his notorious paper, the _Indian Sociologist_, in which he openly
glorified murder. The "Sedition Committee's" Report was only made public
in 1918, and if the action taken upon it by the Government of India was
to furnish the occasion for another popular explosion different in
character from, but no less formidable than, the explosion which
followed the Partition of Bengal, the facts which it marshalled and the
conclusions which it drew from them with judicial soberness have never
been seriously challenged. It found that the long series of crimes of
which it recorded the genesis and growth had been "directed towards one
and the same objective, the overthrow by force of British rule in
India," and nothing revealed more clearly the mainspring of the movement
than the statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons
who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst
committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age;
most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all
high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas--the latter a
writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste. These statistics did
not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped
scot-free and were never brought to justice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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