shrines into seats of Extremist politics. Long before the hatching of the daily Jugantar at Benares, Puri instituted a religious procession in celebration of the advent of a New Era (yuga+antar). Sealy in his Report admits: "It would be extremely rash to argue that the place has not been freely used by the anarchist for sealing the compact of many a vow against the Government or that it has not been a recognised place of refuge for the fugitive from justice or surveillance by the police." A few months before the Surat Congress, Suranath Bhaduri of Benares, on reaching Calcutta after travelling all over Bengal, "formed a central committee at the Sandhya office, with the help of Jatin Banerji (alias Niralamba Swami) and with Kartik Dutta; Mukhada Samadhyayi, Shyamsundar Chakravarti, Arabindo Ghose, Tarakhepa, Annada Charan Kaviraj and others as members(…) Measures are being devised for freeing India and for proclaiming the divine commands which have been received in the matter (…) After this Suranath went to Puri with Preo Nath Karar alias Sri Yukteswar Giri (…) Attempts are being made to get hold of such of the ruling Chiefs as are patrons of the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal. Raja Sasisekhareswar of Tahirpur … is being fully converted to this creed." The Maharaj of Darbhanga was the General President of the Mahamandal; Suranath's father, Somnath Bhaduri, was the Maharaja's Private Secretary; Amarendra Chatterjee's father-in-law, Preonath Banerjee, was the manager of the Darbhanga Raj; the link was further close because one of Preonath Banerjee's nephews, Natbihari Chatterjee (son-in-law of the great Surendranath Banerjee), was munsif at Cuttack; another nephew, Dhiren Mukherjee, taught at the Ravenshaw Collegiate School. Amarendra had free access not only to these patriots but, also, to the headmaster of this school (later principal of the Ravenshaw College), Khirodchandra Ray Chaudhuri, who edited and published the "scurrilous" (to quote Sealy) daily, Star of Utkal. Khirodchandra's son, Sukumar, practised as a barrister at Cuttack and had married a daughter of Dr Aghore Nath Chatterjee "who was deported by the Nizam of Hyderabad for intriguing against the British Government." The most illustrious of Aghore Nath's children was Virendranath Chattopadhyay ("Chatto", the revolutionary of international reputation); among the others was the patriotic Mrinalini Chatterjee who formed a trio with Kumudini Mitra and Sarojini Ghose (respectively cousin and sister of Sri Aurobindo). The poet Harin and the politician Sarojini Naidu were two other of Aghore