Khudiram Bose Was Hanged at 18 on 11 August 1908, and a Bihar Railway Station and an Indian Postage Stamp Now Carry His Name

At about 8.30 on the evening of 30 April 1908, a bomb was thrown into a horse-drawn carriage at Muzaffarpur, in Bihar. It was meant for Douglas Kingsford, the British judge of the town, who was travelling in a second carriage just behind. The carriage that was hit held Mrs Kennedy, the wife of the barrister Pringle Kennedy, and her daughter Grace. Both died.

Khudiram Bose, 18 years old, threw it. He was hanged at Muzaffarpur jail 103 days later, on 11 August 1908.

Why Kingsford

Kingsford had come to Muzaffarpur from Calcutta, where he had been Chief Presidency Magistrate. The Sedition Committee, a Government of India panel that reported in 1918, records what he had done there. He had tried cases against the nationalist papers Jugantar, Bande Mataram, Sandhya and Nabasakti, and he had sentenced a young man named Sushil Kumar Sen to fifteen stripes with the whip.

The committee’s 1918 report says those acts “had given great offence” to the group it calls the Alipore conspirators. It says they sent Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki to Muzaffarpur to bomb him. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram’s page on Bose names the man who sent them as Barin Ghose, whom the committee describes as one of the most active founders of the revolutionary movement in Bengal.

The report adds two details. It says the police had been told ten days earlier that Kingsford was a target. It also says that a revolutionary, speaking in custody the next year, claimed a bomb had been posted to Kingsford before the attack. Searchers then found a parcel Kingsford had received and not opened: a book with the middle of its pages cut away, and a bomb with a spring inside.

A boy from Midnapore

Bose was born on 3 December 1889 in Midnapore district, in what is now West Bengal. The Ashram’s page gives the village as Habibpur. The district administration’s own page names it Mohobani, in Keshpur block. Both agree on the date.

His first brush with the law, the Ashram page records, came at about sixteen. In 1906 police arrested him for having copies of a seditious leaflet. The case was withdrawn on 16 May 1906 because of his age. The catalogue entry for his 1990 stamp at Indian Philatelics says he joined the freedom movement after the 1905 partition of Bengal, the division of the province that Lord Curzon had carried out and that Bengal answered with a boycott of British goods.

In its account of his life, the Quint says Sri Aurobindo’s example inspired him and that he joined secret revolutionary groups at sixteen. It adds that he watched Kingsford’s routine in Muzaffarpur for days, noting when the magistrate was at court, at the club and at home.

Twenty-four miles to Waini

After the explosion the two young men separated. The Ashram’s page says Bose walked about 24 miles and was arrested at around 8 a.m. on 1 May at Waini station while eating parched rice. The police found two revolvers, 37 rounds of ammunition, thirty rupees, a railway map and cuttings from a timetable. The page says he shouted “Bande Mataram” as they took him to the police station. The Statesman’s reporter, quoted by the Quint, described him as “a boy of 18 or 19” who “looked quite determined”.

Waini station now bears his name, as Khudiram Bose Pusa. The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts used it as one of two venues for an exhibition on him in August 2021.

Chaki did not survive his arrest. The Ashram’s page on Chaki says that on 1 May, at Mokameh station, a sub-inspector who had grown suspicious tried to arrest him. Chaki ran along the platform, fired at a constable, missed, and shot himself dead. The Sedition Committee adds that the sub-inspector was shot dead in Serpentine Lane, Calcutta, on 9 November that year.

What the trial and the appeal said

The trial began at Muzaffarpur on 21 May 1908, by the Ashram page’s account, though an extract it reprints from the Roll of Honour gives 8 June. Accounts of what Bose said in court also differ. The Sedition Committee’s summary says one of the two youths “confessed in court and was hanged”. The Ashram page records both a plea of guilty and a denial made on his lawyers’ advice, and says he gave his first statement on 23 May.

On 13 June 1908 came the sentence. The Ashram page places the High Court hearing in early July and says the sentence was confirmed on 13 July. It adds that an appeal to the Governor General was also rejected. The same page reprints a Roll of Honour extract in which a judge finds “no ground for mitigating the penalty”.

One passage on that page is worth reading as it stands. It says Bose told his lawyer that he regretted the two women had died, and that he also regretted Kingsford was still alive. The page gives this as a summary, not as the words he spoke. It also says he told his lawyer he had read the Gita and was not afraid to die.

Six in the morning, 11 August

At 6 a.m. on 11 August 1908, in Muzaffarpur jail, he was hanged. The Ashram page says he walked to the gallows “firmly and cheerfully” and smiled when the cap was drawn over his head. The Quint quotes the Bengali daily Anand Bazar Patrika as reporting that he died “cheerful and smiling”, and says a crowd reportedly gathered outside the jail with garlands.

From the birth date both the Ashram and the district administration give, Bose was 18 years, 8 months and 8 days old, almost four months short of his nineteenth birthday. Some accounts, including the stamp catalogue entry, give his age as 19, and the Statesman’s reporter guessed “18 or 19” on seeing him. The Ashram page calls him eighteen. Bhagat Singh, hanged at 23 in 1931, was five years older when he died.

On 16 August the Bande Mataram newspaper wrote about the hanging. The Ashram page quotes it as saying people could never forget “how the Spirit got the better of the flesh” in the young man.

The Alipore case that followed

The bombing grew into the Alipore bomb case. On 2 May 1908, a day after Bose’s arrest, police searched a garden at Maniktala in Calcutta and other addresses and seized bombs, dynamite and cartridges. The Sedition Committee says 34 people were charged with conspiracy and that fifteen were finally found guilty. It names Barindra Kumar Ghosh among them, and Hem Chandra Das as the maker of the bomb that killed Mrs and Miss Kennedy.

Sri Aurobindo was arrested the same day. According to the Ashram’s page on the case, Judge Beachcroft delivered the judgment on 6 May 1909 and Aurobindo was acquitted. Chittaranjan Das was defence counsel in the sessions court. The charge was conspiracy to wage war against the King-Emperor, the charge the Raj brought again against the defendants in the Kakori train action case.

The committee called the Muzaffarpur killings “the first great blow struck by these revolutionaries”. In an annexure it also describes the attack as the first time in Bengal that a youth of the bhadralok, the educated middle class, had thrown a bomb. The committee was a government body, so the framing is the Government of India’s. The facts it lists match the other sources.

How Indians read it at the time

Among the papers the committee’s report quotes is a Nagpur newspaper, the Desha Sevak, from 11 May 1908. The paper called Bose’s attempt on Kingsford’s life “certainly very mean” and congratulated Kingsford on his escape. In the same article it said it would be “greatly delighted” if the bombs had in fact been made in Calcutta. Praise was not hard to find elsewhere. Swarajya, a paper founded at Allahabad in November 1907, printed a piece the committee calls a panegyric (an article of praise) on Bose, and its founder Shanti Narain was jailed for articles on the Muzaffarpur killings. The Bande Mataram, as quoted above, had already written of his composure at the gallows.

What Bengal kept

The Quint credits the poet Pitambar Das with the Bengali song Ek Baar Bidaye De Ma, written in Bose’s honour. The Indian Philatelics catalogue says songs about him entered Bengali folk tradition. India Post issued a stamp on 11 August 1990, the anniversary of the hanging.

On its website, the Paschim Medinipur district administration lists Mohobani as a historic site and describes Bose as the youngest martyr to oppose British rule. It says work to preserve his birthplace as a tourist destination is under way. In August 2021 the IGNCA’s Ranchi centre held a webinar with the Bihar State Archives and a seminar with the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at Barrackpore, with an exhibition titled “The Young Martyr of Pre-Independent India” at the Barrackpore museum and at Khudiram Bose Pusa station.

All India Radio News reported the country paying homage to him on 11 August 2026.