SOCIAL SCIENTIST Pune, the British Plague Commissioner (Mr. Rand) and another civilian (Mr. Ayrst) were murdered by the Chapekar brothers and their associates. Apparently the killings were designed as a terrorising counter-action against the reign of terror the British unleashed in the name of fighting the epidemic through atrocities over quarantines, segregation camps and plague hospitals, and by burning properties, violating private domains and committing outrages on women. The arrest, trial and the hanging of the Chapekar brothers in 1898 did not go in vain, and their line of action seemed to have impressed the Mitra Mela - the group that was led by V.D. Savarkar in 1900 in Nasik - which in 1904 turned into Abhinava Bharat. Two years earlier in the far flung Bengal, a barrister (Pramatha Nath Mitra) under the hypnosis of the cult of European secret societies, a local physical culture enthusiast (Satish Bose) in touch with Sister Nivedita, Swami Vivekananda's famed Irish disciple, and an expatriate Qatindranath Banerji) in the service of the Baroda State Army, came together to establish the Calcutta Anushilan Samiti - the progenitor of the two main groups of revolutionists in Bengal, namely, the Anushilan and the Jugantar. The appearance of clandestine groups in the eastern and the western parts of India about the same time could not have been altogether unconnected, and it was not actually so because of their drawing sustenance from the same "extremist" politics of the Indian National Congress, as opposed to its "moderate" ones. They received in Maharashtra the indirect encouragement of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, whose successful concealment of the revolutionist connections could not spare him from a British suspicion of his having a hand in the Chapekars' plot. So far as Bengal was concerned, Aurobindo Chose not only encouraged the secret societies directly, but also played a pivotal role in organising them. It was Aurobindo, who during his stay in Baroda, met Jatindranath Banerji, and persuaded him to go to Calcutta in 1902 for setting up the first secret group there. Both Banerji and Savarkar had read Thomas Frost's book, The Secret Societies of European Revolution, 1776-1876, in two volumes (London, 1876), and they were struck by the hierarchical framework of the Russian Nihilists, in which the rank and file members knew only those in the same groups, and the members of the directing committee were known exclusively, and only, to one another. The leaders of the secret societies in Bengal and Maharashtra tried to set up their own organisations on the Nihilistic lines, and also to adopt other practices enumerated by Frost as characteristics of secret