Dan Morrison was researching the history of cholera in India when he came across a 1930s murder case that made headlines around the world at the time, but has since been forgotten, and found therein a story fit for a medical thriller. An Indian film in the 1970s was loosely based on the story, but even this fictional account could not compare to the theatrics of the true story. Morrison has written a new true crime book, The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World, that reads like a fictional thriller thought up by someone with a wild imagination. But it’s apparent from Morrison’s substantial bibliography and endnotes that all of the details in his book are in fact true.
The story itself is short and simple. A young man named Amarendra Chandra Pandey is about to board a train from Howrah to Pakur when he suddenly feels a pinch in his arm, as if someone had just jabbed him with a needle. And indeed someone had. Morrison describes what happens to Amarendra’s body after this jab.
The virulent germs the strange assailant had driven into his arm began to multiply, releasing endotoxins that would in the coming days cause at first scores, and then hundreds of tiny blood clots to silently form throughout Amarendra’s body. Their blood supply choked off by these clots, Amar’s organs faced a slow death. With his body’s coagulants depleted, and colonies of pathogens growing exponentially, blood from Amarendra’s damaged tissue would soon begin seeping into his lungs.
Eight days later, Amar is dead. His older half-brother Benoyendra, a hard-drinking womanizer, is the suspect. Amar and Benoy were the heirs to a zamindar family from Pakur that had ruled the land since the 16th century. When their father passes away, Benoy wants his half-brother’s share of their inheritance and hires someone to kill Amar. Most of the book shows how Benoy carries out the murder and what happens after Amar is jabbed.
Benoy finds inspiration in a Sherlock Holmes novel.
Benoy is a fan of American and Indian film as well as Sherlock Holmes novels. He finds inspiration in one of the latter when he starts thinking of ways to kill his half-brother.
In 1917, the Holmes anthology His Last Bow reached India. The fifth mystery in that collection, ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, concerns a death by pinprick that bears an uncanny resemblance to the murder of Amarendra Pandey.
Benoy works with a shady doctor named Taranath to obtain a deadly bacterium. Although India hadn’t seen cases of the plague in over a dozen years, in 1932 Benoy and Taranath feel it would be an easy way to kill Amar. But obtaining the plague from a lab proves more challenging than they imagine. Taranath first approaches a respected clinic, claiming he’d like a small sample of plague because he is researching a cure and needs to test that against the bacterium. Morrison includes a fascinating history of the institute.
The Haffkine Institute was the country’s premier centre for plague science. It was named for Waldemar Haffkine, a Ukrainian Jew who had created the first vaccines for cholera and plague, and who had served for years successfully fighting both diseases in India before he was falsely blamed for the deaths of several men during a vaccination drive and forced out by resentful British medical officers. It took three years of exile for Haffkine, with the help of luminaries including the Nobel laureate Sir Ronald Ross, to clear his name and resume his duties in India. In 1925, 10 years after Haffkine’s retirement, Bombay’s Plague Research Laboratory was renamed in honor of its founder.
Taranath is turned away by the institute and approaches other labs, but it’s no spoiler to let on that he eventually obtains the bacterium for Amar is killed by it in the beginning of the book.
Benoy is sentenced to the same jail as Nehru.
After Benoy is arrested, he is sentenced to the same jail where Nehru has been imprisoned for political activity. Morrison doesn’t know if the two ever met, but they both get out of jail as India gains independence.
On 28 August 1947, after more than 13 years behind bars, Benoyendra walks free out of Alipore Jail thanks to an amnesty celebrating the British departure from India. ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge,’ the prime minister (and Benoy’s erstwhile fellow inmate) Jawaharlal Nehru had said in Delhi 14 days earlier as the nation awaited freedom at midnight.
Benoy doesn’t live happily ever after and vows to take revenge on everyone who testified against him at his murder trial. The end befits a movie and Benoy probably orchestrated his final days according to his favorite action flicks of the day.
Thanks to Morrison, this story has been resurrected for an Indian audience by an English-language press in Delhi. Here’s hoping English readers around the world also have the chance to read it.