" Two people connected with the rise of revolutionary activity in Bengal did have some contact with Russian anarchists. Margaret Noble, an Irish disciple of Vivekananda, whom he renamed Sister Nivedita, corresponded with one such anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, and later met him in London. One of his books, she wrote to a friend, confirmed her "determination towards Anarchism"—not necessarily the peaceful kind. Although she was "glad of every sovereign destroyed," she hoped that India, "the most civilized country in the world," might enter the promised land without violence. Nivedita helped organize samitis (societies) that promoted physical and moral education and sodal service among young Bengalis. She presented one of these groups with her collection of books on European revolutionary history, but there is no evidence that she spoke to them of Kropotkin’s philosophical anarchism, much less the anarchist idea of "propaganda by the deed." The samitis Nivedita helped found eventually turned to terrorism, but it is difficult to determine her role. Nivedita once requested members of the party "not to tell her anything of the secret movement," yet she did help one young man gain access to a laboratory so he could experiment with explosives.( [1]
The bombs of the anarchists, not their ideas, attracted Bengali terrorists. Disgusted with the ineffectiveness and the religious orientation of Bengali secret societies, Hemchandra Das went to Europe in 1906 to study explosive chemistry and revolutionary organization. He learned something of both but evinced no interest in anarchism, socialism, or other political and economic theories. At first he thought "anarchist" and "revolutionary" were synonyms, but when he learned "that anarchism implies a state of things in which everyone’s will is law," he became disillusioned and stopped meeting with anarchists. He considered their ideal as impractical as spiritual swaraj. Das returned to India at the end of 1907 with a mass of revolutionary literature and an up-to-date bomb manual. Knowledge of explosives eventually became widespread in Bengal, so it may be said that this was the most important influence of European anarchism on the Bengali terrorists". [2]