The court room where Aurobindo Ghose and other freedom fighters were tried. A Telegraph picture

The author was missing from the book launch. “I was collecting material for my next book on Bhagat Singh’s trial and couldn’t make it to Calcutta,” Noorul Hoda, the author of The Alipore Bomb Case: A Historic Pre-Independence Trial, says. His absence at the Boi Mela launch notwithstanding, the book is an interesting one.

It is a well-produced slim volume on the 1908 case, in connection with which 19-year-old Khudiram Bose was sentenced to death. He had attempted to hurl a bomb at Magistrate Kingsford in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. The judge was notorious for handing out harsh sentences to nationalists.

Bose and his companion Prafulla Chaki missed their target. The bomb killed two British women. Chaki committed suicide to avoid being captured by the police.

Hoda, the curator of the Supreme Court museum for the last five years, had been researching material at the Calcutta police archives and the National Archives of India for an exhibition on the 100th year of the Alipore case.

So impressed was the owner of Niyogi Books with the exhibition that he approached Hoda with the proposal of a book. He agreed.

The 176-page book is beautifully designed, from the flexi-pack jacket, the excellent quality of typesetting and the printing (on natural shade maplitho paper) to the quality of the photographs, scanned impressions of contemporary newspapers and a copy of Aurobindo Ghose’s statement disavowing connections with any “secret society”.

Priced at Rs 395, the book is obviously not quite for research scholars. It is more of Khudiram on the coffee table.

It has lengthy transcriptions of arguments by the prosecution and the defence, and the judgment delivered by Justice Beechcroft (he had been at college in Cambridge with Ghose, one of the accused).

Unexpected details like a list of the possessions found on the accused (a reshmi kurta, among other things, on Khudiram; a railway ticket from Mokameh Ghat to Howrah found on Chaki) might urge one to look back at turbulent times whose relevance recedes further everyday. But they do not provide too many insights.

Says Hoda: “I wrote the book as a student and not as a scholar. When I began researching on the judicial aspects of the Independence movement, I found a wealth of material on the Alipore bomb case lying in Calcutta that few have probably seen. My book was an effort to make this history more accessible to people.”

The Calcutta police archives are in a bad shape, says Hoda. “Many of the documents are crumbling. They should be digitised or put on micro film.”

Thirty six-year-old Hoda is from Muzzafurpur himself. He claims to feel a bond with the place now.