The Chandannagar Municipal Corporation (CMC) has in principle agreed to put up plaques at sites where Sri Aurobindo stayed before moving to Pondicherry (now Puducherry). In Puducherry, Sri Aurobindo set up an ashram and stayed there until he breathed his last in 1950.
After being discharged in the Alipore bomb case in 1910, Sri Aurobindo went to Chandannagar, a French colony then, and stayed there from the middle of February till 31 March. According to a study, Sri Aurobindo stayed at nine places in Pondicherry during this period.
He went to Chandannagar after revolutionaries received a tip-off that the British Police were looking for him to arrest him again. Sri Aurobindo stayed at Goswami Ghat in Chandannagar and then lived for some time at Karer Bagan. Later he lived in a house near Jagannath Bari, Police ghat, situated south of Ranighat. He also lived in houses of Matilal Roy, Santosh Chandra Dey and Narendranath Bandyopadhyay. Finally, he left for Pondicherry from a ghat on river Hooghly known as Kanai Sarkarer Gangar Ghat.
Sanjay Bhattacharya, the joint secretary of the Chandannagar Barasat Gate Cultural Association, wrote a letter to Ram Chakraborty, the mayor of the CMC, with a request regarding the installation of plaques. The civic body asked Bhattacharya to submit the sketch of the sites where the proposed plaques were to be installed.
The civic authorities have agreed to the proposal in principle. Research scholars from the country and abroad regularly visit Chandannagar to see the sites where Sri Aurobindo had stayed. A research is also being carried out on INA founder Rashbehari Bose at an institute located there.
It may be mentioned that Duplexe College, now known as Chandannagar College, had remained closed for 23 years from 1908 onwards because of the alleged involvement of students in the freedom movement. A museum on the Indian freedom movement has been set up on the college premises on the personal initiative of Principal Professor Debashis Sarkar