A few months before the Surat Congress, Suranath Bhaduri of Benares, on reaching Calcutta after travelling all over Bengal, "formed a central committee at the Sandhya office, with the help of Jatin Banerji (alias Niralamba Swami) and with Kartik Dutta; Mukhada Samadhyayi, Shyamsundar Chakravarti, Arabindo Ghose, Tarakhepa, Annada Charan Kaviraj and others as members(…) Measures are being devised for freeing India and for proclaiming the divine commands which have been received in the matter (…) After this Suranath went to Puri with Preo Nath Karar alias Sri Yukteswar Giri (…) Attempts are being made to get hold of such of the ruling Chiefs as are patrons of the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal. Raja Sasisekhareswar of Tahirpur … is being fully converted to this creed." The Maharaj of Darbhanga was the General President of the Mahamandal; Suranath's father, Somnath Bhaduri, was the Maharaja's Private Secretary; Amarendra Chatterjee's father-in-law, Preonath Banerjee, was the Manager of the Darbhanga Raj; the link was further close because one of Preonath Banerjee's nephews, Natbihari Chatterjee (son-in-law of the great Surendranath Banerjee), was munsif at Cuttack; another nephew, Dhiren Mukherjee, taught at the Ravenshaw Collegiate School. Amarendra had free access not only to these patriots but, also, to the headmaster of this School (later Principal of the Ravenshaw College), Khirodchandra Ray Chaudhuri, who edited and published the "scurrilous" (to quote Sealy) daily, Star of Utkal.