Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (Bengali: বীরেন্দ্রনাথ চট্টোপাধ্যায়; 31 October 1880 – 2 September 1937), also known by his pseudonym Chatto, was a prominent Indian revolutionary who worked to overthrow the British Raj in India using armed force.

He created alliances with the Germans during World War I, was part of the Berlin Committee organising Indian students in Europe against the British, and explored actions by the Japanese at the time.

Virendranath was the eldest son (the second of eight children) of Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, a scientist-philosopher and educationist who was an ex-principal and professor of science at the Nizam College, and his wife Barada Sundari Devi, a poet and singer in a Bengali Brahmin family settled in Hyderabad.

In August, along with Madame Cama and S. R. Rana, he attended the Stuttgart Conference of the Second International where they met delegates including Henry Hyndman, Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, and Ramsay MacDonald, among others.

On 1 July, at the Imperial Institute in London, Sir William Curzon-Wyllie, political aide-de-camp at the India Office, was assassinated by Madan Lal Dhingra, who was deeply influenced by Savarkar.

In May 1910, seizing the opportunity of tension between the United Kingdom and Japan over the Korean peninsula, Chattopadhyaya discussed the possibility of Japanese help to Indian revolutionary efforts.

Aiyar returned to India and settled in Pondicherry where he published the Dharma newspaper and a number of political pamphlets in Tamil, while maintaining a regular contact with Madame Cama in Paris.

Chatto and some other revolutionaries stayed with her at 25 rue de Ponthieu and helped her to edit the Bande Mataram: its April 1911 issue "was one of the most violent that ever appeared," praising outrages in Nasik and Calcutta.

"[3] In connection with the Tinnevelly Conspiracy Case in February 1912, Madame Cama published an article showing that these political assassinations were in accord with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.

[9] Among its first members were Chattopadhyaya, Bhatta, Dr. Moreshwar Govindrao Prabhakar (Cologne), Dr Abdul Hafiz (Leipzig), C. Padmanabhan Pillai (Zürich), Dr. Jnanendra Das Gupta (Zürich), Dhiren Sarkar, Narain S. Marathé, Vishnu Suktankar, Gopal Paranjapé, Karandikar, Shrish Chandra Sen, Satish Chandra Ray, Sambhashiva Rao, Dadachanji Kersasp, Mansur Ahmad, Siddiq.

Other prominent revolutionaries who soon found their way to Berlin were Har Dayal, Tarak Nath Das, Mohammad Barakatullah, Bhupendranath Datta, A. Raman Pilla (A. R. Pillai), Chandrakanta Chakravarti, M. P. T. Acharya, Herambalal Gupta, Jodh Singh Mahajan, Jiten Lahiri, Satyen Sen, and Vishnu Ganesh Pingley[10][11][12] On 22 September 1914, Sarkar and Marathé left for Washington, D.C., with a message for the German ambassador, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff.

He ordered Franz von Papen, his military attaché, to arrange for steamers, and purchase arms and ammunition, to be delivered on the eastern coast of India.

Bagha Jatin sent a note through Pingley and Kartar Singh to Rash Behari Bose, asking him to expedite preparations for the proposed armed uprising.

In 1917, With the failure of the Indo-German Zimmermann Plan, Chattopadhyaya opened a new Bureau of the Independence Committee in Stockholm, which acted under the name Indiska Nationalkommittéen.

From this point on the Stockholm venture fought with the remaining parts of the Berlin Committee over the role of legitimate representative of Indian nationalism in Europe.

In November 1920, in his search of financial and political support exclusively for the revolutionary nationalist movement in India, Chattopadhyaya was encouraged by M. N. Roy (with Mikhail Borodin's approval).

In December 1921, in Berlin, Chattopadhyaya founded an Indian News and Information Bureau with his correspondent Rash Behari Bose in Japan.

[14] In 1927, while working as the head of the Indian Languages Section of the KPD, Chatto accompanied Jawaharlal Nehru to the Brussels Conference of the League against Imperialism.

On learning of Jawaharlal Nehru's becoming president of the Indian National Congress, Chattopadhyaya asked him – in vain – to split the party for a more revolutionary programme of full independence from British imperialism.

Between 1931 and 1933, while living in Moscow, Chattopadhyaya continued to advocate anti-Hitler activities, Asian emancipation from Western powers, the independence of India, and Japanese intervention into the Chinese revolution.

Among his Korean, Japanese, and Chinese friends was Zhou Enlai, the future Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China after its successful revolution.

His name appeared on a death list among 184 other persons, which was signed on 31 August 1937 by Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Andrei Zhdanov, and Lazar Kaganovich.

[citation needed] In his autobiography decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of Chatto: An entirely different type of person was Virendranath Chattopadhyay, member of a famous family in India.

No exile can escape the malady of his tribe, that consumption of the soul, as Mazzini called it ... Of the few I met, the only persons who impressed me intellectually were Virendranath Chattopadhyay and M. N. Roy.