Pritilata Waddedar 1911–1932
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Record 13 · The Plates

Eight plates,
eight different
kinds of thing

One photograph, one degraded copy of it, one site, and five modern representations. Each is labelled for what it is.

Read the labels

Only two images in this gallery are photographic evidence of Pritilata Waddedar: a single undated studio portrait, and a degraded reproduction of the same portrait. Everything else is either a photograph of a place, or a modern sculpture or rendering made long after her death.

They are all worth looking at. They are not all the same kind of thing, and this archive does not display them as though they were.

The plates

8 of 8 plates shown.

Plate 01 · Archival photograph Pritilata Waddedar — archival portrait The principal surviving photographic likeness. Essentially every later portrait, statue, film image and postage stamp descends from this one plate. Undated studio photograph, in circulation since the 1930s. Photographer, date and circumstances unrecorded.
Plate 02 · Degraded reproduction The same portrait, after circulation The same photograph as it commonly appears in print and online — small, contrast-crushed and re-bordered by successive copying. Included as evidence of how the single likeness has travelled, not as an independent source.
Plate 03 · Present-day rendering Modern commemorative rendering A contemporary treatment of the archival photograph, of the kind circulated on anniversaries. Not a historical photograph. The colour and background are modern additions and the flag shown was adopted in 1947, fifteen years after her death. Evidence about the present, not the past.
Plate 04 · Site photograph, present day The Pahartali European Club building The building associated with the former Pahartali European Club, which survives at the site in Chattogram. The railway settlement it served is the physical setting of the events of 23 September 1932. Contemporary photograph. Not an image from 1932; present-day signage and use are modern.
Plate 05 · Modern sculpture Museum tableau — the women of the movement A sculptural group commemorating the women of the Chittagong movement, in a museum display devoted to revolutionaries of the independence struggle. The painted names on the surrounding walls are part of the installation. A modern artistic representation made long after the events. Not a documentary photograph of any person or event from life.
Plate 06 · Memorial sculpture Memorial statue on a fluted pedestal A memorial statue of Pritilata Waddedar. The striding, arm-raised pose has become the standard visual shorthand for her. Older photographic print of a commemorative sculpture. An interpretation, not a likeness from life.
Plate 07 · Memorial sculpture in use Bronze bust, garlanded A bronze bust garlanded for a commemoration. The marigolds and overhead streamers show the memorial in use rather than at rest — remembrance as an event, not an object. Contemporary photograph of a memorial installation.
Plate 08 · Memorial sculpture Stone bust against foliage A stone bust at a memorial site — one of several sculptural interpretations of the same archival photograph. Contemporary photograph of a commemorative sculpture.

Using these imagesSelect any plate to open it at full size, where it is shown complete and uncropped. Use the arrow keys to move between plates and Escape to close. Nothing in this archive crops a face or alters an image beyond resizing and compression for the web.

Note

Why there are so few images

She died at twenty-one in 1932, in a provincial city, as a member of an illegal organisation. Almost nobody in that position was photographed more than once.

Photography in Bengal at the time was a studio activity: expensive, formal, and undertaken for occasions. A clerk’s family might commission a handful of portraits in a decade. Once she went underground in June 1932 the possibility disappeared entirely, and there is no reason to think a wanted revolutionary sat for a photographer.

What survives, then, is one plate — and then eighty years of people making new images out of it. The statues, the colourised portraits and the film performances are all attempts to give a face more presence than a single small photograph can carry.

That is a perfectly human response. It is also worth noticing, because the accumulating interpretations can start to feel like evidence.

How this archive reads images