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Record 09 · Analysis
When history
expected women
to remain on
the margins
A generation of Bengali women declined the arrangement — and were then remembered, mostly, one at a time.
The problem with “the first woman to…”
Pritilata Waddedar is usually introduced as an exception: the woman who led an armed action, singular and astonishing. That framing is flattering and it is misleading.
Between December 1931 and September 1932 — a period of ten months — Bengali women in their teens and early twenties carried out politically motivated shootings at Comilla and Calcutta and led an armed attack at Pahartali. Behind those events sat a decade of women’s political organisation in Dhaka and Calcutta, and behind that, three decades of women’s education.
What looks like a series of exceptions was a cohort. Treating each as a solitary marvel is a way of not noticing that.
A single remarkable woman is a curiosity. Five in ten months is a movement, and it should be read as one.
Editorial statement by this archiveSix ways women actually participated
Armed action is the most visible and the least common. It was never the whole of it.
Founding, funding, running and teaching in girls’ schools. In colonial Bengal this was a political act with an explicit national argument attached to it, not a neutral service.
Bodies such as the Deepali Sangha and the Nari Satyagraha Samiti: membership, meetings, publications, training, funds. The unglamorous infrastructure without which nothing else happens.
From 1930, women joined picketing, salt satyagraha and boycott in very large numbers. Arrest became an ordinary risk of participation rather than a scandal.
Housing wanted members, carrying messages and materials, providing cover. Indispensable, continuous, and almost entirely undocumented — which is why it is rarely commemorated.
Courtrooms were political platforms. Statements from the dock by women defendants were reported nationally and did more public work than most pamphlets.
The rarest category, and the one that produced the records. It is remembered disproportionately because colonial policing and nationalist commemoration both had reasons to write it down.
An archival bias worth namingCategories 4 and 5 involved far more women than category 6, and left far less evidence. The shape of the surviving record is not the shape of what happened.
The cohort around her
Five names, all Bengali, all acting within a few years of one another, several of them known to each other.
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1900–1970
Leela Nag (Leela Roy)
The first woman admitted as a postgraduate student at Dhaka University. Founded the Deepali Sangha in 1923 and built a network of schools, physical training programmes, publications and discussion groups for women in eastern Bengal. Pritilata Waddedar entered political life through this circle while at Eden College. Leela Nag was later detained for several years.
-
both born c. 1916
Santi Ghose and Suniti Choudhury
Two schoolgirls who shot the district magistrate at Comilla on 14 December 1931. Both were around fifteen. Because of their age they were sentenced to transportation for life rather than death. The case was reported across India and made the participation of very young women in armed action an inescapable public fact.
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1911–1986
Bina Das
A student at Bethune College — Pritilata Waddedar’s own college and near-exact contemporary. On 6 February 1932 she fired at Stanley Jackson, the Governor of Bengal, during the Calcutta University convocation. She was sentenced to nine years. Her degree, like Pritilata’s, was withheld, and both were conferred posthumously by the University of Calcutta in 2012.
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1913–1995
Kalpana Datta
From Chittagong, studying in Calcutta, and a member of Surya Sen’s organisation from 1931. Arrested in September 1932 while on reconnaissance for the Pahartali action and released on bail, she returned underground and was captured in May 1933. Sentenced to transportation for life; released in 1939. She later joined the Communist Party of India and published a memoir of the Chittagong movement, one of the few first-hand accounts by a participant.
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1911–1932
Pritilata Waddedar
Graduate in philosophy, school headmistress, and the first woman to command an action of the Chittagong organisation. Died at Pahartali on 24 September 1932, leaving a written statement arguing for the equal participation of women in the freedom struggle.
Why this list stops at fiveIt is a list of the best-documented cases in one province over one decade, not a ranking and not a complete account. Many women who did the work in categories four and five above cannot be named here because their names were not recorded.
What they were arguing against
“It is too dangerous for them”
Protective in form and disqualifying in effect. It assigned women the status of people to be shielded from a struggle that was being fought over their own future.
“A woman’s arrest will compromise others”
An operational argument resting on an assumption about who would break under interrogation. The record of the 1930s does not support the assumption.
“Their role is to support”
Women were already sheltering wanted members and moving materials. The objection was not to their involvement but to their visibility.
“Respectability will be lost”
Widely felt across the social spectrum, and one of the heaviest costs actually borne by the women who acted — and by their families afterwards.
Equal obligation follows equal stake
The core of the statement Pritilata Waddedar left: if the nation being fought for is also women’s nation, the duty to fight for it cannot be assigned by sex.
Education had already made the case
Women were sitting the same examinations and taking the same degrees. A movement that accepted that and then denied them political agency was arguing with itself.
Demonstration beat debate
Comilla in 1931 and Calcutta in February 1932 removed the factual basis of the objection. Pahartali in September 1932 removed what remained of it.
The cost was accepted knowingly
These were educated adults and, in two cases, schoolgirls, who understood what transportation for life and execution meant. They were not swept along.
What happened to the argument afterwards
The women of this cohort who survived went in several directions, and the argument they had won did not translate automatically into anything after 1947.
Kalpana Datta joined the Communist Party. Bina Das served her sentence and returned to public life. Leela Nag continued organising and publishing. The generation that had forced the question of women’s political participation onto the agenda in the 1930s found that independence settled a great deal less about it than they had expected.
Meanwhile the commemoration took a particular shape. The women who died were memorialised most readily; the women who organised for decades were memorialised least. A statue is easier to build for a martyr than for a secretary of a district committee.
Pritilata Waddedar’s reputation has moved with those tides. For much of the twentieth century she was principally a martyr of the Chittagong movement. Since the 1990s, as the history of women and Indian nationalism has been written more seriously, she has increasingly been read as what she also was: a participant in an argument about who the freedom struggle belonged to.
