Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to...

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Durba Ghosh, ‘Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s’Gender & History, Vol.25 No.2 August 2013, pp. 355–375.

Revolutionary Women and NationalistHeroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s

Durba Ghosh

In her written confession to a charge of attempted murder of the British governor ofBengal, Bina Das, revolutionary terrorist and political activist, wrote:

I confess I fired at His Excellency the Governor on the last Convocation day at the Senate House . . .My object was to die, and if to die, to die nobly fighting against this despotic system of Government,which has kept my country in perpetual subjection to its infinite shame and endless suffering – andfighting in a way which cannot but tell . . .

I have been thinking – is life worth living in an India so subjected to wrong, and continually groaningunder the tyranny of a foreign Government, or is it not better to make one’s supreme protest againstit by offering one’s life away. Would not the immolation of a daughter of India and of a son ofEngland awaken India to the sin of its acquiescence to its continued state of subjection and Englandto the iniquities of its proceedings? . . .

All the ordinances, all measures to put down the noble aspiration for freedom in my countrymen,came as a challenge to our national manhood [emphasis added] and as indignities hurled at it. Thishardened even the tender feminine nature like mine into one of heroic mould.1

This extraordinary confession, nearly five typed double-spaced pages in its fullversion, was offered to a Special Tribunal of judges convened ten days later under theBengal Emergency Powers Ordinance. The tribunal charged Bina Das, then a twenty-year-old college student, for possession of arms and attempting to murder the Governorof Bengal, F. Stanley Jackson, at the University of Calcutta convocation on 6 February1932, where she took aim and shot three bullets at him. The story, likely apocryphal,was that Jackson, a famed cricketer who had played for England, ducked at the crucialmoment and survived. Bina Das was sentenced for attempted murder under section307 of the Indian Penal Code and was ordered to undergo imprisonment for nine years;the possession of arms charge was dropped.

Bina Das’s confession was a highly crafted document, written in English andintended for circulation. Multiple copies of the confession are preserved in archives ofthis period – in official legal and police files, in newspapers and in legislative debatesabout the effectiveness of British repressive laws.2 Within days, the statement wasbanned from publication by an emergency colonial ordinance. Nonetheless, it circulatedwidely over the next half-century, suggesting the widespread resonance of Bina Das’sactions and words.3 A remarkable historical document, it provided evidence of an

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356 Gender & History

individual woman’s voice and her self-awareness that she was historically relevant. Ithas since been used by historians as evidence of the widespread participation of womenin India’s history of nationalism.

This article follows histories of revolutionary women terrorists through severaltemporal and archival frames, from the histories produced about them during the 1930s,when they were under police and judicial surveillance, through the postcolonial periodwhen they wrote biographies and memoirs, recorded oral histories and were recognisedin the mainstream media. The goal is not to produce a fixed historical truth from thesedifferent accounts, but to embrace the idea of history as always ‘unfinished’.4 In theprocess of having their lives inscribed and reinscribed, these women’s subjectivitiesshifted according to the multiple moments and contexts in which their lives wereproduced as history. As Jean Allman has argued, feminist historians have long beencommitted to recuperating women from the historical past, but this recuperative projectis insufficient unless we contextualise how female subjectivities were produced invarious historical records. In Allman’s investigation of why one woman was erasedfrom documents through successive archival and bureaucratic regimes, she arguesthat women activists are included only when they can be safely contained within‘entrenched androcentric nationalist narratives’.5

Women revolutionary terrorists in India, such as Bina Das, have been the subjectsof many histories, but they have typically been selectively framed in appropriatelygendered ways as studious, quiet and modest. By examining the historical momentsthrough which these revolutionary women’s subjectivities were produced, I argue thatthe practice of history-writing became a crucial vehicle for making the historicalsubjectivity of militant women revolutionaries ‘respectable’, even when they and theiractivities were quite radical.6

Although Bina Das confessed to firing a gun at a British colonial official, shemade frequent reference to gendered symbols in order to explain her unusually radicalact, which was, as she admitted, a departure from conventional forms of womanhood.She notes that her ‘feminine nature’ was transformed by the conditions of colonial rule,such as violent repressions, unlawful detentions and prohibitions against the free pressand rights of free assembly. When she called British policies an assault on the ‘nation’smanhood’, she equated India’s right to national independence and sovereignty with itsmasculinity. The attack on the nation’s manhood required her to violate national ideasof womanhood and take ‘heroic’ action. At the end of her statement, she drew on animage of devotion and humility to explain her violent actions as a departure from ‘hernature’, ‘I only sought the way of death by offering myself at the feet of my countryand invite the attention of all by my death to the situation created by the measures ofthe Government, which can unsex even a frail woman like myself, brought up in all thebest tradition of Indian womanhood’.7 By offering to sacrifice her life for her countryand becoming a supplicant to the body politic, she recognised that she would becomea public spectacle in a manner that was unbecoming and immodest, and her ‘unsexing’was antithetical to the ‘best tradition of Indian womanhood’.8

This essay turns to the question of the recurring and reiterative construction of theidea of the ‘best tradition of Indian womanhood’, a concept that has received a greatdeal of attention in the historiography of gender, nationalism and anti-colonialism. Ashistorians of diverse areas of the world have shown, reaffirming the ideal woman (asmother, wife, sister and national symbol) was central to nationalist campaigns.9 In

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Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s 357

Asian and African societies that were colonised by European powers in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, feminist scholars have challenged a widespread belief thatcolonised women neither possessed feminist consciousness nor were particularly activein political struggles. These studies have shown how feminist politics intersected withother political domains and generated feminist strategies that are not easily compared tofirst-world feminisms.10 Scholars of colonial South Asia have long argued that femaleIndian activists were sensitive to existing cultural and political contexts, and that theyframed their political demands – whether they advocated lowering the age of consent,expanding land tenure or providing access to birth control – so that they could createcoalitions with a range of political actors.11 Inspired by this important body of feministscholarship on women activists, I revisit the construction of middle-class womanhoodas it emerged from late nineteenth-century anti-colonial nationalism and show howthese ideals were reshaped and reconstituted through the practice of history-writingin the twentieth century. By turning to the ideological work that history-writing doesin unwittingly consolidating particular kinds of cultural and social norms for feministand postcolonial historians and their subjects, I argue for rethinking feminist notions ofhistorical subjectivity so that we might resist the temptation to make women into heroicideals whose voices and words are read as examples of unusual agency or feministconsciousness.12 Instead, I call for historicising accounts of women revolutionaries inorder to chart how the shifting axes of nationalism, colonialism, gender, feminism andclass have contributed to the production of their historical subjectivities.13 By doing so,we might be more critical of how the practice of history-writing unwittingly reinstatesparticular hegemonic ideologies and narratives (to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty). Inthis particular case study, I want to be sensitive to the ways that revolutionary womennarrated their activities and constructed accounts of their selves within a historicalframework that privileged liberal forms of personhood and citizenship over violenceand radical political change.14

The arguments of this essay have been inspired by what is now a well-worn phrasefor scholars and historians of women and gender, as well as a good part of the Americanpublic, ‘Well-behaved women rarely make history’. This was a line that Laurel ThatcherUlrich, a historian of early America, wrote in an essay in 1976 about funeral sermonsin seventeenth-century New England.15 Taken out of context, the quote became asymbol of feminist empowerment and was emblazoned on T-shirts, bumper stickersand coffee mugs. Restored to its original context, Ulrich’s essay explored the history of‘good women’ (which I would gloss as a possible equivalent to ‘respectable’). Funeralsermons given after their death expressed their virtues and marked an important wayin which their everyday activities were recorded in history. In a keynote address at theAmerican Historical Association meetings in 2006, Ulrich noted the gap between heracademic arguments and the bumper sticker when she remarked, ‘the whole purposeof the essay was to give well-behaved women a history’.16

Such an inspiration, from a founding mother of US women’s history, may seem outof place in an article about educated, middle-class, upper-caste women who participatedin radical and militant activities in the struggle for Indian independence against theBritish. Rather than split feminist historical criticism and practice into ‘first’ and ‘third’world, or between the ‘west’ and ‘non-west’, I emphasise the connectedness betweendifferent forms of feminist historical practice and argue for rethinking some of theconditions of that shared ground. I offer a twist to Ulrich’s project – which was to



give well-behaved women a history – and instead consider how women who were notwell-behaved find themselves written about in history. By reading a range of historicalaccounts of women revolutionaries, terrorists and militants in official documents,memoirs, biographies, letters and manifestos, I show that even when women were notparticularly well-behaved, the practice of history-writing – as it has been generatedby particular bourgeois norms and professional demands – produced Indian womenas middle-class ideals of womanhood. This essay interrogates how radical womennationalists who used violence became inscribed in historical writing as respectableand ‘good’ women whose violence was explained as a part of a national project. In short,this essay traces the process by which the discipline of history makes women ‘well-behaved’ even when the women themselves espoused radical politics and behaved insocially inappropriate ways.

The lives of many female revolutionaries have been a staple of textbooks, publiccommemorations and inspiration for novels, films and songs in the postcolonial period,which began after 1947 when India gained its independence.17 Some of these womenhave been involved in making themselves into historical subjects by writing theirown memoirs, giving interviews and providing oral histories; other have been profiledin newspapers, magazines and the mainstream press, particularly when they ran forpublic office, as several did after independence.18 Their histories were written from amultiplicity of perspectives: many have thick files devoted to them in archives in WestBengal, New Delhi and London, where ‘history sheets’ compiled by colonial officialsdemonstrate how long they remained under state surveillance.19

Postcolonial iterations of revolutionary women’s historical accounts might bepresumed to offer a radical departure from colonial versions, but I argue that thereare important continuities, as these various iterations drew on a durable narrative thatclaimed the ‘respectable’ nature of the women themselves.20 As a generation of scholarson gender and South Asia have argued, the construction of Indian womanhood in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forged in the interstices of anti-colonialstruggle, emerged with distinct characteristics that tied the emergence of a ‘respectable’middle-class female subjectivity closely to the nation.21 Debates about the ‘woman’question were especially acute in Bengal, the part of India where the British establishedtheir empire.22 In Bengal, the bhadralok were represented by upper-caste Hindu groupssuch as Brahmans, Kayasths and Baidya, who did not perform manual labour and wereconsidered well-educated.23

From the work of Partha Chatterjee, Uma Chakravarti, Dipesh Chakbrabartyand Tanika Sarkar, we have learned that the ideal bhadramahila (respectable woman)in late nineteenth-century Bengal lived by Aryan and Vedic ideals: she was chaste,pious, educated and disciplined.24 As Partha Chatterjee has noted, by the late nine-teenth century, an elite nationalist patriarchy assigned middle-class Bengali womenthe role of protectors of the spiritual realm. The emergence of the ‘new woman’ inlate nineteenth-century Bengal combined public and private articulations of femalesubjectivity to service the nation’s anti-colonial ambitions.25 Critics of Chatterjee’sthesis have noted the ways that the nationalist discourse on women has been integratedinto a postcolonial, Subaltern Studies historiography without ‘adequately theorizinga gendered subaltern subject’.26 Kamala Visweswaran’s study of politically activewomen in Madras in the 1930s notes how lower-class women’s political activitieswere erased in government documents and colonial archives by both colonial officials



and nationalist politicians, an elision that reinforced the preferential treatment ofmiddle-class female political prisoners who were privileged in what they were allowedto wear, where they were jailed, and what kinds of labour they could perform whileimprisoned.27

Revolutionary women writing their own histories have embraced the idea of theradical possibilities of a nationalist–anti-colonial movement by taking up violence;their militant acts were authorised by a generation of novelists from Bankimchan-dra Chatterjee to Saratchandra Chatterjee who believed that women possessed greatphysical and spiritual strength.28 Ironically, however, their historical accounts have re-instated the centrality of the middle-class woman and her relationship to the nation.29

In the remainder of this essay, I turn to critiquing how the histories of revolutionarywomen terrorists take the form of reinstating the ‘ideals of Indian womanhood’, whichare predominantly middle-class, elite and educated, constituted by norms of sexuality,physical appearance and notions of bodily modesty that are central to the instantiationof the nation.

In contrast to the latter two decades of the nineteenth century – a moment in whichthe bulk of historical research on gender and nationalism in India is focused – by the1920s and 1930s, the idealised nationalist Indian woman emerged in a more activistmould to serve the nation: she performed all the traits of her mother’s generation, butshe was also unafraid to face the violence of colonialism with courage and fortitude.The entry of women into the larger nationalist movement marked a new developmentin the composition of anti-colonial political parties in this period.30 Women associatedwith Gandhian campaigns participated in the salt march, spun yarn and wore khadi;these actions epitomised one aspect of this historical moment.31 For Gandhi, womenwere ideal participants of nonviolent struggles or satyagrahis because they were seento be ‘naturally’ peaceful.32

In the revolutionary terrorist movement, no such presumption about women’speaceful demeanour was made. Instead, when women turned to violence, this shiftwas cast by women as a new iteration of middle-class womanhood, one in which theadoption of political violence was explained as an elaboration of patriotic womanhoodrather than its corruption. Even if these ‘newer’ women were militants and radicals,they retained an important sensibility about ‘respectability’, dharma (perhaps besttranslated as duty or fate), their nation and their responsibilities to their communities.As Geraldine Forbes noted nearly a generation ago, ‘women’s political work had to beconducted without a hint of social rebellion’.33

The revolutionary terrorist movement was founded initially in 1900 by somedisenchanted members of the bhadralok classes, and it quickly became instrumentalin forming resistance against the first partition of Bengal in 1905; a partition that wasreversed in 1911. Most histories of the Bengali terrorist movement focus on the periodbefore the First World War, when British efforts to contain terrorism were declaredsuccessful and the movement was said to have been suppressed.34 Called politicalrevolutionaries and terrorists alternately by both Indians and the British, ‘terrorist’in this context was not considered a pejorative term, but rather one that was usedby the insurgents themselves to mark their turn toward political violence against thecolonial state.35 Until the 1940s, the terms ‘revolutionary’ and ‘terrorist’ were usedinterchangeably by both Bengalis and Britons, although in recent years, ‘militant’ hasbeen preferred.36



From the 1930s onwards, a handful of politically active Bengali bhadramahila,or ‘respectable women’, took up arms.37 They shot at British officials, secured andtransported materials to make bombs, carried messages in an underground network ofsecret cells of revolutionaries and pretended to be wives, sisters and relatives of menwho were hiding from the authorities.38 From the early 1930s, a series of spectacularcrimes were committed by women, which was unusual given that the movement hadbeen known by Indians and British officials for its attachment to asceticism, martialdiscipline and manhood.39 The involvement of Kalpana Dutt in the aftermath of thedramatic Chittagong Armoury Raid, which was a four-day siege of Chittagong inApril 1930 by a group that styled itself on the Irish Republican Army, was the startof several violent episodes involving women. Dutt’s involvement in the ChittagongRaid was followed by the assassination of C. G. B. Stevens, the District Magistrateof Tippera, by fifteen-year-old Shanti Ghosh and fourteen-year-old Suniti Chowduryon 14 December 1931. In quick succession, there were more attacks committed byyoung revolutionary women, such as Bina Das’s attempted murder of Stanley Jacksonon 6 February 1932, Pritilata Waddaddar’s suicide at a raid in the Pahartali Club on23 September 1932 and Amiya Majumdar’s support for the group that attempted tomurder another Bengal governor, John Anderson, in Darjeeling in 1934.

These events were well known to the public and proved inspirational: when BinaDas’s rooms were searched after her arrest, she had a leaflet featuring photographs ofShanti and Suniti in which the words ‘Rakte Amar’ (My Blood) had been scrawledacross the cover page.40 Kalpana Dutt learned to ride a bicycle with Pritilata Waddadarand was supposed to have accompanied her on the fateful mission to raid the PahartaliClub. Priti Waddadar committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill, and left a suicidenote that revealed that she was part of a secret group that was going to create havocat the club that night. When Dutt was arrested that same night by the police, she waswearing men’s clothes. She claimed that she had argued with her mother and hadleft the house in search of some friends. The police believed that the male disguisesuggested a seditious intention.41

In the course of waging acts of resistance against the British government, thesewomen flouted many social and cultural norms. Most of them were college educatedand members of the landholding groups of Bengal. They might have ordinarily beenexpected to become good homemakers, mothers and wives. But they broke from thesenormative bourgeois and middle-class expectations, often mingling with men whowere unrelated to them, travelling unchaperoned around the city or on trains to distantparts of the country and lying to their families about their activities.

Recruited through groups formed in colleges, schools and universities, they par-ticipated in much the same type of training as their male counterparts: sword and lathiplay, target practice and handling bombs and munitions. Rabindranath Tagore’s niece,Sarala Debi Chaudhurani, had been very active in promoting physical training foryoung men and women, as had many of Tagore’s ancestors in the nineteenth century.42

In addition to martial arts, many revolutionaries (male and female) learned to swim,ride bicycles, row boats and drive cars as a way to prepare themselves for undergroundwork. Kalpana Dutt learned how to row in water tanks at Victoria Memorial and learnedlathi and dagger play with Bina Das and her sister, Kalyani.43 Priti Waddadar, whowas arrested and questioned by the police three months before the attack at Pahartali,admitted that she was in Dipali Samiti, a women’s group led by Leela Nag, which



provided physical and moral training for revolutionaries. Officials concluded that itwas more likely that a woman would participate in political violence and subver-sive activity if she came from a family of political activists and had ties to terroristnetworks.44 Priti admitted that several of her male cousins had been involved in theChittagong Armoury Raid (Ardhendu, Purnendu, Sukhendu and Hemendu Dastidar)and that her sister, Kanak Lata, had been kept under house arrest for her politicalactivities.

The marked increase in women’s participation in the revolutionary terrorist move-ment in the 1930s was a very canny manoeuvre for groups attempting to evade Britishsurveillance, particularly because intelligence officials focused their surveillance onyoung men. Women revolutionaries became especially adept at harbouring fugitives,serving as messengers between different cells and hiding arms and ammunition. Ka-mala Dasgupta, the woman who was credited with helping Bina Das procure therevolver with which she shot Stanley Jackson, ran a boarding house for women stu-dents in Calcutta, which allowed her to find new recruits.45 She also hid the bomb thatwas used to attempt to kill Charles Tegart, the Calcutta Commissioner of Police, atDalhousie Square, in a fruit basket. In both cases, she was arrested but released forlack of evidence. She was eventually detained by the British government from 1932 to1938, remaining in British jails without being charged.

Women were often protected by male members of their families because Britishofficials were reluctant to raid the houses of prominent Bengalis and offend ‘nativefeelings’.46 The arrest of Shanti and Suniti was a notable case in point: although theirtarget, the district magistrate, died immediately, officials felt they could not sentencethem to death, both because they were under the age of sixteen and because theycame from ‘respectable families’.47 They were sentenced to transportation for life,which meant imprisonment far from their homes. In spite of a life sentence, theywere classified as Division II prisoners so that they might receive books, magazinesand the right to pursue an education while in jail. Local authorities placed them injails suitable to their stature. After they were incarcerated, both women were movedaround jails in Bengal with jail officials mindful that they needed to be with womenof their own kind. Upon the devolution of provincial autonomy from the centre inDelhi to the local government in Bengal in March 1937, matters having to do withpolitical prisoners were put into the hands of the local government, and members of theBengal Legislative Assembly demanded to hear how women revolutionary terroristswere faring in prison.48

Most women revolutionaries were detained for a year or less, often in detentioncamps close to their homes, signalling how difficult it was for colonial officials to find away to incarcerate middle-class women separately from lepers and ‘ordinary’ prisonerswhose status and connections differed from those of revolutionary women.49 Fathersand other influential figures were often intermediaries, advocating on behalf of thesewomen: in 1938, C. F. Andrews petitioned the Government of Bengal, ‘representing thedesire of Rabindranath Tagore’, to release Kalpana Dutt from jail. Andrews wrote thathe had been in communication with Mr Dutt, had met him and was ‘fully convincedthat his daughter is sincerely repentant and ready to live with her parents a settled andpeaceful life’. Tagore co-signed the letter with Andrews and it was supplemented bya petition from Dutt’s father to the chief minister of Bengal, Fazlul Huq, that she hasrealised her mistakes and was willing to become a ‘good and worthy citizen’. Soon



after, Kalpana Dutt followed this correspondence with a request of her own to theBengal government, asking that she be allowed to go to Calcutta to attend the sciencecollege there to earn a doctorate in applied mathematics. The petition was quicklydenied, with handwritten marginal notes marking the ways in which the governmentfelt she remained a threat.50

During the movement, accounts collected by police informers and those by thewomen themselves suggest that revolutionary women had temporarily suspended theirwomanhood and their sexuality in the service of the nation. For instance, when thepresence of women was described as a distraction to male revolutionaries, many ofwhom had taken a vow of celibacy as a way of disciplining themselves for militantactivity, revolutionary women stated that they behaved as ‘sisters’ or ‘daughters’ withmale revolutionaries, thereby desexualising their underground encounters with menand casting themselves in familial terms in relation to their male peers. In response toaccusations or presumptions that they had been intimate with their male counterparts,many of these women described themselves or were described as ‘dark-skinned’,somehow unattractive and therefore unavailable for the sexual attention of others,perhaps even unworthy of becoming mothers or wives. Kalpana Dutt recounted thatshe was not beautiful, but dark, and as a result she vowed to study hard and become ascholar.51

In writing their own histories, revolutionary women invoked a sense of historicalconsciousness, of individual will, and the ability to rationalise their violent activi-ties that were distinct to a particular anti-colonial (and possibly feminist) moment.For instance, when Bina Das confessed in 1932 that her actions were unusual for awoman, she reminded readers of her reform-minded commitments to education, reli-gion, morality and the nation.52 Born in a reformed Brahmo Samaj family, she hadbeen a student at Bethune College, the premier post-secondary college for women inBengal, transferring to Diocesan College a few weeks before the crime.53 Althoughher crime occurred at the university, she claimed the highest esteem for the ‘Institu-tion where I was having my education – an Institution which loved me dearly andexercised the highest influence on my life and character’. She claimed religious andmoral commitment, writing, ‘My sense of religion and morality is not inconsistentwith my sense of political freedom. I believe that a person, who is a slave politically,cannot realise God, Who is the spirit of freedom and had made His sons and daughtersfree to share in the joy that is in Him’.54 By refusing to become a liberal and secularsubject in a putatively European tradition, in her autobiographical confession, BinaDas draws on a longer tradition of women’s autobiographies in India to embrace pietyand religious devotional imagery, although the emergence of a liberal self lurks behindthe confessional mode in her typed statement.55

When Bina Das took aim and shot three bullets at Bengal’s Governor StanleyJackson at the University of Calcutta convocation in 1932, she was a college studentwhose awareness of the question of legal rights and rule of law were foregroundedin her confession. She had been tutoring a local woman, the wife of someone whowas detained by the British, and she drew attention to the illegal nature of detainingsuspected terrorists without charge. As she noted, ‘Every day I saw with my own eyesthe sufferings of the poor wife leading the life of widowhood in the lifetime of herhusband, the almost demented mother, and the father every day sinking into the grave,without their having the faintest notion of the supposed guilt’.56



The longer version of her statement gestured to a number of historically relevantevents, explanations that drew attention to why she had tried to kill the governor. Shelisted a number of crimes committed by the government against the Indian people,invoking a kind of quick history of those who had been living in Bengal in theearly twentieth century. She situated her own activities into this historical genealogy,thus rendering herself a part of history: she cited ‘The outrages perpetrated in thename of the Government at Midnapore, Hijli and Chittagong’ as reasons for hercrime. These three place names (districts in Bengal) represented riots instigated bythe government, a shooting of a prisoner at a detention camp and the ChittagongArmoury Raid, respectively. Her confession is a historical document because of itsplace in official and unofficial archives, but more important, it records her own senseof historical consciousness, marking her emergence as a modern subject of the nationwhose own life intersected with key historical events that are central to a nationalistnarrative.

While several scholars have argued that revolutionary women did not step outsideclass and gender norms and attributed these patterns to the patriarchal nature of therevolutionary movement, I would expand this argument to suggest that the practice ofrevolutionary or radical history-writing by women participants reproduced the bour-geois ideologies that the movement and its participants were attempting to overthrow.57

In other words, while writing one’s history and finding a voice is often taken as a signof liberation from social norms and offers the possibility of writing a feminist orcounter-hegemonic narrative, I argue that history-writing reinstated gender norms inthe service of validating a subject’s historical importance to the nation. When revolu-tionary women took up the practice of writing history – recording their own historyand distributing it in various forms – their historical subjectivity became central toauthorising and making the idea of middle-class women taking up arms respectable.

When India gained its independence, revolutionary women such as Bina Das andKalpana Dutt wrote historical accounts of their lives: Bina Das’s autobiography wasoriginally published in Bengali in 1947. The autobiography was subsequently reprintedseveral times and has recently been translated into English and published by the Indianfeminist press, Zubaan.58 Kalpana Dutt was involved in hiding those involved in theChittagong Armoury Raid; her account of these events, Chittagong Armoury Raiders:Reminiscences, was first written in Bengali, soon translated into English in 1945, andlater into other vernacular languages.59

Kalpana Dutt’s account of her involvement in the revolutionary terrorist movementin Chittagong Armoury Raiders is a well-known text. Published initially after Indianindependence, a second edition in English was reissued on the fiftieth anniversaryof the raid in 1980. The book is an autobiography about a young woman coming ofage and eventually finding her way towards communism; its communist conversionnarrative resembles several others that were published by male revolutionary terroristsfrom the 1920s onwards.60 As had other members of the Chittagong Armoury Raid,Kalpana Dutt joined the Communist Party of India. Her memoir was published soonafter she married P. C. Joshi, the leader of the Party.61

In spite of the title, Kalpana Dutt did not participate in the actual raid: indeed, shecame to Chittagong several weeks after the raid and, through various political networks,came to meet Surja Sen and his associates. Her book described her encounters with thevarious figures of the movement, particularly its leader, Surja Sen, whom she called



Master-da. As Purnima Bose shows, the text represents a first-person account, althoughDutt did not meet several of the figures profiled in the book.62 Comprised of thirteenchapters, eleven of which are about figures in the movement, the book is a historicalnarrative of men who were folk nationalist heroes in the areas around Chittagong, toldthrough the voice of a woman. By inserting herself into telling the story of the groupwho participated in the raid, the book’s publication marked the making of KalpanaDutt into a historical figure.

After the raid, Kalpana Dutt, Surja Sen and some others escaped into the hillsaround Chittagong. Kept hidden by local villagers, they managed to evade arrest forthree years. Much of the account is about their efforts, the support they received fromvillagers in the countryside and the many police raids and attacks they survived. Whenthey were arrested, Surja Sen was hanged after a short trial, while Kalpana was givena sentence of six years, in part a result of her age and the fact that she was a woman.

Noticeably, in Chittagong Armoury Raiders, the short chapter biographies share aseries of motifs, one of which I focus on here. Although much of the book is about thehistorical deeds of men, Dutt describes the resistance that many of the male membersof the terrorist movement had towards allowing women to participate. By her account,they changed their minds once they came into contact with the fortitude of women.Women were repeatedly able to overcome their presumed weakness as women andwin over sceptics by being well-behaved, ‘good’ women who supported the terroristmovement in new ways.

As Dutt tells it, Surja Sen informed her that ‘It was not easy to take this deci-sion . . . It was an iron rule for the revolutionaries that they should keep aloof fromwomen. Master-da told me one day, “I just could not make up my mind about lettinggirl revolutionaries abscond. But their bravery and steadiness made my mind up forme”’.63 Similarly, in describing Ananta Lal Singh, whom she had never seen but hadcommunicated with, she wrote, ‘He was strongly against taking girls into the revolu-tionary network – he did not trust us. So much so that he could not trust men who wereassociated with any girl . . . To me, the highest honour in the world was to have wonhis trust’.64 At Singh’s encouragement, Kalpana Dutt became involved in transportingacid on the train from Calcutta to Chittagong at the age of sixteen and he eventuallyregretted his position on barring women from the movement.65

In September 1932, Kalpana Dutt was arrested for the first time on suspicionof terrorist activities. When she was released on bail in December 1932, she wascalled to visit Surja Sen again and he encouraged her to ‘abscond’ and become afugitive in order to avoid further detentions. Subsequently, she went into hiding withSurja Sen, staying at each hideout no more than three or four days.66 Unlike otherautobiographical accounts, such as Trailokya Nath Chakraborty’s, in which a malerevolutionary terrorist reported sharing a bed with the great Master-da, Kalpana Dutt’saccount remains remarkably silent on the question of sleeping arrangements and inparticular, her relationship with Tarakeshwar Sen, who was with her when she wasfinally caught by the police.67

The presumption that Kalpana Dutt, and other women revolutionaries, were un-chaste was frequently repeated in witness statements and depositions by those whoclaimed to know her. After she was arrested, one of Kalpana Dutt’s acquaintancesclaimed to police that Kalpana was friendly with two other women revolutionaries andthat ‘I presume they are of loose morals’.68 Similarly, her father deposed to police



that she frequently went out at night and did not tell him where she was. The state-ments are not necessarily evidence that these women were unchaste or immodest, butit demonstrates that women’s modesty and honour were causes for concern when thepolice gathered their evidence. In a later account provided to the Statesman, a nationalnewspaper, the concern about Dutt’s female honour was transformed into anti-colonialpatriotism: Kalpana Dutt recalls that a high-ranked colonial official reprimanded anunderling for handcuffing a woman, something that the official considered an insult.He said to Kalpana Dutt, ‘I too know what it is to fight for freedom – I am anIrishman’.69

The recurrence of Dutt’s engagement with what male terrorists thought of womenin the movement suggests the ways that Kalpana Dutt used her narrative to integratewomen into the movement at a time when male revolutionaries were reluctant to admitthem. In demonstrating the ways she had to prove herself, she reminds us, gently andrepeatedly, that she was a woman of conviction, of some obedience (she repeatedlyfollows their lead, but saves the day when necessary). She does not upstage her malecounterparts, but rather becomes exemplary for her ability to blend in and follow therules. The recognition of her cause by the Irish colonial official stationed in Indiavalidated her respectability – she would not be cuffed. In Kalpana Dutt’s chaptersabout other women terrorists, she refers to their respectability, their devotion to thecause, their sacrifice of social ties and comforts in becoming involved in the movement.When she found herself in Hijli jail with several other well-known women revolution-aries, they told her that life in prison was difficult and instructed her to ‘preserve thegreat good name of Chittagong and her family’.70 In a later section, after she wasreleased and returned to Chittagong, she remembered this advice and lamented that thewomen of Chittagong had turned to ‘shameful practices’, without revealing what theywere.71

Women repeatedly suffered torture at the hands of the police, but these incidentswere never described as dishonourable; rather, suffering torture became a sign ofhow committed revolutionary women were. Stories of women targeted for tortureunderscored the barbarity of the police and the colonial state. Dutt narrates the storyof Suhasini Ganguly, known to her as Putudi, who had her fingernails broken by thepolice, a form of punishment that caused extraordinary pain. Similarly, as Kalyani Dasrecounted in an oral interview recorded in the early 1970s, women proved to be steadfastwhen confronted by the police: Kalyani narrated the resistance of Banalata Das Gupta,who was a ‘brilliant’ student of a well-respected family. She was arrested for hidingrevolvers and organising an illegal meeting. Although she was made to sit on a stool forthree days without food and water, she refused to turn her companions in or confess.72

Shanti Das, who murdered District Magistrate Stevens in December 1931, along withSuniti Chowdhury, reports that they were both tortured by the police, pins were stuckunder their fingernails and they had to stand throughout their trial. Shanti and Suniticarried cyanide tablets to commit suicide if ‘our personal honour was jeopardised’ asShanti recorded in an oral history taken in 1969.73 The question of sexual dishonourwas so unspeakable that it was never addressed directly in female political prisoners’accounts, yet the idea that suicide could prevent dishonour suggested the level of dangerthat women perceived.74

Through the many genres for explaining how educated, unmarried, middle-class women became involved in secret and underground revolutionary activity in



the 1920s and 1930s, revolutionary women represented themselves as historicallysignificant figures whose unusual and militant actions were constitutive of a newkind of patriotic womanhood. Their historical reputations were made and remade inthe decades following independence in 1947. As Shanti Das explained to AparnaBasu, one of the premier historians of women and gender in India, ‘our missionwas to rouse the women of India by our dead defiance and courage in successfulaction’.75

Kalpana Joshi’s (Dutt’s) interest in ‘history’ as a way to narrate her life andexplain her political choices continued after the publication of Chittagong ArmouryRaiders. In the early 1970s, Kalpana Joshi had planned to write a definitive accountof the Chittagong Armoury Raid using government documents, including surveillancereports, informers’ statements and police blotters. Thus, she dutifully went to theNational Archives in Delhi to examine records stored there and took notes. She checkedout many of the same files I checked out as I researched this article.76 According toTanika Sarkar, a historian who was doing research in the National Archives in the 1970swhen Kalpana Joshi was a regular in the reading room, Joshi left her notebooks in theback of a taxi one day, so she never wrote that definitive account.77 This ‘unfinished’history leaves us with some tantalising questions: what did she hope to find in thearchive? How might the government’s documents have changed her telling of what shelived through? Kalpana Joshi’s attempt to write her own history using governmentaldocuments reaffirms a commitment to the importance of writing and rewriting historyas a way of reconfiguring her own place within the long history of the Indian nationalistmovement.

Bina Das’s sense of her own historical subjectivity is well represented in herconfession. It is presented differently in her autobiography, which was written inBengali during the momentous summer of 1947, at the request of her companions andfollowers.78 Because she was convicted of the attack on Stanley Jackson, she was ableto admit to being involved with a range of criminal activities in the 1930s before herfirst imprisonment (other activists, who were detained without charge or acquitted, didnot admit their crimes for fear of prosecution). For instance, in her autobiography, sheadmitted her involvement with the group that planned the Dalhousie bombing, whichwas an attempt in August 1930, on the life of Charles Tegart, the police commissioner.

In her autobiography, Das details her formative years, beginning in 1921, whenshe recalled her sources of inspiration. She cites Saratchandra Chatterjee’s 1926 novel,Pather Dabi, as an important influence and, although it was banned by the colonialgovernment, she wrote a paper about it while at Bethune College for Women. She alsospoke of the influence of her father, Beni Madhab Das, who was a prominent educatorand nationalist; among Bina Das’s publications was a biography of him written after hedied.79 In interviews and written accounts that Bina and her sister Kalyani produced,they repeatedly affirmed their connection to Subhas Chandra Bose, a student of theirfather’s, how he inspired them to become politically active and the ways in whichtheir activities fulfilled the expectations of their father and his protege. In her memoir,Bina Das recounts the many family influences that supported her entry into politicalactivism – her mother was involved in many community activities and her older brotherjoined a secret party and was jailed in the 1920s – and how difficult it was to keepher involvement a secret from her family, something that was a crucial requirement ofturning to revolutionary work.



Most of Das’s autobiography focuses on her incarceration and political events after1939, when the final two years of her sentence were remitted by a general amnestyoffered to all political prisoners. Between 1939 and 1947, Bina Das became a memberof Congress and was eventually appointed secretary of the South Calcutta CongressCommittee. In 1946, she was elected a member of the Bengal Assembly in a seat thatwas reserved for women in the Dacca constituency. In the early 1940s, she became moreinvolved in social improvement among workers, peasants and slum-dwellers. Theseactivities enabled her to expand her political experiences as she learned more aboutcaste and community groups beyond her immediate circle of non-labouring middle-class groups. In contrast to Kalpana Dutt’s conversion narrative, Bina Das recorded herreservations about the Communist Party, opting instead to join the Congress. Activein Calcutta, she was jailed during the Quit India movement, which was organised byCongress and began in August 1942. She remained in prison until the war ended in1945. After her release, Bina Das and Kamala Dasgupta, the woman who had given herthe revolver in 1932, appeared to disavow revolutionary violence. They joined Gandhiand his group of nonviolent political activists in their efforts to reconstruct the villagesthat had been destroyed by riots between Muslims and Hindus in Noakhali in 1946.Bina Das was still there when she heard Viceroy Mountbatten’s announcement thatthe British were finally leaving India, which had been the primary goal of both therevolutionary terrorist and nonviolent movements.

In a later interview recorded on audiotape by the Institute of Historical Studiesin Calcutta, Bina Das admitted that she became involved in the movement becauseall the local ‘dadas’ (older boys) were involved and they claimed that women couldnot participate. She said, ‘Ami bhabalama ye kana amara karathe parathama na?’ (Iwondered why we [women] were considered incapable of such work?) Recorded inthe early 1980s, this twenty-minute oral interview is the only instance in her ownaccounts in which she is critical of male revolutionaries and voices how importanttheir scepticism was to generating her activism.80 The oral account, spoken entirely inBengali, shows a feminist sensibility that is quite distinct from the way she presentedher ‘unsexing’ in the 1932 confession, which was written in English, and focused onhow her own status as a woman was destabilised by taking up arms. Rather thanpresenting herself as ‘defending the manhood’ of the nation as she did in 1932,and situating herself as part of a national anti-colonial campaign, she differentiatesherself from the men and more openly challenges the gendered presumptions behindwho was considered an able-bodied participant in militant national activity. The oralaccount reminds us that the history of Bina Das’s brazen attempt on the governorin 1932, which she characterised as an unusual act for a woman of her educationand caste, was recast as an act of feminist activism when it was retold nearly a halfcentury later.81

Aside from Bina Das’s own accounts of her actions, the many arms of the colonialgovernment – the police, the court, the Intelligence Branch – kept historical accountsthat attempted to understand her activities and her motivations. Although she confessedand was sentenced relatively quickly, the police conducted weeks of research to unearthhow she had managed to smuggle a revolver into the convocation and shoot at thegovernor. They determined that Bina Das had never used a revolver before and was notactively involved with any political group; she seemed to live a largely quiet life, andsome reports suggested she had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed. Two



weeks before the attempt on Stanley Jackson’s life, Bina Das moved from her family’shome on Ekdalia Road to the women’s hostel at Diocesan College. In a testimony givento the police, her father claimed that she was ‘of a very reserve [sic] temperament andalso of a sympathetic heart feeling [sic] for all sorts of suffering, e.g., she did not taketalk so long as Mahatma Gandhi was in jail’. Although she fasted on days that had beentroubling to her – for instance, the riots at the Hijli detention camp in September 1931in which a number of detainees were killed – her father and older brother said thatBina studied hard and helped around the house. She contributed to her family’s meagreearnings by offering private tutorials to neighbours.82 Although her father testified tothe police that he had been unaware of her plans, in later years Bina Das admitted thather father had drafted her confession statement, suggesting how her own family wereinvolved in creating Bina Das, the putative assassin and historical figure.83

Bina Das and Kalpana Dutt eloquently expressed their opposition to the legislationpassed by the colonial government, which allowed the police to detain alleged terroristsand curtail their movements. For these women, the suspension of civil liberties by thecolonial government that targeted bhadralok men was a sign that colonial rule hadirretrievably broken down. But this did not lead to the breakdown of Indian genderand social order. Rather, such attacks on basic social norms led to a readjustment ofa bhadralok social order. For middle-class women whose respectability was centralto the construction of Indian nationalism, the assault on bhadralok men and womenwas reason enough to take up arms and risk death. Although, the idea of sacrifice waspre-eminent, middle-class practices and norms were never sacrificed.

Women wrote most directly about the social costs and consequences of becoming arevolutionary when they described the sacrifices made by other women revolutionaries.In describing the plight of her sister, Kalyani, Bina Das noted, ‘She is a graduate withHonours and lived in all the comforts of the life of a well-to-do respectable family;still for some days of her life in prison she was subjected to the ignominy of jail dressand jail diet of an ordinary convict and had even to pass sleepless nights amongst suchcriminals’.84 Indeed, witnessing Kalyani’s trial was one of the signal moments of heryoung life, inspiring her to organise the attempt on the governor.85 In turn, KalyaniDas, wrote of her sister that the government had sentenced her to eight years in prisonbecause they did not dare to give a woman the death sentence, even though Bina hadbeen prepared to die for her crime. By focusing on their status as respectable women,female revolutionaries could declare that they had made sacrifices in the service ofthe nation that were deeply embedded in their expectations as middle-class, educatedwomen.

In the postcolonial period, histories of revolutionary women were recorded inwritten narratives and oral interviews, and widely circulated through newspaper andmagazine articles, reminding readers and future generations of their subject’s pedi-gree. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a public appetite persisted for accountsabout these women that cast them as brave, daring nationalist heroines who had riskedtheir social status in the service of the Indian nation. Ironically, because their politicalactivities had resulted in India’s independence, they became known as ‘freedom fight-ers’ in the postcolonial period. But both Bina Das and Kalpana Dutt remained undersurveillance by the Intelligence Branch in postcolonial India. Seen as ‘subversives’by the newly independent state, their surveillance files total thousands of pages. In1964, Bina Das was arrested at a rally advocating the rights of East Bengali refugees



in West Bengal, and as a result she spent another month in detention at Presidency Jailin Calcutta.86 Kalpana Dutt was repeatedly denied access to higher education by theBengal ministry after 1947 because officials were suspicious that she would recruituniversity students to insurgent political activities.87

Conclusion

It is not my project to question whether these women were rebels or heroines, but ratherto interrogate how narratives of their lives have been constructed as parables for visionsof an idealised womanhood in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Memoirs, oralhistories and other accounts produced after independence served as a lesson about a newmodel of Indian womanhood that replaced the ‘new woman’ of the turn of the twentiethcentury. The ideal middle-class woman of the nationalist period, the 1890s and 1900s,was a good mother, good wife, chaste, modest, pious and educated. By the 1920s and1930s, the ideal woman of the interwar years was all those things – modest, pious andeducated – and also firm in her conviction that political violence was a legitimate formof protest. The history of women’s revolutionary activities demonstrates how somewomen departed from middle-class social expectations, learning how to fight witha lathi, ride a bicycle, row and swim, in order to support the revolutionary terroristmovement. They smuggled arms, went underground with men in the movement andbecame adept at evading police surveillance. In this sense, women taking up armsbecame constitutive of the late Indian nationalist movement, much as their better-known counterparts participated in Gandhi’s nonviolent salt march campaigns andtextile boycotts. Bina Das’s actions suggest that she was anything but a Gandhian, andyet she grieved when he was jailed and joined him in the 1940s as he worked to healcommunal tensions in eastern Bengal.

My reading of these women’s life stories suggests how durable the articulationof a bourgeois nationalist female subject remained in the interwar years and the waysin which these ideals were consolidated in the post-independence era when narrativesof these women’s lives were stored in archives across India and Britain and publishedby prominent feminist presses. In my reading of texts produced about women and bywomen at various moments in the history of twentieth-century India, I have shownthe ways in which discursive ideals about middle-class womanhood remained intactwithin the narratives written about female revolutionaries.

I want to end by gesturing to a brief moment at the end of Gayatri Spivak’scanonical essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in which she argues that giving voiceto a third-world female subject is impossible. Spivak ends with a short passage aboutthe suicide of Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri, who hanged herself in her family’s flat innorth Calcutta in 1926. As Spivak described this moment, ‘The suicide was a puzzlesince, as Bhubaneshwari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case ofillicit pregnancy’. Instead, Spivak explains, she was a member of a revolutionaryparty and had been asked to commit a political assassination, which she realised shecould not carry out. Spivak reads the suicide as a ‘rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide’ because Bhubaneswari sacrificed her life for a political cause, not becauseshe had become a widow. A sati-suicide was when a widow mounted the funeralpyre of her dead husband in order to avoid living as a widow, which might be seen asinauspicious. Family members interpreted the suicide as ‘melancholia’ because she was



not respectably married and was ‘dark-skinned’.88 The description of Bhubaneshwarias ‘dark-skinned’ parallels how women revolutionaries disavowed their sexuality inorder to explain how they had become involved in radical politics rather than marryingand becoming wives and mothers.

Spivak reads Bhubanesewari’s suicide as an act of political importance rather thanmelancholia; this reading is uncannily reminiscent of Bina Das’s statement in whichshe invokes the idea of suicide as political protest, ‘Would not the immolation of adaughter of India and of a son of England awaken India to the sin of its acquiescenceto its continued state of subject and England to the iniquities of its proceedings?’ Thelanguage of immolation spoke to the kind of patriotic sacrifice Bina Das was willingto make, as she explained why she was willing to kill another being.

Spivak uses the Bhubaneshwari episode to express her frustration that it wasimpossible to understand Bhubhaneswari’s historical consciousness given the presup-position that women only committed suicide when they failed as wives and mothers.89

Rather than adjudicate whether the life of this female revolutionary was silenced or not,I want to read Bhubaneswari’s act from a different angle. According to Spivak’s decon-structive and radical retelling, Bhubaneswari sacrificed her life for a political struggle,but her act cannot register as resistance because so many (including her descendants)disallow this possibility by explaining it as a result of her ugliness and inability tomarry. Bhubaneshwari committed suicide because she realised she could not committhe assassination to which she was assigned. Spivak concludes that Bhubaneswari is asubaltern who has no voice, a radical whose political act of suicide cannot be read asresistance. I would argue that Bhubaneswari’s act was not nearly as radical as Spivakargues: her suicide demonstrates that she was a ‘good’ girl who had followed therequirements of being a female revolutionary. Spivak’s analysis suggests the impossi-bility of making subalterns into liberal subjects whose historical agency can be clearlyunderstood; but even if we were to understand Bhubaneswari’s suicide as an act ofradical resistance, it would be impossible to disentangle Bhubaneswari from the nationand the kinds of demands it put on its female revolutionaries to be ‘well-behaved’.

Unlike Bhubaneswari, Bina Das left little doubt that she intended to die andintended to kill when she attacked F. Stanley Jackson. Killing and dying were acts thatwould definitively sacrifice her status as a respectable woman, yet she undercut herwillingness to die by expressing gratitude that no-one died. The following passage waswidely reported by the pro-British newspapers but not reproduced in Indian nationalistaccounts, suggesting perhaps that she was loyal to the British, a liberal rather thanradical subject who comprehended the humanity of the coloniser:

But I am glad that the life of Sir Stanley Jackson has been saved by Providence and that LadyJackson and her children have been spared their terrible misfortune, and I am glad I have attainedmy end without loss of life.90

In concluding, I do not want to understate the significant social and bodily risksthat female revolutionaries took in participating in militant movements. Many womenwere detained for long periods of time, ranging from a few months to almost a decade,without being charged for the crimes they allegedly committed. What I explore are theways in which narratives of political violence are integrated and even domesticatedinto a larger history of women and of nationalism in India that privileged certain formsof bourgeois subjectivity. Why did women who participated in violent acts against the



state feel compelled to cast their lives and activism within gendered conceptions ofIndian and Bengali nationalisms, even though their actions had seemingly destabilisedsuch conceptions of gender? By reading the narratives produced by these women andthose sympathetic to them, we can imagine how ‘well-behaved women’ can indeedmake history because history makes women well-behaved.

NotesI am very grateful to the audience at the Association of Asian Studies and my fellow panel members – Neeti Nair,Rochona Majumdar and Vinayak Chaturvedi – where I first presented this material in 2006; subsequent iterationsat Amherst College, Binghamton University, and Jadavpur University helped me to refine the arguments. Specialthanks go to the members of my writing group, especially Rachel Prentice, Sara Pritchard, Kathleen Vogel andMarina Welker, whose keen criticism kept this essay on track. As ever, I am grateful to the continued support ofAmrita Basu, Antoinette Burton, Geraldine Forbes, Barbara Ramusack, Krupa Shandilya, Mrinalini Sinha andRachel Sturman, who commented on various versions and contributed important interventions.

1. British Library, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (hereafter APAC), L/P&J/7/332 (online catalogueshows PJ), ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction of assailant’,which includes Political & Judicial File 1462/32 detailing the Special Tribunal’s proceedings.

2. National Archives of India (hereafter NAI), Home Poll, File 4/33, Legislative Proceedings: re BengalCriminal Law Amendment Act 1932.

3. APAC, L/P&J/7/332; APAC, European Manuscripts, (hereafter Mss Eur.) F 341/169, Forbes Collection.The event was widely reported: New York Times, 16 February 1932; her statement was excerpted in theTimes of India, 17 February 1932, p. 7. See also, Tirtha Mandal, Women Revolutionaries of Bengal, 1905–39 (Calcutta: Minerva, 1991) where the text of Bina Das’s statement appears in the appendix, pp. 141–3.It is fully described on pp. 85–8, which draws from Kamala Dasgupta, Swadhinata sangrame Banglarnari (Calcutta: Jayashri, 1963); pp. 59–69; Radha Kumar, A History of Doing: an Illustrated Account ofMovements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (London: Verso, 1993), p. 91.

4. Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London and New York: Routledge,1999), p. 13.

5. Jean Allman, ‘The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History’,Journal of Women’s History 21 (2009), pp. 13–35, here p. 24.

6. In thinking through the idea of ‘making respectable’, I am indebted to the reading of Michel Foucaultoffered byAnn Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press,2002).

7. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction ofassailant’.


9. The following titles are a brief sampling: Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and AnxiousPatriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1996); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1992); Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1991); Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: the Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and LiberatingEgypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and theNation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Steve J. Stern, The SecretHistory of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1995); Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege,and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), see esp. pp.117–26; Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (eds), Woman-Nation-State (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1989).

10. For scholarship that shows how women activists positioned themselves under colonial regimes,see Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and its ‘New’ Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 5–11, 14–17; Geraldine Heng, ‘“A GreatWay to Fly”: Nationalism, the State, and the Varieties of Third-World Feminism’, in Jacqui Alexan-der and Chandra T. Mohanty (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New



York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 30–45; Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World(New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986); Insook Kwon, ‘The New Women’s Movement in 1920s Korea’, inMrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott (eds), Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford:Blackwell, 1999), pp. 37–61.

11. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2006); Sthree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘We Were Making History . . . ’: Life Stories of Women inthe Telangana People’s Struggle (London: Zed Books, 1989); Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints:Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Kumkum Sangari andSudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press, 1988) paved the way for many of these discussions.

12. My argument benefits from the critical analysis offered by Mahua Sarkar, Visible Women, DisappearingVoices: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2008), pp. 1–26, 133–95.

13. Particularly productive in this regard is Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women LearnedWhen Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 141–61; Tarabai Shinde,A Comparison between Men and Women: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender in Colonial India, tr.Rosalind O’Hanlon (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994).

14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 27–46, esp. p. 30; see also the important critique in Setsu Shigematsu ,Scream From the Shadows: the Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2012).

15. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘“Vertuous Women Found”: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735’,American Quarterly 28 (1976), pp. 20–40.

16. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History’, Committee of Women Histori-ans Breakfast, 7 January 2006, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA. Seealso, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007).

17. Asutosh Gowariker directed a film about the Chittagong Armoury Raid, Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey (2010).The film is based on an account of the raid byManini Chatterjee, Do or Die: the Chittagong Uprising(New Delhi: Penguin, 1999).

18. See Leela Nag Roy’s obituary pamphlet: APAC, Mss Eur. F 341/158, or the statue of her in DeshapriyaPark in South Kolkata next to that of Nellie Sengupta. Nellie Sengupta, the widow of J. M. Sengupta,defeated Kalpana Dutt in the 1946 assembly election for the Chittagong seat. Notably, Bina Das also ranfor the Bengal Assembly in 1946 and won. For newspaper articles, see e.g., Akhil Chandra Nandy, ‘Girlsin India’s Freedom Struggle’, Patrikay Sunday Magazine (Calcutta), 2 September 1973, pp. 1–2, cited inForbes, Women in Colonial India, p. 140; APAC, Mss Eur. F 341/144, Forbes Collection, Clipping onKalpana Joshi from Sunday Statesman Review, 22 August 1963; Nikhil Chakrabarty, ‘Gentle Battle Cries’,Times of India, 9 June 1985, p. 4.

19. See e.g., a history sheet reprinted in the ‘Archives’ section of Swati Chaudhuri, ‘My Only Wish is India’sFreedom: the History Sheet of Satyavati Devi’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 5 (1998), pp. 243–53.

20. The tradition of recuperating women’s voices from South Asian contexts is a vibrant one that has focusedprimarily on elite and literate women, see Aparna Basu and Malavika Karlekar (eds), In So Many Words:Women’s Life Experiences From Western and Eastern India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008), which includesan excerpt from Kalpana Dutt Joshi’s Chittagong Armoury Raiders, which I discuss below; Leela Gulatiand Jasodhara Bagchi (eds), A Space of Her Own: Personal Narratives of Twelve Women (New Delhi:Sage, 2005); Malavika Karlekar, Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1991); Ritu Menon (ed.), Women Who Dared (New Delhi: National Book Trust,2002); Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Women in the Indian National Movement: Unseen Faces and UnheardVoices, 1930–42 (New Delhi: Sage, 2006).

21. The imagery of which was crucial to the gendering of Indian and Bengali nationalism. See Sugata Bose,‘Representations and Contestations of “India” in Bengali Literature and Culture’, in Sugata Bose andAyesha Jalal (eds), Nationalism, Democracy, Development: State and Politics in India (New Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 50–75; Tanika Sarkar, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Image of Womenin 19th Century Bengali Literature’, Economic and Political Weekly 21 (November 1987), pp. 2011–15.

22. Himani Banerji, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (London: AnthemPress, 2002); Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton: Prince-ton University Press, 1984); Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politicsof Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah?



Women in Bengal, 1890–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Geraldine Forbes, Women in Mod-ern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation:Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Tanika Sarkar,Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (New Delhi: Permanent Black,2009); Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India.

23. Swapna M. Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 4–12; E. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 5–6; Borthwick, Changing Role of Women in Bengal,pp. 54–9; Chowdhury, Frail Hero and Virile History, pp. 5–7.

24. Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, in Kumkum Sangari andSudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press, 1989), pp. 233–53; Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?’, inSangari and Vaid (eds), Recasting Women, pp. 27–87; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference – Deferral ofColonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies 8 (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 50–88.

25. Chatterjee, ‘Nationalist Resolution’, p. 233.26. Kamala Visweswaran, ‘Small Speeches, Subaltern Gender: Nationalist Ideology and Its Historiography’,

Subaltern Studies 9 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 83–125, here p. 86.27. Visweswaran, ‘Small Speeches’, pp. 93–125.28. Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Positivism and Nationalism – Womanhood and Crisis in Nationalist Fiction – Bankim-

chandra’s Anandmath’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 October 1985, pp. WS 58–62; Sarkar, ‘Nation-alist Iconography’.

29. In thinking this through, I have productively drawn from the fine distinction between liberal and radicalfeminist scholarship drawn in Rochona Majumdar, ‘Arguments Within Indian Feminism’, Social History32 (2007), pp. 434–45.

30. See Forbes, Women in Colonial India, pp. 124–9; Visweswaran, ‘Small Speeches’; Sinha, Specters ofMother India.

31. Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 2007).

32. Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gandhi and Women’, Economic and Political Weekly, 5 October 1985, pp. 1691–1702;Economic and Political Weekly, 12 October 1985, pp. 1753–58.

33. Forbes, Women in Colonial India, p. 122. See also Geraldine Forbes, ‘Goddesses or Rebels? The WomenRevolutionaries of Bengal’, Oracle 2 (1980), pp. 1–15.

34. Leonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1870–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press,1974); Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: the Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1993); Rajat Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1984); Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (NewDelhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973).

35. Sukla Sanyal, ‘Legitimizing Violence: Seditious Propaganda and Revolutionary Pamphlets in Bengal,1909–1918’, Journal of Asian Studies 67 (2008), pp. 759–87.

36. Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal, p. xi; Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire: Individualism, CollectiveAgency, and India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 128–35.

37. British officials opened a file as early as 1919 to track the involvement of women, and one case of awoman active in revolutionary terrorism emerged in 1924, but the surveillance only became intense in the1930s: West Bengal State Archives, Intelligence Branch (hereafter WBSA, IB), File 223/19, ‘Recruitmentof females for the formation of Women’s Branch of the Revolutionary Party’; WBSA, IB, File 264 (1)/24,‘Information about two female terrorists of Anushilan Samiti – Anupama and Kanak’.

38. Their activities are detailed in Dasgupta, Swadhinata sangrame Banglar nari; Mandal, Women Revolution-aries of Bengal. Kamala Dasgupta, herself a member of a revolutionary party, published a memoir, RakterAkshare, (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1995). See the summary of the movement provided in Forbes, Womenin Colonial India, pp. 138–40.

39. Heehs, Bomb in Bengal.40. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction of

assailant’. See also P&J 1274/32, Letter from W. S. Hopkyns, Chief Secretary to Government of Bengalto Secretary of State for India, 11 February 1932, enclosure report by Deputy Commissioner of Police,Special Branch, Calcutta.

41. WBSA, IB, File 493/31, ‘Kalpana Dutt’, File 2, ‘Addendum to the history sheet of Kalpana Datta d/o[daughter of] Benode Bihari Datta, or Sripur, Boalkhali, and Fairy Tank West, Chittagong’.



42. John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-CenturyBengal’, Past & Present 86 (1980), pp. 121–48.

43. WBSA, IB, File 493/31, ‘Kalpana Dutt’. This file is among the thickest compiled for a revolutionary; itoccupies five volumes and nearly two feet in shelf length.

44. WBSA, IB, File 115/32, ‘Priti Waddadar’, ‘Statement of Priti Waddadar, alias Rani, d/o Babu JagabandhuWaddadar of Dhalghat, PS Patiya, Chittagong, aged 20 years, vaidya by caste’.

45. Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum Library, Oral History, Manuscripts Room, (hereafter NMML), Acc. no.648, 2 January 1969.

46. APAC, L/P&J/7/242; L/P&J/754/33, Minute.47. APAC, L/P&J/7/286, ‘Mr C. G. B. Stevens, JCS, District Magistrate, Tippera; assassinations and allegations

arising therefrom’.48. See e.g., WBSA, IB, File 633/37, Bengal Legislative Assembly Debates, 22 March 1938, in which the

incarceration of Suniti Chowdhury, Santi Ghosh (convicted of the murder of G. B. Stevens, DistrictMagistrate in Tippera) and Kalpana Dutt was discussed. For an explanation of the devolution of governmentto the provinces, see John Gallagher, ‘Congress in Decline: Bengal 1930–1939’, Modern Asian Studies 7(1973), pp. 589–645.

49. APAC, L/P&J/12/676 lists the detainees by district with women listed at the end of each section and wherethey were detained.

50. WBSA, Home Poll, File W–90/41, ‘Application from Kalpana Dutt to attend college’.51. APAC, Mss Eur. F 341/144, Forbes Collection, Clipping on Kalpana Joshi from Sunday Statesman Review,

22 August 1963.52. Social reform for Indian women was a crucial platform for advancing national goals; see the essays collected

in Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds), Women and Social Reform in Modern India (Indiana: IndianaUniversity Press, 2010).

53. The Bethune College website lists Das, Dutt and Kamala Dasgupta among their most famousalumnae: Bethune College, ‘The Bethune College Alumnae Association’, http://www.bethunecollege.ac.in/alumni.htm. Engels, notes that a relatively small number of women attended college, estimatingbetween two and three hundred in 1927 and 1932: Engels, Beyond Purdah?, pp. 173, 181 respectively.


55. See the reading of Rassundari Debi’s autobiography as it is analysed in Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation,pp. 95–134.


57. Ishanee Mukherjee, ‘Scaling the Barrier: Women, Revolution, and Abscondence in Late Colonial Bengal’,Indian Journal of Gender Studies 6 (1999), pp. 61–78; Sandip Bandopadhyay, ‘Women in the BengalRevolutionary Movement, 1909– 1935’, Manushi 65 (July–August 1991), pp. 30–35. A parallel critiqueof Subaltern Studies is made in Visweswaran, ‘Small Speeches’, see esp. pp. 83–94. See also Srila Roy,‘The Everyday Life of the Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Memory’, South Asia Research 27 (2007),pp. 187–204.

58. Bina Das, Srinkhal Jhankar (Calcutta: Jayasree, 1956); Bina Das: A Memoir, tr. Dhira Dhar (New Delhi:Zubaan, 2010).

59. Kalpana Joshi Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences (Bombay: Bombay People’s PublishingHouse, 1945).

60. Hem Chandra Kanungo; Trailokya Nath Chakrabarti; M. N. Roy.61. Many of those involved in the raid eventually joined the Communist Party of India, most notably Ananta

Lal Singh and Ganesh Ghosh, who produced their own conversion narratives.62. Bose, Organizing Empire. This biographical format appealed to other historians of the movement; see

Dasgupta, Swadhinata sangrame Banglar nari, which provides twelve short chapters on exemplary women.63. Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders, p. 12.64. Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders, p. 21.65. Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders, p. 56.66. See Mukherjee, ‘Scaling the Barrier’.67. There are two versions: Cakrabarti, Trailokya Natha, Jele tris´a bachara o Paka Bharatera svadhinata

samgrama [30 years in Jail for India’s Freedom Struggle] (Mymensingh: Kapasatiy˙a, 1968) and Biplabitrailokya cakrabartrai atma kahani [Rebel Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty’s own story] (Calcutta: SamgathaniParicalaka Samsada, 1988).



68. WBSA, IB, File 493/31, ‘Kalpana Dutt’, File 2, ‘Statement of Nirmala Devi, detenu, d/o of Beni Madhabof Karandwip, PS Boalkhali, 28 August 1933, aged 7’.

69. APAC, Mss Eur. F 341/144, Forbes Collection, Clipping on Kalpana Joshi from Sunday Statesman Review,22 August 1963.

70. Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders, p. 41.71. Dutt, Chittagong Armoury Raiders, p. 46.72. NMML, acc. no. 113, 10 March 1969, p. 6.73. NMML, accession no. 648, 2 January 1969.74. Bina Das carried a packet of cyanide with her for her assault on the Governor. For a similar observation

made by a female civil disobedience prisoner jailed in Meerut, see Taylor Sherman, ‘From Hell to Paradise?Voluntary Transfer of Convicts to the Andaman Islands, 1921–40’, Modern Asian Studies 43 (2009), pp.367–88, here p. 380.

75. NMML, acc. no. 648, dated 2 January 1969.76. See e.g., NAI, Home Poll, File 13/32, ‘Reports on the operation of the Bengal Emergency Ordinance in the

District of Chittagong’; NAI, Home Poll, File 4/33, ‘Legislative Proceedings regarding BCLA’. Her nameis listed on the back page with the date that she checked out the file.

77. Professor Tanika Sarkar confirmed that this is what Kalpana Dutt, later Joshi, had planned but abandoned.Personal communication, 17 December 2009.

78. Das, Srinkhal Jhankar.79. Bina Bhowmik, Pitrdhana: sraddheya Benimadhaba Dasera punyasmrti (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1947).80. An omission that is also noted by Sandip Bandopadhyay, ‘Women in the Bengal Revolutionary Movement,

1909–1935’, Manushi 65 (July–August 1991), pp. 30–35, here p. 32.81. Institute of Historical Studies, Kolkata. I thank Dr Chittabrata Palit for his generosity in allowing me access

to these tapes.82. WBSA, IB, File 172/32, ‘Attempted assassination on HE Governor of Bengal at the Senate House, Calcutta

re: Bina Das’.83. Mandal, Women Revolutionaries in Bengal, p. 113 n. 77: In October 1979, she did an interview with

Satyabrata Ghosh and admitted as much; Bina Das also wrote a biography of her father.84. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, P&J 1274/32: From W. S. Hopkyns, Chief Secretary to Government of Bengal to

Secretary of State for India.85. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, P&J 1274/32: From W. S. Hopkyns, Chief Secretary to Government of Bengal to

Secretary of State for India.86. WBSA, IB, File 422/40.87. WBSA, IB, File 493/31.88. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds),

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313, esp.pp. 307–8.

89. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 308–9.

90. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction ofassailant’. The paragraph ends with the sentence, ‘But the Governor of Bengal represents a system whichhas kept enslaved 300 millions of my countrymen and country women’.


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