Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980S’ Gender & History, Vol.25 No.2 August 2013, Pp

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Durba 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 Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s Durba Ghosh

In her written confession to a charge of attempted murder of the British governor of Bengal, 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 – and fighting in a way which cannot but tell . . .

I have been thinking – is life worth living in an India so subjected to wrong, and continually groaning under the tyranny of a foreign Government, or is it not better to make one’s supreme protest against it by offering one’s life away. Would not the immolation of a daughter of India and of a son of England awaken India to the sin of its acquiescence to its continued state of subjection and England to 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. This hardened even the tender feminine nature like mine into one of heroic mould.1 This extraordinary confession, nearly five typed double-spaced pages in its full version, was offered to a Special Tribunal of judges convened ten days later under the Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance. The tribunal charged Bina Das, then a twenty- year-old college student, for possession of arms and attempting to murder the Governor of Bengal, F. Stanley Jackson, at the University of Calcutta convocation on 6 February 1932, 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 crucial moment and survived. Bina Das was sentenced for attempted murder under section 307 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 and intended for circulation. Multiple copies of the confession are preserved in archives of this period – in official legal and police files, in newspapers and in legislative debates about the effectiveness of British repressive laws.2 Within days, the statement was banned from publication by an emergency colonial ordinance. Nonetheless, it circulated widely over the next half-century, suggesting the widespread resonance of Bina Das’s actions and words.3 A remarkable historical document, it provided evidence of an

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 356 Gender & History individual woman’s voice and her self-awareness that she was historically relevant. It has since been used by historians as evidence of the widespread participation of women in India’s history of nationalism. This article follows histories of revolutionary women terrorists through several temporal and archival frames, from the histories produced about them during the 1930s, when they were under police and judicial surveillance, through the postcolonial period when they wrote biographies and memoirs, recorded oral histories and were recognised in the mainstream media. The goal is not to produce a fixed historical truth from these different accounts, but to embrace the idea of history as always ‘unfinished’.4 In the process of having their lives inscribed and reinscribed, these women’s subjectivities shifted according to the multiple moments and contexts in which their lives were produced as history. As Jean Allman has argued, feminist historians have long been committed to recuperating women from the historical past, but this recuperative project is insufficient unless we contextualise how female subjectivities were produced in various historical records. In Allman’s investigation of why one woman was erased from documents through successive archival and bureaucratic regimes, she argues that 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 subjects of many histories, but they have typically been selectively framed in appropriately gendered ways as studious, quiet and modest. By examining the historical moments through which these revolutionary women’s subjectivities were produced, I argue that the practice of history-writing became a crucial vehicle for making the historical subjectivity of militant women revolutionaries ‘respectable’, even when they and their activities were quite radical.6 Although Bina Das confessed to firing a gun at a British colonial official, she made frequent reference to gendered symbols in order to explain her unusually radical act, 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 press and rights of free assembly. When she called British policies an assault on the ‘nation’s manhood’, she equated India’s right to national independence and sovereignty with its masculinity. The attack on the nation’s manhood required her to violate national ideas of womanhood and take ‘heroic’ action. At the end of her statement, she drew on an image of devotion and humility to explain her violent actions as a departure from ‘her nature’, ‘I only sought the way of death by offering myself at the feet of my country and invite the attention of all by my death to the situation created by the measures of the Government, which can unsex even a frail woman like myself, brought up in all the best tradition of Indian womanhood’.7 By offering to sacrifice her life for her country and becoming a supplicant to the body politic, she recognised that she would become a 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 the idea of the ‘best tradition of Indian womanhood’, a concept that has received a great deal of attention in the historiography of gender, nationalism and anti-colonialism. As historians of diverse areas of the world have shown, reaffirming the ideal woman (as mother, wife, sister and national symbol) was central to nationalist campaigns.9 In

Asian and African societies that were colonised by European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, feminist scholars have challenged a widespread belief that colonised women neither possessed feminist consciousness nor were particularly active in political struggles. These studies have shown how feminist politics intersected with other political domains and generated feminist strategies that are not easily compared to first-world feminisms.10 Scholars of colonial South Asia have long argued that female Indian activists were sensitive to existing cultural and political contexts, and that they framed their political demands – whether they advocated lowering the age of consent, expanding land tenure or providing access to birth control – so that they could create coalitions with a range of political actors.11 Inspired by this important body of feminist scholarship on women activists, I revisit the construction of middle-class womanhood as it emerged from late nineteenth-century anti-colonial nationalism and show how these ideals were reshaped and reconstituted through the practice of history-writing in the twentieth century. By turning to the ideological work that history-writing does in unwittingly consolidating particular kinds of cultural and social norms for feminist and postcolonial historians and their subjects, I argue for rethinking feminist notions of historical subjectivity so that we might resist the temptation to make women into heroic ideals whose voices and words are read as examples of unusual agency or feminist consciousness.12 Instead, I call for historicising accounts of women revolutionaries in order to chart how the shifting axes of nationalism, colonialism, gender, feminism and class 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 reinstates particular hegemonic ideologies and narratives (to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty). In this particular case study, I want to be sensitive to the ways that revolutionary women narrated their activities and constructed accounts of their selves within a historical framework that privileged liberal forms of personhood and citizenship over violence and radical political change.14 The arguments of this essay have been inspired by what is now a well-worn phrase for scholars and historians of women and gender, as well as a good part of the American public, ‘Well-behaved women rarely make history’. This was a line that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a historian of early America, wrote in an essay in 1976 about funeral sermons in seventeenth-century New England.15 Taken out of context, the quote became a symbol of feminist empowerment and was emblazoned on T-shirts, bumper stickers and 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’). Funeral sermons given after their death expressed their virtues and marked an important way in which their everyday activities were recorded in history. In a keynote address at the American Historical Association meetings in 2006, Ulrich noted the gap between her academic arguments and the bumper sticker when she remarked, ‘the whole purpose of 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 out of place in an article about educated, middle-class, upper-caste women who participated in radical and militant activities in the struggle for Indian independence against the British. Rather than split feminist historical criticism and practice into ‘first’ and ‘third’ world, or between the ‘west’ and ‘non-west’, I emphasise the connectedness between different forms of feminist historical practice and argue for rethinking some of the conditions of that shared ground. I offer a twist to Ulrich’s project – which was to

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 358 Gender & History give well-behaved women a history – and instead consider how women who were not well-behaved find themselves written about in history. By reading a range of historical accounts of women revolutionaries, terrorists and militants in official documents, memoirs, biographies, letters and manifestos, I show that even when women were not particularly well-behaved, the practice of history-writing – as it has been generated by particular bourgeois norms and professional demands – produced Indian women as middle-class ideals of womanhood. This essay interrogates how radical women nationalists who used violence became inscribed in historical writing as respectable and ‘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 in socially inappropriate ways. The lives of many female revolutionaries have been a staple of textbooks, public commemorations and inspiration for novels, films and songs in the postcolonial period, which began after 1947 when India gained its independence.17 Some of these women have been involved in making themselves into historical subjects by writing their own memoirs, giving interviews and providing oral histories; other have been profiled in newspapers, magazines and the mainstream press, particularly when they ran for public office, as several did after independence.18 Their histories were written from a multiplicity of perspectives: many have thick files devoted to them in archives in West Bengal, New Delhi and London, where ‘history sheets’ compiled by colonial officials demonstrate how long they remained under state surveillance.19 Postcolonial iterations of revolutionary women’s historical accounts might be presumed to offer a radical departure from colonial versions, but I argue that there are important continuities, as these various iterations drew on a durable narrative that claimed the ‘respectable’ nature of the women themselves.20 As a generation of scholars on gender and South Asia have argued, the construction of Indian womanhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forged in the interstices of anti-colonial struggle, 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 established their empire.22 In Bengal, the bhadralok were represented by upper-caste Hindu groups such as Brahmans, Kayasths and Baidya, who did not perform manual labour and were considered well-educated.23 From the work of Partha Chatterjee, Uma Chakravarti, Dipesh Chakbrabarty and 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 nineteenth century, an elite nationalist patriarchy assigned middle-class Bengali women the role of protectors of the spiritual realm. The emergence of the ‘new woman’ in late nineteenth-century Bengal combined public and private articulations of female subjectivity to service the nation’s anti-colonial ambitions.25 Critics of Chatterjee’s thesis have noted the ways that the nationalist discourse on women has been integrated into a postcolonial, Subaltern Studies historiography without ‘adequately theorizing a gendered subaltern subject’.26 Kamala Visweswaran’s study of politically active women in Madras in the 1930s notes how lower-class women’s political activities were erased in government documents and colonial archives by both colonial officials

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s 359 and nationalist politicians, an elision that reinforced the preferential treatment of middle-class female political prisoners who were privileged in what they were allowed to wear, where they were jailed, and what kinds of labour they could perform while imprisoned.27 Revolutionary women writing their own histories have embraced the idea of the radical 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 great physical and spiritual strength.28 Ironically, however, their historical accounts have reinstated 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 revolutionary women terrorists take the form of reinstating the ‘ideals of Indian womanhood’, which are predominantly middle-class, elite and educated, constituted by norms of sexuality, physical appearance and notions of bodily modesty that are central to the instantiation of the nation. In contrast to the latter two decades of the nineteenth century – a moment in which the bulk of historical research on gender and nationalism in India is focused – by the 1920s and 1930s, the idealised nationalist Indian woman emerged in a more activist mould to serve the nation: she performed all the traits of her mother’s generation, but she 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 development in the composition of anti-colonial political parties in this period.30 Women associated with Gandhian campaigns participated in the salt march, spun yarn and wore khadi; these actions epitomised one aspect of this historical moment.31 For Gandhi, women were ideal participants of nonviolent struggles or satyagrahis because they were seen to be ‘naturally’ peaceful.32 In the revolutionary terrorist movement, no such presumption about women’s peaceful demeanour was made. Instead, when women turned to violence, this shift was cast by women as a new iteration of middle-class womanhood, one in which the adoption of political violence was explained as an elaboration of patriotic womanhood rather than its corruption. Even if these ‘newer’ women were militants and radicals, they retained an important sensibility about ‘respectability’, dharma (perhaps best translated 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 be conducted without a hint of social rebellion’.33 The revolutionary terrorist movement was founded initially in 1900 by some disenchanted members of the bhadralok classes, and it quickly became instrumental in forming resistance against the first partition of Bengal in 1905; a partition that was reversed in 1911. Most histories of the Bengali terrorist movement focus on the period before the First World War, when British efforts to contain terrorism were declared successful and the movement was said to have been suppressed.34 Called political revolutionaries and terrorists alternately by both Indians and the British, ‘terrorist’ in this context was not considered a pejorative term, but rather one that was used by the insurgents themselves to mark their turn toward political violence against the colonial state.35 Until the 1940s, the terms ‘revolutionary’ and ‘terrorist’ were used interchangeably by both Bengalis and Britons, although in recent years, ‘militant’ has been 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 and transported materials to make bombs, carried messages in an underground network of secret cells of revolutionaries and pretended to be wives, sisters and relatives of men who were hiding from the authorities.38 From the early 1930s, a series of spectacular crimes were committed by women, which was unusual given that the movement had been known by Indians and British officials for its attachment to asceticism, martial discipline and manhood.39 The involvement of Kalpana Dutt in the aftermath of the dramatic Chittagong Armoury Raid, which was a four-day siege of Chittagong in April 1930 by a group that styled itself on the Irish Republican Army, was the start of several violent episodes involving women. Dutt’s involvement in the Chittagong Raid was followed by the assassination of C. G. B. Stevens, the District Magistrate of Tippera, by fifteen-year-old Shanti Ghosh and fourteen-year-old Suniti Chowdury on 14 December 1931. In quick succession, there were more attacks committed by young revolutionary women, such as Bina Das’s attempted murder of Stanley Jackson on 6 February 1932, Pritilata Waddaddar’s suicide at a raid in the Pahartali Club on 23 September 1932 and Amiya Majumdar’s support for the group that attempted to murder another Bengal governor, John Anderson, in Darjeeling in 1934. These events were well known to the public and proved inspirational: when Bina Das’s rooms were searched after her arrest, she had a leaflet featuring photographs of Shanti and Suniti in which the words ‘Rakte Amar’ (My Blood) had been scrawled across the cover page.40 Kalpana Dutt learned to ride a bicycle with Pritilata Waddadar and was supposed to have accompanied her on the fateful mission to raid the Pahartali Club. Priti Waddadar committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill, and left a suicide note that revealed that she was part of a secret group that was going to create havoc at the club that night. When Dutt was arrested that same night by the police, she was wearing men’s clothes. She claimed that she had argued with her mother and had left the house in search of some friends. The police believed that the male disguise suggested a seditious intention.41 In the course of waging acts of resistance against the British government, these women flouted many social and cultural norms. Most of them were college educated and members of the landholding groups of Bengal. They might have ordinarily been expected to become good homemakers, mothers and wives. But they broke from these normative bourgeois and middle-class expectations, often mingling with men who were unrelated to them, travelling unchaperoned around the city or on trains to distant parts of the country and lying to their families about their activities. Recruited through groups formed in colleges, schools and universities, they participated in much the same type of training as their male counterparts: sword and lathi play, target practice and handling bombs and munitions. Rabindranath Tagore’s niece, Sarala Debi Chaudhurani, had been very active in promoting physical training for young 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 underground work. Kalpana Dutt learned how to row in water tanks at Victoria Memorial and learned lathi and dagger play with Bina Das and her sister, Kalyani.43 Priti Waddadar, who was 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

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s 361 provided physical and moral training for revolutionaries. Officials concluded that it was 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 terrorist networks.44 Priti admitted that several of her male cousins had been involved in the Chittagong Armoury Raid (Ardhendu, Purnendu, Sukhendu and Hemendu Dastidar) and that her sister, Kanak Lata, had been kept under house arrest for her political activities. The marked increase in women’s participation in the revolutionary terrorist movement in the 1930s was a very canny manoeuvre for groups attempting to evade British surveillance, particularly because intelligence officials focused their surveillance on young 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 the revolver with which she shot Stanley Jackson, ran a boarding house for women students in Calcutta, which allowed her to find new recruits.45 She also hid the bomb that was used to attempt to kill Charles Tegart, the Calcutta Commissioner of Police, at Dalhousie Square, in a fruit basket. In both cases, she was arrested but released for lack of evidence. She was eventually detained by the British government from 1932 to 1938, remaining in British jails without being charged. Women were often protected by male members of their families because British officials were reluctant to raid the houses of prominent Bengalis and offend ‘native feelings’.46 The arrest of Shanti and Suniti was a notable case in point: although their target, the district magistrate, died immediately, officials felt they could not sentence them to death, both because they were under the age of sixteen and because they came from ‘respectable families’.47 They were sentenced to transportation for life, which meant imprisonment far from their homes. In spite of a life sentence, they were classified as Division II prisoners so that they might receive books, magazines and the right to pursue an education while in jail. Local authorities placed them in jails suitable to their stature. After they were incarcerated, both women were moved around jails in Bengal with jail officials mindful that they needed to be with women of their own kind. Upon the devolution of provincial autonomy from the centre in Delhi to the local government in Bengal in March 1937, matters having to do with political prisoners were put into the hands of the local government, and members of the Bengal Legislative Assembly demanded to hear how women revolutionary terrorists were faring in prison.48 Most women revolutionaries were detained for a year or less, often in detention camps close to their homes, signalling how difficult it was for colonial officials to find a way to incarcerate middle-class women separately from lepers and ‘ordinary’ prisoners whose status and connections differed from those of revolutionary women.49 Fathers and other influential figures were often intermediaries, advocating on behalf of these women: in 1938, C. F. Andrews petitioned the Government of Bengal, ‘representing the desire of Rabindranath Tagore’, to release Kalpana Dutt from jail. Andrews wrote that he had been in communication with Mr Dutt, had met him and was ‘fully convinced that his daughter is sincerely repentant and ready to live with her parents a settled and peaceful life’. Tagore co-signed the letter with Andrews and it was supplemented by a petition from Dutt’s father to the chief minister of Bengal, Fazlul Huq, that she has realised her mistakes and was willing to become a ‘good and worthy citizen’. Soon

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 362 Gender & History after, Kalpana Dutt followed this correspondence with a request of her own to the Bengal government, asking that she be allowed to go to Calcutta to attend the science college there to earn a doctorate in applied mathematics. The petition was quickly denied, with handwritten marginal notes marking the ways in which the government felt she remained a threat.50 During the movement, accounts collected by police informers and those by the women themselves suggest that revolutionary women had temporarily suspended their womanhood and their sexuality in the service of the nation. For instance, when the presence of women was described as a distraction to male revolutionaries, many of whom had taken a vow of celibacy as a way of disciplining themselves for militant activity, revolutionary women stated that they behaved as ‘sisters’ or ‘daughters’ with male revolutionaries, thereby desexualising their underground encounters with men and casting themselves in familial terms in relation to their male peers. In response to accusations 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 that she was not beautiful, but dark, and as a result she vowed to study hard and become a scholar.51 In writing their own histories, revolutionary women invoked a sense of historical consciousness, of individual will, and the ability to rationalise their violent activities 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 a woman, she reminded readers of her reform-minded commitments to education, religion, morality and the nation.52 Born in a reformed Brahmo Samaj family, she had been a student at Bethune College, the premier post-secondary college for women in Bengal, transferring to Diocesan College a few weeks before the crime.53 Although her 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 and exercised the highest influence on my life and character’. She claimed religious and moral commitment, writing, ‘My sense of religion and morality is not inconsistent with 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 daughters free to share in the joy that is in Him’.54 By refusing to become a liberal and secular subject in a putatively European tradition, in her autobiographical confession, Bina Das draws on a longer tradition of women’s autobiographies in India to embrace piety and religious devotional imagery, although the emergence of a liberal self lurks behind the confessional mode in her typed statement.55 When Bina Das took aim and shot three bullets at Bengal’s Governor Stanley Jackson at the University of Calcutta convocation in 1932, she was a college student whose awareness of the question of legal rights and rule of law were foregrounded in her confession. She had been tutoring a local woman, the wife of someone who was detained by the British, and she drew attention to the illegal nature of detaining suspected terrorists without charge. As she noted, ‘Every day I saw with my own eyes the sufferings of the poor wife leading the life of widowhood in the lifetime of her husband, 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 relevant events, explanations that drew attention to why she had tried to kill the governor. She listed 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 the early twentieth century. She situated her own activities into this historical genealogy, thus rendering herself a part of history: she cited ‘The outrages perpetrated in the name of the Government at Midnapore, Hijli and Chittagong’ as reasons for her crime. These three place names (districts in Bengal) represented riots instigated by the government, a shooting of a prisoner at a detention camp and the Chittagong Armoury Raid, respectively. Her confession is a historical document because of its place in official and unofficial archives, but more important, it records her own sense of historical consciousness, marking her emergence as a modern subject of the nation whose own life intersected with key historical events that are central to a nationalist narrative. While several scholars have argued that revolutionary women did not step outside class and gender norms and attributed these patterns to the patriarchal nature of the revolutionary movement, I would expand this argument to suggest that the practice of revolutionary or radical history-writing by women participants reproduced the bourgeois 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 sign of liberation from social norms and offers the possibility of writing a feminist or counter-hegemonic narrative, I argue that history-writing reinstated gender norms in the service of validating a subject’s historical importance to the nation. When revolutionary women took up the practice of writing history – recording their own history and distributing it in various forms – their historical subjectivity became central to authorising and making the idea of middle-class women taking up arms respectable. When India gained its independence, revolutionary women such as Bina Das and Kalpana Dutt wrote historical accounts of their lives: Bina Das’s autobiography was originally published in Bengali in 1947. The autobiography was subsequently reprinted several times and has recently been translated into English and published by the Indian feminist press, Zubaan.58 Kalpana Dutt was involved in hiding those involved in the Chittagong Armoury Raid; her account of these events, Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences, was first written in Bengali, soon translated into English in 1945, and later into other vernacular languages.59 Kalpana Dutt’s account of her involvement in the revolutionary terrorist movement in Chittagong Armoury Raiders is a well-known text. Published initially after Indian independence, a second edition in English was reissued on the fiftieth anniversary of the raid in 1980. The book is an autobiography about a young woman coming of age and eventually finding her way towards communism; its communist conversion narrative resembles several others that were published by male revolutionary terrorists from 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 soon after 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, she came 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 the various 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, although Dutt did not meet several of the figures profiled in the book.62 Comprised of thirteen chapters, eleven of which are about figures in the movement, the book is a historical narrative of men who were folk nationalist heroes in the areas around Chittagong, told through the voice of a woman. By inserting herself into telling the story of the group who participated in the raid, the book’s publication marked the making of Kalpana Dutt into a historical figure. After the raid, Kalpana Dutt, Surja Sen and some others escaped into the hills around Chittagong. Kept hidden by local villagers, they managed to evade arrest for three years. Much of the account is about their efforts, the support they received from villagers in the countryside and the many police raids and attacks they survived. When they were arrested, Surja Sen was hanged after a short trial, while Kalpana was given a 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 a series of motifs, one of which I focus on here. Although much of the book is about the historical deeds of men, Dutt describes the resistance that many of the male members of 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 and win over sceptics by being well-behaved, ‘good’ women who supported the terrorist movement 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 from women. Master-da told me one day, “I just could not make up my mind about letting girl revolutionaries abscond. But their bravery and steadiness made my mind up for me”’.63 Similarly, in describing Ananta Lal Singh, whom she had never seen but had communicated with, she wrote, ‘He was strongly against taking girls into the revolutionary network – he did not trust us. So much so that he could not trust men who were associated with any girl . . . To me, the highest honour in the world was to have won his trust’.64 At Singh’s encouragement, Kalpana Dutt became involved in transporting acid on the train from Calcutta to Chittagong at the age of sixteen and he eventually regretted his position on barring women from the movement.65 In September 1932, Kalpana Dutt was arrested for the first time on suspicion of terrorist activities. When she was released on bail in December 1932, she was called to visit Surja Sen again and he encouraged her to ‘abscond’ and become a fugitive in order to avoid further detentions. Subsequently, she went into hiding with Surja Sen, staying at each hideout no more than three or four days.66 Unlike other autobiographical accounts, such as Trailokya Nath Chakraborty’s, in which a male revolutionary terrorist reported sharing a bed with the great Master-da, Kalpana Dutt’s account remains remarkably silent on the question of sleeping arrangements and in particular, her relationship with Tarakeshwar Sen, who was with her when she was finally caught by the police.67 The presumption that Kalpana Dutt, and other women revolutionaries, were unchaste was frequently repeated in witness statements and depositions by those who claimed to know her. After she was arrested, one of Kalpana Dutt’s acquaintances claimed to police that Kalpana was friendly with two other women revolutionaries and that ‘I presume they are of loose morals’.68 Similarly, her father deposed to police

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s 365 that she frequently went out at night and did not tell him where she was. The statements are not necessarily evidence that these women were unchaste or immodest, but it demonstrates that women’s modesty and honour were causes for concern when the police gathered their evidence. In a later account provided to the Statesman, a national newspaper, the concern about Dutt’s female honour was transformed into anti-colonial patriotism: Kalpana Dutt recalls that a high-ranked colonial official reprimanded an underling 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 an Irishman’.69 The recurrence of Dutt’s engagement with what male terrorists thought of women in the movement suggests the ways that Kalpana Dutt used her narrative to integrate women into the movement at a time when male revolutionaries were reluctant to admit them. In demonstrating the ways she had to prove herself, she reminds us, gently and repeatedly, that she was a woman of conviction, of some obedience (she repeatedly follows their lead, but saves the day when necessary). She does not upstage her male counterparts, but rather becomes exemplary for her ability to blend in and follow the rules. The recognition of her cause by the Irish colonial official stationed in India validated her respectability – she would not be cuffed. In Kalpana Dutt’s chapters about other women terrorists, she refers to their respectability, their devotion to the cause, 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 revolutionaries, they told her that life in prison was difficult and instructed her to ‘preserve the great good name of Chittagong and her family’.70 In a later section, after she was released and returned to Chittagong, she remembered this advice and lamented that the women of Chittagong had turned to ‘shameful practices’, without revealing what they were.71 Women repeatedly suffered torture at the hands of the police, but these incidents were never described as dishonourable; rather, suffering torture became a sign of how committed revolutionary women were. Stories of women targeted for torture underscored the barbarity of the police and the colonial state. Dutt narrates the story of Suhasini Ganguly, known to her as Putudi, who had her fingernails broken by the police, a form of punishment that caused extraordinary pain. Similarly, as Kalyani Das recounted in an oral interview recorded in the early 1970s, women proved to be steadfast when 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 hiding revolvers and organising an illegal meeting. Although she was made to sit on a stool for three 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 with Suniti Chowdhury, reports that they were both tortured by the police, pins were stuck under their fingernails and they had to stand throughout their trial. Shanti and Suniti carried cyanide tablets to commit suicide if ‘our personal honour was jeopardised’ as Shanti recorded in an oral history taken in 1969.73 The question of sexual dishonour was 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 danger that women perceived.74 Through the many genres for explaining how educated, unmarried, middle- class women became involved in secret and underground revolutionary activity in

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 366 Gender & History the 1920s and 1930s, revolutionary women represented themselves as historically significant figures whose unusual and militant actions were constitutive of a new kind of patriotic womanhood. Their historical reputations were made and remade in the decades following independence in 1947. As Shanti Das explained to Aparna Basu, one of the premier historians of women and gender in India, ‘our mission was to rouse the women of India by our dead defiance and courage in successful action’.75 Kalpana Joshi’s (Dutt’s) interest in ‘history’ as a way to narrate her life and explain her political choices continued after the publication of Chittagong Armoury Raiders. In the early 1970s, Kalpana Joshi had planned to write a definitive account of the Chittagong Armoury Raid using government documents, including surveillance reports, informers’ statements and police blotters. Thus, she dutifully went to the National Archives in Delhi to examine records stored there and took notes. She checked out many of the same files I checked out as I researched this article.76 According to Tanika Sarkar, a historian who was doing research in the National Archives in the 1970s when Kalpana Joshi was a regular in the reading room, Joshi left her notebooks in the back 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 the archive? How might the government’s documents have changed her telling of what she lived through? Kalpana Joshi’s attempt to write her own history using governmental documents reaffirms a commitment to the importance of writing and rewriting history as a way of reconfiguring her own place within the long history of the Indian nationalist movement. Bina Das’s sense of her own historical subjectivity is well represented in her confession. It is presented differently in her autobiography, which was written in Bengali during the momentous summer of 1947, at the request of her companions and followers.78 Because she was convicted of the attack on Stanley Jackson, she was able to admit to being involved with a range of criminal activities in the 1930s before her first imprisonment (other activists, who were detained without charge or acquitted, did not admit their crimes for fear of prosecution). For instance, in her autobiography, she admitted her involvement with the group that planned the Dalhousie bombing, which was 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, when she 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 colonial government, she wrote a paper about it while at Bethune College for Women. She also spoke of the influence of her father, Beni Madhab Das, who was a prominent educator and nationalist; among Bina Das’s publications was a biography of him written after he died.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 their father’s, how he inspired them to become politically active and the ways in which their activities fulfilled the expectations of their father and his proteg´ e.´ In her memoir, Bina Das recounts the many family influences that supported her entry into political activism – her mother was involved in many community activities and her older brother joined a secret party and was jailed in the 1920s – and how difficult it was to keep her involvement a secret from her family, something that was a crucial requirement of turning to revolutionary work.

Most of Das’s autobiography focuses on her incarceration and political events after 1939, when the final two years of her sentence were remitted by a general amnesty offered to all political prisoners. Between 1939 and 1947, Bina Das became a member of Congress and was eventually appointed secretary of the South Calcutta Congress Committee. In 1946, she was elected a member of the Bengal Assembly in a seat that was reserved for women in the Dacca constituency. In the early 1940s, she became more involved in social improvement among workers, peasants and slum-dwellers. These activities enabled her to expand her political experiences as she learned more about caste and community groups beyond her immediate circle of non-labouring middle- class groups. In contrast to Kalpana Dutt’s conversion narrative, Bina Das recorded her reservations about the Communist Party, opting instead to join the Congress. Active in Calcutta, she was jailed during the Quit India movement, which was organised by Congress and began in August 1942. She remained in prison until the war ended in 1945. After her release, Bina Das and Kamala Dasgupta, the woman who had given her the revolver in 1932, appeared to disavow revolutionary violence. They joined Gandhi and his group of nonviolent political activists in their efforts to reconstruct the villages that 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 that the British were finally leaving India, which had been the primary goal of both the revolutionary terrorist and nonviolent movements. In a later interview recorded on audiotape by the Institute of Historical Studies in Calcutta, Bina Das admitted that she became involved in the movement because all the local ‘dadas’ (older boys) were involved and they claimed that women could not participate. She said, ‘Ami¯ bhabal¯ ama¯ yek¯ ana¯ amar¯ a¯ karathe¯ parathama na?’¯ (I wondered why we [women] were considered incapable of such work?) Recorded in the early 1980s, this twenty-minute oral interview is the only instance in her own accounts in which she is critical of male revolutionaries and voices how important their scepticism was to generating her activism.80 The oral account, spoken entirely in Bengali, shows a feminist sensibility that is quite distinct from the way she presented her ‘unsexing’ in the 1932 confession, which was written in English, and focused on how her own status as a woman was destabilised by taking up arms. Rather than presenting 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 differentiates herself from the men and more openly challenges the gendered presumptions behind who was considered an able-bodied participant in militant national activity. The oral account reminds us that the history of Bina Das’s brazen attempt on the governor in 1932, which she characterised as an unusual act for a woman of her education and caste, was recast as an act of feminist activism when it was retold nearly a half century later.81 Aside from Bina Das’s own accounts of her actions, the many arms of the colonial government – the police, the court, the Intelligence Branch – kept historical accounts that attempted to understand her activities and her motivations. Although she confessed and was sentenced relatively quickly, the police conducted weeks of research to unearth how she had managed to smuggle a revolver into the convocation and shoot at the governor. They determined that Bina Das had never used a revolver before and was not actively involved with any political group; she seemed to live a largely quiet life, and some reports suggested she had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed. Two

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 368 Gender & History weeks before the attempt on Stanley Jackson’s life, Bina Das moved from her family’s home on Ekdalia Road to the women’s hostel at Diocesan College. In a testimony given to the police, her father claimed that she was ‘of a very reserve [sic] temperament and also of a sympathetic heart feeling [sic] for all sorts of suffering, e.g., she did not take talk so long as Mahatma Gandhi was in jail’. Although she fasted on days that had been troubling to her – for instance, the riots at the Hijli detention camp in September 1931 in which a number of detainees were killed – her father and older brother said that Bina studied hard and helped around the house. She contributed to her family’s meagre earnings by offering private tutorials to neighbours.82 Although her father testified to the police that he had been unaware of her plans, in later years Bina Das admitted that her father had drafted her confession statement, suggesting how her own family were involved in creating Bina Das, the putative assassin and historical figure.83 Bina Das and Kalpana Dutt eloquently expressed their opposition to the legislation passed by the colonial government, which allowed the police to detain alleged terrorists and curtail their movements. For these women, the suspension of civil liberties by the colonial government that targeted bhadralok men was a sign that colonial rule had irretrievably broken down. But this did not lead to the breakdown of Indian gender and social order. Rather, such attacks on basic social norms led to a readjustment of a bhadralok social order. For middle-class women whose respectability was central to the construction of Indian nationalism, the assault on bhadralok men and women was reason enough to take up arms and risk death. Although, the idea of sacrifice was pre-eminent, middle-class practices and norms were never sacrificed. Women wrote most directly about the social costs and consequences of becoming a revolutionary 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 with Honours 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 dress and jail diet of an ordinary convict and had even to pass sleepless nights amongst such criminals’.84 Indeed, witnessing Kalyani’s trial was one of the signal moments of her young life, inspiring her to organise the attempt on the governor.85 In turn, Kalyani Das, wrote of her sister that the government had sentenced her to eight years in prison because they did not dare to give a woman the death sentence, even though Bina had been 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 of the nation that were deeply embedded in their expectations as middle-class, educated women. In the postcolonial period, histories of revolutionary women were recorded in written narratives and oral interviews, and widely circulated through newspaper and magazine articles, reminding readers and future generations of their subject’s pedi- gree. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a public appetite persisted for accounts about these women that cast them as brave, daring nationalist heroines who had risked their social status in the service of the Indian nation. Ironically, because their political activities 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 under surveillance by the Intelligence Branch in postcolonial India. Seen as ‘subversives’ by the newly independent state, their surveillance files total thousands of pages. In 1964, Bina Das was arrested at a rally advocating the rights of East Bengali refugees

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s 369 in West Bengal, and as a result she spent another month in detention at Presidency Jail in Calcutta.86 Kalpana Dutt was repeatedly denied access to higher education by the Bengal ministry after 1947 because officials were suspicious that she would recruit university students to insurgent political activities.87

Conclusion It is not my project to question whether these women were rebels or heroines, but rather to interrogate how narratives of their lives have been constructed as parables for visions of an idealised womanhood in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Memoirs, oral histories and other accounts produced after independence served as a lesson about a new model of Indian womanhood that replaced the ‘new woman’ of the turn of the twentieth century. 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 and 1930s, the ideal woman of the interwar years was all those things – modest, pious and educated – and also firm in her conviction that political violence was a legitimate form of protest. The history of women’s revolutionary activities demonstrates how some women departed from middle-class social expectations, learning how to fight with a lathi, ride a bicycle, row and swim, in order to support the revolutionary terrorist movement. They smuggled arms, went underground with men in the movement and became adept at evading police surveillance. In this sense, women taking up arms became constitutive of the late Indian nationalist movement, much as their better- known counterparts participated in Gandhi’s nonviolent salt march campaigns and textile boycotts. Bina Das’s actions suggest that she was anything but a Gandhian, and yet she grieved when he was jailed and joined him in the 1940s as he worked to heal communal tensions in eastern Bengal. My reading of these women’s life stories suggests how durable the articulation of a bourgeois nationalist female subject remained in the interwar years and the ways in which these ideals were consolidated in the post-independence era when narratives of these women’s lives were stored in archives across India and Britain and published by prominent feminist presses. In my reading of texts produced about women and by women at various moments in the history of twentieth-century India, I have shown the ways in which discursive ideals about middle-class womanhood remained intact within the narratives written about female revolutionaries. I want to end by gesturing to a brief moment at the end of Gayatri Spivak’s canonical essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in which she argues that giving voice to a third-world female subject is impossible. Spivak ends with a short passage about the suicide of Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri, who hanged herself in her family’s flat in north Calcutta in 1926. As Spivak described this moment, ‘The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhubaneshwari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy’. Instead, Spivak explains, she was a member of a revolutionary party and had been asked to commit a political assassination, which she realised she could 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 because she had become a widow. A sati-suicide was when a widow mounted the funeral pyre of her dead husband in order to avoid living as a widow, which might be seen as inauspicious. Family members interpreted the suicide as ‘melancholia’ because she was

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 370 Gender & History not respectably married and was ‘dark-skinned’.88 The description of Bhubaneshwari as ‘dark-skinned’ parallels how women revolutionaries disavowed their sexuality in order to explain how they had become involved in radical politics rather than marrying and becoming wives and mothers. Spivak reads Bhubanesewari’s suicide as an act of political importance rather than melancholia; this reading is uncannily reminiscent of Bina Das’s statement in which she invokes the idea of suicide as political protest, ‘Would not the immolation of a daughter of India and of a son of England awaken India to the sin of its acquiescence to its continued state of subject and England to the iniquities of its proceedings?’ The language of immolation spoke to the kind of patriotic sacrifice Bina Das was willing to make, as she explained why she was willing to kill another being. Spivak uses the Bhubaneshwari episode to express her frustration that it was impossible 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 to marry. Bhubaneshwari committed suicide because she realised she could not commit the assassination to which she was assigned. Spivak concludes that Bhubaneswari is a subaltern who has no voice, a radical whose political act of suicide cannot be read as resistance. I would argue that Bhubaneswari’s act was not nearly as radical as Spivak argues: her suicide demonstrates that she was a ‘good’ girl who had followed the requirements of being a female revolutionary. Spivak’s analysis suggests the impossi- bility of making subalterns into liberal subjects whose historical agency can be clearly understood; but even if we were to understand Bhubaneswari’s suicide as an act of radical resistance, it would be impossible to disentangle Bhubaneswari from the nation and 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 and intended to kill when she attacked F. Stanley Jackson. Killing and dying were acts that would definitively sacrifice her status as a respectable woman, yet she undercut her willingness to die by expressing gratitude that no-one died. The following passage was widely reported by the pro-British newspapers but not reproduced in Indian nationalist accounts, suggesting perhaps that she was loyal to the British, a liberal rather than radical 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 Lady Jackson and her children have been spared their terrible misfortune, and I am glad I have attained my end without loss of life.90

In concluding, I do not want to understate the significant social and bodily risks that female revolutionaries took in participating in militant movements. Many women were 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 the ways in which narratives of political violence are integrated and even domesticated into a larger history of women and of nationalism in India that privileged certain forms of bourgeois subjectivity. Why did women who participated in violent acts against the

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal, 1930 to the 1980s 371 state feel compelled to cast their lives and activism within gendered conceptions of Indian and Bengali nationalisms, even though their actions had seemingly destabilised such conceptions of gender? By reading the narratives produced by these women and those sympathetic to them, we can imagine how ‘well-behaved women’ can indeed make history because history makes women well-behaved.

Notes I 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 iterations at Amherst College, Binghamton University, and Jadavpur University helped me to refine the arguments. Special thanks go to the members of my writing group, especially Rachel Prentice, Sara Pritchard, Kathleen Vogel and Marina Welker, whose keen criticism kept this essay on track. As ever, I am grateful to the continued support of Amrita Basu, Antoinette Burton, Geraldine Forbes, Barbara Ramusack, Krupa Shandilya, Mrinalini Sinha and Rachel 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 catalogue shows 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 Bengal Criminal 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 the Times 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 Banglar nari (Calcutta: Jayashri, 1963); pp. 59–69; Radha Kumar, A History of Doing: an Illustrated Account of Movements 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 Foucault offered 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 of assailant’. 8. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction of assailant’. 9. The following titles are a brief sampling: Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 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 Liberating Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 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 Great Way 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’, in Mrinalini 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: Duke University Press, 2006); Sthree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘WeWere Making History . . . ’: Life Stories of Womenin the 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 and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988) paved the way for many of these discussions. 12. My argument benefits from the critical analysis offered by Mahua Sarkar, Visible Women, Disappearing Voices: 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 Learned When 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 of Minnesota 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. See also, 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 Deshapriya Park 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 ran for the Bengal Assembly in 1946 and won. For newspaper articles, see e.g., Akhil Chandra Nandy, ‘Girls in India’s Freedom Struggle’, Patrikay Sunday Magazine (Calcutta), 2 September 1973, pp. 1–2, cited in Forbes, Women in Colonial India, p. 140; APAC, Mss Eur. F 341/144, Forbes Collection, Clipping on Kalpana 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’s Freedom: 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 focused primarily 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 includes an excerpt from Kalpana Dutt Joshi’s Chittagong Armoury Raiders, which I discuss below; Leela Gulati and 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 Unheard Voices, 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 and Ayesha 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 Women in 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: Anthem Press, 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 Politics of 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 and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 233–53; Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?’, in Sangari and Vaid (eds), Recasting Women, pp. 27–87; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference – Deferral of Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies 8 (Delhi: Oxford University 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 radical feminist scholarship drawn in Rochona Majumdar, ‘Arguments Within Indian Feminism’, Social History 32 (2007), pp. 434–45. 30. See Forbes, Women in Colonial India, pp. 124–9; Visweswaran, ‘Small Speeches’; Sinha, Specters of Mother India. 31. Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 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 Women Revolutionaries 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: Oxford University 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 (New Delhi: 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, Collective Agency, 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 a woman active in revolutionary terrorism emerged in 1924, but the surveillance only became intense in the 1930s: West Bengal State Archives, Intelligence Branch (hereafter WBSA, IB), File 223/19, ‘Recruitment of 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, Rakter Akshare, (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1995). See the summary of the movement provided in Forbes, Women in 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 Bengal to 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-Century Bengal’, 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; it occupies 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 Jagabandhu Waddadar 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, District Magistrate in Tippera) and Kalpana Dutt was discussed. For an explanation of the devolution of government to 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 where they 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: Indiana University Press, 2010). 53. The Bethune College website lists Das, Dutt and Kamala Dasgupta among their most famous alumnae: 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, estimating between two and three hundred in 1927 and 1932: Engels, Beyond Purdah?, pp. 173, 181 respectively. 54. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction of assailant’. 55. See the reading of Rassundari Debi’s autobiography as it is analysed in Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, pp. 95–134. 56. APAC, L/P&J/7/332, ‘Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal: attempted assassination and conviction of assailant’. 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 Bengal Revolutionary Movement, 1909– 1935’, Manushi 65 (July–August 1991), pp. 30–35. A parallel critique of 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 Publishing House, 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 Biplabi trailokya cakrabartrai atma kahani [Rebel Trailokya Nath Chakrabarty’s own story] (Calcutta: Samgathani Paricalaka Samsada, 1988).

68. WBSA, IB, File 493/31, ‘Kalpana Dutt’, File 2, ‘Statement of Nirmala Devi, detenu, d/o of Beni Madhab of 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 name is 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 of assailant’. The paragraph ends with the sentence, ‘But the Governor of Bengal represents a system which has kept enslaved 300 millions of my countrymen and country women’.

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd women, gender equality in securing economic opportunities and participation, equal representation in politics, reproductive rights, family law reforms and gender mainstreaming in public policies. From a movement that was mostly urban and composed of professional and middle class women in the 1970s and 1980s, it has expanded to include a diverse set of actors and womenâ€™s rights discourses.Â which are linked to the movementâ€™s sustainability in the future. They include: being able to attract and retain younger activists, the decrease in international funding for small and medium sized womenâ€™s groups, the conservative backlash against the movement, and the shrinking space for political activism due to the rise of extremist groups. In the 1930s, revolutionary groups sprang up across the country, particularly in undivided Bengal, including those led by women. Dacca (now Dhaka), Comilla, Chittagong, and Calcutta were the seats of activity for these women-led groups and they were particularly associated with colleges. Young students were recruited by classmates and alumni, drawn by the cause of the freedom of the nation from British rule.Â Social movements during the British occupation of the subcontinent that led to the outlawing of sati, widow burning, female infanticide, segregation of women, etc. paved the way for some of the earliest social reforms that occured in the interest of womenâ€”for instance, widow-remarriages. German revolutionary Sophie Scholl was a founding member of the non-violent anti-Nazi resistance group The White Rose, which advocated for active resistance to Hitlerâ€™s regime through an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign. In February of 1943, she and other members were arrested for handing out leaflets at the University of Munich and sentenced to death by guillotine.Â The Nationalists held on for awhile, but were arrested and sentenced to life in prison after 3 days.Â Then, moving to the mainland, we have all the women slaves who fought and ran the underground railroad, and the Native women who struck fear in American men for being outspoken warriors! Reply. brett saysÂ There are many unforgotten Heroes both revolutionary and non revolutionary. Revolutionary nationalism emerged as a potent political force in Bengal in the wake of the Swadeshi Movement in the first decade of the 20th century and thereafter it worked alongside mainstream nationalism that was represented by the Congress party, sometimes in cooperation, at other times along parallel tracks.Â To add to the general political excitement, the bomb-throwing incident was soon followed by the arrest of a number of young men from a garden house in Muraripukur in the Manicktala area on the charge that they were manufacturing weapons with the purpose of attacking the government.