Women on Fire: Sati, Consent, and the Revolutionary Subject
,%-.%/& 0121 Women on Fire: Immolation, Consent, and the Revolutionary Subject Sisters-in-Arms On September 23, 1932, Pritilata Waddedar, a twenty-year-old schoolteacher and member of the Indian Republican Army (&31),¹ became the first woman to die in the commission of an anticolonial attack when she committed suicide after leading a raid on the Pahartali Railway Institute in Chittagong. Police found Waddedar’s body outside the club, dressed in men’s clothes and with no visible injuries, and discovered, tucked into her shirt, several pamphlets of her own writing, including “Long Live Revolution” and “An Appeal to Women.” In the latter, she had written, “Women to day have taken the firm resolution that they will not remain in the background. For the freedom of their motherland they are willing to stand side by side with their brothers in every action however hard or fearful it may be. To offer proof I have taken upon myself the leadership of this expedition to be launched today” (122).² Her body, spectacularly still outside the site of her attack, offers proof of another order. Of what it offers proof, the modes of reading and memorialization it invites, and the afterlives of that body and its articu- lations constitute the terms of a colonial and postcolonial struggle over Volume 24, Number 3 $%& 10.1215/10407391-2391959 © 2014 by Brown University and differences : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 64 Women on Fire meaning making. At the time, Waddedar’s dead body took on a kind of evidentiary status in the prosecution of her comrades, a colonial assertion of authority in the courtroom—a prophecy, perhaps, of the ways in which it would come again to be, decades later, the disputed object of historical narrative.
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