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Death and Desire in Times of Revolution

Sarmistha Dutta Gupta

This paper engages with the choices made by Pritilata Waddedar (1911-32), a member of the Chittagong-based Indian Republican Army, who died on 24 September 1932 after successfully leading a siege on the Pahartali European Club in Chittagong. Pritilata has long been accorded iconic status as a virangana in nationalist historiography. Her dying statement has been studied by historians to understand whether and how the politicisation of women in anti-colonial struggles resulted in a reordering of gender relations. This article engages with the complexity of Hindu womens participation in militant anti-colonial struggles by problematising the choices made by them. It attempts a decentring of knowledge by exposing to scrutiny areas of private experience of women in public/political movements through a reading of the writings of Pritilata, Kalpana Dutt and Surya Sen.

The rst draft of this paper was read at a seminar of the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata in October 2008. Subsequently, comments from Modhumita Roy, Jasodhara Bagchi and Shefali Moitra enriched the draft. Swati Ganguly suggested the title of this article. Subhasish Mukherjee, Rajib Kundu, Amit Kumar Suman, Ruchira Goswami and Aveek Sen helped variously. Over the years, conversations with Kalpana Dutts youngest sister Maitreyee Roy, her husband and well-known Marxist critic the late Ajit Roy and their daughter Nandini Roy helped in more ways than can be accounted for. Sarmistha Dutta Gupta (sarmistha91@yahoo.com) is a Kolkata-based independent researcher, literary translator and activist. She is the author of Identities and Histories, Womens Writing and Politics in Bengal (2010).
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wo recent Hindi lms, Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey directed by Ashutosh Gowariker and Chittagong directed by Bedabrata Pain, commemorating the martyrdom of Chittagong revolutionaries in Indias struggle for independence, dwell at length on Pritilata Waddedar (1911-32), revered as a virangana (literally heroic woman) of Indias militant antiimperialist resistance. Long after the British withdrawal from India, till about the 1970s at least, for those growing up in the Hindu middle-class families of Bengal, Pritilata was a household name. She is remembered for her political role in successfully leading the siege on the Pahartali European Club in Chittagong and giving up her life thereafter in order to inspire the Indian women to sacrice their lives at the altar of freedom. So it was interesting to note that in both lms, Pritilata was portrayed more as a sexual subject than as a political one. Pritilata and Nirmal Sen (1900-32) second in command to Surya Sen (1894-1934) in the Indian Republican Army (IRA) are shown to be open about their mutual attraction from the very beginning of these two lms. But the lms leave us asking whether Pritilata was there in IRA because of her attraction for Nirmal Sen or was joining the revolutionary group a conscious political choice on her part? This question looms large when, in her nal moments, Gowariker shows Pritilata leading the Pahartali siege in a traditional Hindu red-bordered white sari and dying with Nirmal Sens name on her lips. She is spared of being the masculinised warrior of nationalist historiography, but come dangerously close to the colonisers way of seeing her as a sexualised subject only, especially in Gowarikers lm. While memorialising the martyrs in Indias struggle for independence most of whom belonged to militant nationalist groups oral sources and written ones in Bengali (in the form of history textbooks, biographies and commemorative volumes brought out by members of erstwhile secret societies) often referred to Pritilata as the only woman martyr of the agnijug or the ery age of revolution since Rani Lakshmibais death in the battleeld in 1858 (Ghosh 1965: 256-58; Ray and Kishore 1967: 79; Majumdar 1978: 545). These sources turned her into a desexualised gure and we learnt to believe that the 21-year-old Pritilata, attired in mens clothing, took potassium cyanide after successfully leading the siege on Pahartali European Club so as not to surrender to the police. On the other hand, the British intelligence reports cast her as a typical feminine gure with eroticised overtones that is incapable of any political agency by referring to Pritilata1 as the lover of Nirmal Sen. What is often cited is her last testament Long Live Revolution (Ray 1973: 557-59) found by the police on her body as
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well as distributed as pamphlets by members of IRA in Chittagong after the Pahartali siege (Roy 1993: 82). Excerpts from this document usually highlight Pritilatas appeal to her sisters to get themselves ready to face all dangers and difculties and join the revolutionary movement in their thousands as the central focus for her exemplary sacrice. Some scholars have celebrated Pritilatas declaration that if women are yet less t it is because they have been left behind, as an emancipatory assertion that points to the social barriers women like her scaled en route to their political participation (Mukherjee 1999). Some others have interpreted Pritilatas invocation in her dying statement, of the chaste wives, heroic mothers and warrior women of Indias past, as a sign that she could come to terms with her transgression by casting it in the shape of an extraordinary sacrice demanded by an elect few at a rare moment (Sarkar 1989: 240-41; Basu and Banerjee 2006). In this historiographical maze, what is obscured is the gure of Pritilata the revolutionary, i e, the reasons why she chose militant action; and why, indeed, she chose to die. Setting an example for the women of India may have been one reason, but not the only reason she had chosen death. That she had sought her leader Surya Sens permission to die if the siege was successful and that there may have been a far more layered narrative of her life and death, was something one does not get to know unless one reads her fellow-revolutionary Kalpana Dutts (1913-95) reminiscences. Manini Chatterjees extensively researched book on the Chittagong uprising, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34 , published nearly 55 years after Dutts memoirs, reiterates the fact that Pritilata sought a release through death when she could have escaped (Chatterjee 1999: 216-24). This essay primarily looks at the writings of Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Dutt and their leader Surya Sen to problematise the iconic representations of Pritilata to which I have alluded. Its focus is on the private experiences of women in public/ political movements rather than on the public realities that are more often discussed and debated. I am interested here in the subjective as against the objective and in the whole parallel realm where much of sexual politics is located which was until the 1980s considered private and outside the scope of politics (Stree Shakti Sangathana 1989: 28-30). Section 1 lays out the gendered terrain of militant anticolonial politics in Bengal in order to understand and situate the dynamics of Pritilatas participation. It shows that Pritilata is not only iconic, but also a representative of a generation of middle-class women, who were variously involved in antiimperialist political activities. There has been some scholarly discussion about how women in the Gandhian movements went beyond the patriarchalist intentions of the leadership (Sarkar 2006: 551-54; Kaur 1985; Chattopadhyay 1986; Sen 1990; Minault 1981; Ray 1995; Forbes 1996b, 2005; Everett: 1979; Basu 1976; Kasturi and Mazumdar 1994). But little attention has been focused on how women in militant nationalist groups negotiated with their leaders to create spaces of their own (Mandal 1991; Mukherjee 1994; Dutta Gupta 2010).
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Section 2 is centred on the Chittagong revolutionaries and asks what women were doing to the groups they had joined by looking at the way Pritilata and Kalpana were rupturing the nature and intention of the leadership vis--vis women. Finally, drawing on the narratives of these two revolutionary women, this paper deconstructs Pritilatas choices, with the purpose of complicating the representation of female political icons.
1 Fight Like a Man, Nurse Like a Woman

When 300 young women from a handful of Calcutta colleges marched past in dark-green sarees during the inaugural parade of the 1928 Congress session in Calcutta, Pritilata Waddedar to whom we shall return presently was a 17-year-old student in Dacca. Mentored by the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (BPCC) president Subhash Chandra Bose, these girls at the parade had been trained by the founder of Mahila Rashtriya Sangha, Latika Ghose, who believed that like heroines of Indias past, women had to realise the shakti within themselves, and like sparks ignite the res that would leave people puried and ready to serve the motherland.2 Bose himself had been urging Bengali women to appear as embodiments of Shakti (Forbes 1996a: 28) and it was his idea that a womens squad be included in the reception committee of the Calcutta Congress. Commenting on the girls marching past delegates in The Forward, Bose commented that there could be traced not a touch of all the frailties that are so commonly attributed to them (Forbes 2005: 54). What were the ideological underpinnings of such a sanction to respectable young women to march in full public view when teaching girls and working for womens welfare organisations were possibly the only viable options for women wanting to break out of the connes of domesticity? Let us rst briey recall why Hindu Indian nationalists of the late 19th and early 20th century promoted the image of the heroic woman/ militant goddess. As Sunder Rajan among others have argued, this was done to elevate both Hindu womens and Hinduisms self-image and status; to mobilise women to participate in the freedom struggle; and most importantly, to provide an inspirational symbolic focus for national and communal identity through gures such as the Bharatmata (Sunder Rajan 1998: 36). When the British asserted moral superiority over the colonised by emphasising the low status of women in India, elite Indians in response began to construct a self-image which depended on rereading and reconstituting the past as a repository of a lost glorious tradition in which the vedic woman was recast as the highest symbol of Hindu womanhood (Chakravarti 1989: 27-87). The modern Hindu woman was urged to emulate the high-minded and spiritual women of the golden past. Spiritual power and partnership in religious rites in particular were central to this idea of womanhood as these could be easily deployed to play other roles in the regeneration of the nation (Bagchi 1985: 58-62). By the time of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, nationalism was already occupying the place of religion and caste Hindu women were called upon to participate in patriotic rites such as pledging to use only
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Swadeshi goods, inspiring husbands and sons to boycott British goods, and, like Bimala in Rabindranath Tagores novel Ghare Bairey (The Home and the World), donating money and gold ornaments to Swadeshi funds. Alongside the creation of the myth of the vedic woman was created a second image that of the virangana. The virangana ideal, best epitomised in the historical/mythological gures of Rani Durgavati, Tarabai and Lakshmibai, were used to promote powerful female models in many parts of the country not only to displace the more prevalent models of female subordination, but also to inspire men as well as women to take up the righteous struggle in defence of the honour of the motherland. Riding on horseback, armed with a sword and dagger, the Rani of Jhansi became a byword for resistance to the British. Opposed as they were to the proponents of non-violence, the militant nationalists began using the virangana as a potent symbol in myriad ways. Pictures of the Rani appeared together with revolutionary nationalists from Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab Aurobindo Ghose, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai during the Ramlila celebrations in Uttar Pradesh in 1911 (Hansen 1988: 25-33). A good 15 years after the 1928 Calcutta session of the Congress, we were to see Subhash Chandra Bose creating one unit of women in his Indian National Army (INA) and calling it the Rani Jhansi Regiment. Boses inclusion of women too drew signicantly on the cult of the mother goddess in Bengal. In keeping with the sanction derived from the religious practices of Hindu Bengal, the bhadralok conceived of the country as the great mother gure and the ideology of motherhood was given an enormous importance in the cultural life of Bengal (Bagchi 1990: 65-71). In Anandamath (1882), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee politicised the mother goddess image and santans or children of the mother country were imagined as worshippers of a female gure of the motherland as mother goddess. Swami Vivekanandas interrogation of superior western masculinity and formulation of alternative maleness took its meaning from the worship of Shakti, and the principles of creation in destruction, of the triumph of good over evil and the auspicious over the inauspicious (Chowdhury 1998).
Mother Image in Swadeshi Era

red up by sons like Jibananda and daughters like Shanti, who as ascetics vowed to renounce all ties with family, property and sexuality until their enslaved mother country was free. Jibananda, belonging to the band of militant ascetics, had to forsake his wife Shanti in order to be true to his vow. With the dynamic uplift that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee gave to the role of the sahadharmini or partner in religion by delinking wifehood from the enclosed space of domesticity (Bagchi 1985: 58-62), Shanti could don the disguise of a male sannyasi Nabinanda and ght like a virangana by the side of her ascetic husband, strictly following the life of a celibate warrior. As we know, historians have concurred that images like that of the chaste Rani of Jhansi and of Shanti defying normal canons of femininity legitimised a combative political role for women in masculine Hinduism and some women like Pritilata Waddedar used these iconic images to catapult themselves into militant politics (Basu and Banerjee 2006: 419). In doing so, they also had to do renunciation like their male counterparts as sexual renunciation had become synonymous with spiritual superiority and manliness. Renunciation signied different things for men and women. While for men it implied conservation of energy, for women it meant conservation of chastity. Sexual denial apart, politically active women needed to desexualise themselves completely so as not to pose as sexual threats to men. If for some reason a womans sexuality seemed discomting to the male leadership of a group, she was unceremoniously removed.3 Desexualisation also guaranteed the idea of an activist masculinity and resulted in a deep investment in the sister gure (Datta 1999: 224-25). Brotherly-sisterly bonds, sometimes enforced ritually with women tying rakhis on men and naming their relationships in kinship terms, helped dim the threat. At the Calcutta session of the Congress, all the men who entered the stalls in the exhibition grounds managed by women volunteers who had earlier taken part in the parade, were anointed with sandal-paste dots on their forehead by their sisters (Dasgupta 1989: 61-62). This ritual was an overt attempt not only to desexualise gender relations, it was also instituted to render the interaction respectable.
Dignity and Innate Modesty

In the Swadeshi era, the mother image that was projected in nationalist literature, especially in Bengal, combined the affective warmth of a quintessential Bengali mother and the mother goddess Shakti, known under various names as Durga, Chandi or Kali, who occupies a very important position in mainstream religious practice (Bagchi 1990: 65-71). In Bengal, embodiments of Shakti could be both smiling mothers appearing heroically as an inspiration for lifting up the spirit of their sons and they could also be the all-powerful destructive Shakti, the goddess who puts fear into the lives of miscreants and slays the demon incarnated in British rule. The demonslaying Shakti was reborn in the masculinised warrior and literary imagination produced exemplary female icons embodying masculine virtues of courage and strength. Since the time of Anandamath, the imagination of the Hindu elite had been
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In Section 2 we shall have occasion to see how women of the Chittagong group negotiated the threat perception of the men in order to be accepted within the fold. This entailed a crucial negotiation both as class subjects and gendered subjects. As class subjects, these women had to maintain the boundaries between themselves and women on the street, and as gendered subjects they upheld middle-class notions of virtue. Like their sisters in non-violent movements who had to be careful in preserving their dignity and innate modesty, while picketing and in other public roles (Forbes 2005: 47-48), the women who were ready to leave home and take up arms, had to prove that they were of the right kind. When the IRA leader Surya Sen agreed to let girl students be a part of the larger group, he was very clear that his associates must be careful to choose
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only those who were reserved and of high moral standards (Dastidar 2001: 37). Here too women of character and grit were necessary to occupy places of honour and responsibility. In addition to that they had to perform any role and be ready to continually shift between masculine and feminine roles, as and when necessary, without any everyday challenge to socially assigned gender roles. Like the Rani of Jhansi, they were expected to adhere to purdah norms while holding court, but don male attire in the battleeld (Banerjee 2005: 52). Like Shanti, they could be imagined to charm British soldiers dressed as a boshtomi one minute and then ride away like the seasoned warrior Nabinananda, the next. In late colonial Bengal, when revolutionary nationalist brothers called upon their sisters to join the anti-imperialist cause and acquire muscular tness and necessary physical skills, girl students associations had begun springing up in district towns of Bengal. Though all of these groups played a key role in making women politically conscious and trained them physically and mentally for an active political life, most of them followed a programme of physical culture and social work, where girls were taught manly arts like fencing with sticks and swords, cycling and boxing, as well as womanly skills in rst aid and nursing (Bhattacharjee 1952: 179-80; Dutta Gupta 2010:146). If in their outer bodies they were required to be masculine, in their inner core they had to remain modest and feminine. As The Forward comment on the girls marching past Congress delegates shows, these women were expected to hold back their frailty selectively, so that they could be recognised as parts of Shakti. Celebrating the emergence of women like Pritilata who could take up any task for the countrys freedom, Bose told a group of women volunteering for the Rani Jhansi Regiment of INA in 1943: Our brave sistershave shown that when the need arises they could, like their brothers, shoot very well (Forbes 1996a: 38; emphasis mine). Some of the women who had chosen to take up arms as antiimperial subjects may have found the goddess-virangana model empowering and could have sought acceptance within the same cognitive frame. But we need to ask, what else made them choose the life of a militant ascetic? And once their choice was made how did they cope with the pressures of a masculinist nationalism? What did it cost women who dared to walk tightrope of trying to be essentially feminine and yet selectively invoke the demon-slaying Shakti? Some of them had to pay for their choices not only in life, but trapped in stereotypical representations, sometimes long after death. We now turn to Pritilata Waddedar to understand her multiple struggles in trying to live up to the demands and expectations of such a nationalism.
2 Between Men
We, the members of the Anushilan Samiti, would practise wielding the lathi and parade daily in a spot of clearing surrounded by bamboo groves and mango and jackfruit trees. We would meet here every evening and imagine ourselves as the santans of Anandamath, dedicated to the cause of freeing our mother-country from bondage. Satish Pakrasi in Agnijuger Katha (1982: 13; emphasis mine.)

When in college, we would avidly read prison memoirs of revolutionaries like Aurobindo Ghoses Karakahini and Upendranath Banerjees Nirbashiter Atmakatha. We often wondered: Why cant we have this kind of a life? Bina Das in Shrinkhal Jhankar (1995: 9; emphasis mine).

I begin this section with quotations from the memoirs of two well-known revolutionaries of Bengal, Bina Das (1911-86) and Satish Pakrasi (1893-1973). Not only are the quotations from a man and a woman, they belong to two different generations and hail from quite different family backgrounds. I use these quotations to show how the imaginary lives of santans and real lives of militant ascetics induced many young middleclass Bengalis to aspire for an existence beyond the ordinary and for a life where worldly gains seemed immaterial. Seething at the perpetual subjection and endless suffering of their country at the hands of the colonisers, and revering the sannyasi-santans as icons of selessness, they were keen to carry on an inspiring tradition of martyrdom. If the allpowerful destructive shakti idol/ideal did not appeal to a Brahmo woman like Bina Das in the way that it found resonance in the Hindu-born Satish Pakrasi, the popular image of a revolutionary as an asexual renunciate capable of supreme sacrice and exemplary courage certainly did (Das 1995: 8-9). Her most favourite novel was Saratchandra Chatterjees Pather Dabi. The hero Sabyasachi, a mysterious and invincible revolutionary, who was incessantly chased for his boundless love for the motherland, captured Binas imagination the most.
Pritilata Waddedar alias Rani

Pritilata Waddedar alias Rani whose dying statement is often; quoted to argue that she sought approval for her transgression by recalling the heroic women of Indias past was also inspired by this notion of politics as supreme sacrice. What is too often overlooked is the fact that in the same statement she had also asserted that the Chittagong Armoury Raid in April 1930 captured the imagination of young people like her and gave a new impetus to the revolutionaries of Bengal. It is important to remember that reading some revolutionary literature which her cousin Purnendu Dastidar had given her (Dastidar 2001: 32), and stirred by the heroic exploits of the Chittagong-based IRA, Pritilata wanted to be a part of their revolutionary activities while still in school. As we shall see in the course of this paper, coming face to face in her college days with a world of brave young men who were willing to risk everything to end the tyranny of British rule, made her choose the kind of politics that she did. It is also critical to point out here that the rst group that Pritilata joined in 1928 was Leela Nags Deepali Sangha in Dacca which was set up with the specic intention of making women politically conscious. However, when she met Surya Sen alias Master-da in 1932, a few months before her death, she made it very clear that she was not interested in the type of work womens organisations did (Sarkar 2000: 14). She probably believed that unless she took the risks that her revolutionary brothers were taking in direct combat, she would
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never be able to prove that she was equal to them in her devotion and competence. This, in turn, reects that Pritilata had accepted the division between the social and the political and internalised the ideological position that the work of womens organisations was social and never equal in importance to the political work done by men. The tension produced by this stereotypical binary also inuenced Pritilatas choice and manifests how gender interacts with history at an extremely palpable level. When Surya Sen rst heard from the IRA member Purnendu about his cousin Pritilata, the latter was studying in the Intermediate Section of Daccas Eden College (Dastidar 2001: 36). Founded in 1918 by Surya Sen, Ambica Chakrabarty and others, in the second phase of the militant resistance in Bengal between 1923 and 1926, the IRA had started recruiting scores of young men some of them teenagers through a physical training club started by leading members Ananta Singh and Ganesh Ghosh (Chatterjee 1999: 24). As a means to combat the British colonial perceptions of the effeminate Bengali which had come into circulation since the mid-19th century, gymnasiums and physical exercise clubs had become even more popular. As Nirad Chaudhury notes, these gyms were institutions for giving training in patriotism, collective discipline and ethics of nationalism (Chaudhury 1964: 244). From the time of the Swadeshi movement, these clubs or akharas had also proved rich recruiting grounds for revolutionary groups all over Bengal. Such institutions tried to inculcate the practice of sexual abstinence in young men and the selfdiscipline ingrained here was supposed to help entrants in their preparation for a life of non-attachment to worldly ties. Womens entry into these masculine cultural spaces was strictly forbidden and those who had begun to be accepted much later had to erase all markers of their sexuality in order to gain entry. The Chittagong group was no different. As celibate warriors, most IRA members wanted women to be kept out of the way, perceiving them as sexual threats, which also had the power to destabilise the male bonding within the group. In his unnished piece Female Organisation (sic), written in abscondence in the last days of his life, Surya Sen admits, My comrades couldnt think of such a thing at all and if they came to know that anyone was trying to recruit girls, they would go out of their way to severely censure that person (Sarkar 2000: 5). Most of the organisers were single men and although Surya Sen was married, he never lived with his wife Pushpakuntala, having pledged his sexual energy to the nation (Begum 2004). As Kalpana Dutt recalled, it was an iron rule for revolutionaries that they should keep aloof from women (Dutt 1945: 12) and some of them like Ananta Singh were deeply distrustful of the opposite sex, so much so that he could not trust men who were associated in any way with any girl (ibid: 21). As most IRA members were hostile to the idea of womens entry, when the group rocked the nation with the Chittagong Armoury Raid, it was an all-male endeavour. But with severe repressive measures unleashed by the British government
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following the Armoury Raid and most young men becoming political suspects, women were needed more than ever to form a bulwark to militant groups. Intertwined with this is the fact that since the mid-1920s, a sizeable section of middle-class, upper-caste Hindu women had begun forming their own consciousness-raising collectivities like Deepali Sangha of Dacca, Chhatri Sangha of Calcutta and Shakti Sangha of Barisal. These young womens groups began pressing for the right to be included in political movements (Dutta Gupta 2010: 145-47). We already know that in such times Pritilata had come in touch with Deepali Sangha and found that the group sought membership from girls. Having been denied the opportunity of joining IRA till then, Pritilata triumphantly showed the membership form of Deepali Sangha to her cousin Purnendu who had counted on her for covert support like safekeeping of books. It was then that the latter nally told Surya Sen about Pritilata (Dastidar 2001: 34-35) and Sen agreed to accept her as a member in principle (ibid: 39).
Process of Defeminisation

Recalling Pritilata and Kalpanas entry into the group, Surya Sen writes that although he himself was not averse to the idea of including women, he categorically states that he never thought they could be of much use except as sympathisers and behind-the-scene helpers. This was in part because the social conventions shackling middle-class Hindu women would not allow them to fully participate in the kind of militant activities that the group engaged in (Sarkar 2000: 4). Three years later when he was actually to meet Pritilata in a village hideout and had sent a messenger to accompany her there one evening, he still was not quite expecting to see her. I thought would it be possible for a girl who had a family and guardians. After all she was not a man who neednt bother to seek permission from her family before stepping out on her own, he wrote (ibid: 12). Since ground realities stood in the way of womens participation, he believed they could possibly be considered as associates. The fact that Surya Sen wrote about his perceptions about women in his unnished piece Female Organisation, while he was on the run in 1933, shows both his exibility to change and the remarkable resilience and determination of some women in bringing about this change.4 Kalpana and Pritilata knew that as uninitiated members they would never be part of the core group and would never be given any important work.5 So they were resolute in their demand to be included as initiated members. When Sen met Kalpana in 1931 and Pritilata in 1932, it was a litmus test for both of them. They both met Sen quite late at night and having walked several miles to a village hideout from Chittagong town. In the very rst meeting Kalpana had proved that she was physically t, mentally strong, eager to take part in action, had a high endurance level, was willing to sacrice comforts and would be able to respond to the leaders calls at any hour without succumbing to family pressure (Sarkar 2000: 10). The leader observed that though it was raining heavily both when she came and when she left
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and it was muddy all around, not even once did she stumble. Just this one meeting was enough to convince us of these strengths of hers (ibid). Though Kalpana, an undergraduate in chemistry, had been transporting nitric acid and sulphuric acid from Calcutta to Chittagong, making bombs at home and had even got herself transferred from Calcuttas Bethune College to the local college in her hometown so that she could be near the nerve centre of activities, she had to prove her worth by performing a more overt and more commonly recognised masculinity. That is, she ignored social restrictions on her mobility, walked in darkness with a stranger in torrential rains without showing any signs of fatigue or fear and proved her competence in handling machines. It was then that she was accepted in the inner circle of the group (Sarkar 2000: 10). More than a year later, when Kalpana was leading the life of an absconder with Surya Sen, one day he had told her, I just could not make up my mind about letting girls abscond. But their courage and composure made up my mind for me (Dutt 1945: 12). Disguised as men for the most part, the women had to prove their mettle by engaging in masculine activities such as scaling walls, hiding in jungles, crawling along the ground or diving in ditches to avoid getting captured or bringing any harm to the group. In overcoming all timidity, awkwardness and inhibitions while moving around in the company of male comrades and strangers, these women had to relearn and re-establish their bodies in a totally revolutionary fashion (Fanon 1967 : 59), not unlike women used to being behind veils taking up arms against colonial occupation elsewhere in the world. For Pritilata and her friends, successful degendering meant earning the trust of even someone as bitterly opposed to female participation as Ananta Singh, which Kalpana considered one of her most signicant achievements (Dutt 1946: 44-47). Not only did the young women have to establish they were more than equals of men by going through a process of defeminisation, but like their sisters in non-violent movements, they had to be constantly alert against being reprimanded for any moral lapse. Under such scrutiny, women began to censor their own instincts and impulses. Though Kalpana felt attracted to Tarakeshwar Dastidar, she could not even think of admitting it to herself. As late as 1991, nearly 60 years after Tarakeshwar had been hanged, Kalpana said in a published interview that Surya Sen was not too happy whenever he found her and Tarakeshwar in conversation (Dutt 1991). Irrespective of gender, as revolutionaries both Tarakeshwar and Kalpana believed in the need to renounce affective relationships of a sexual kind till freedom was won. Neither of them had ever spoken to each other about their feelings. It was only when Tarakeshwar had been tried and sentenced to death and knew his days were numbered, did he ask Kalpana, Will you wait for me if I come back? (ibid). Subordinating all other loves to the love of ones mother country, these patriots were permitted to function only as political subjects. No wonder then that when Rabindranath
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Tagore penned Ela and Antus love story Char Adhyay in 1934 in the context of the revolutionary terrorist movement in Bengal, most revolutionaries felt betrayed by their very own Rabindranath who could imagine them getting embroiled in such a gross love story! (Acharya 1988: 286; Dutta Gupta 2011: 47-66).
3 Do and Die

Although Kalpana lived to tell parts of her story, Pritilata did not. This section tries to posit Pritilatas private self, through fragments of her own writing and that of Kalpana, as crucial to understanding what the political process of entering a masculine institution meant for a person like her who believed that she was brought up in the best traditions of Indian womanhood (Waddedar 1932) and whose socialisation prepared her in no way to play the roles of a masculinised warrior. We have seen how Kalpana and Pritilata demonstrated their capabilities so that they could move beyond the auxiliary role so far assigned to women. Both were deeply conscious of their status as colonised subjects since their schooldays (Dutt 1945: 51). But both were temperamentally very different. Kalpana was a tomboy, climbing trees and the hills of Chittagong ever since she was a child. Later, in Calcuttas Bethune College, she would run down the stairs every morning and practise cycling in the college grounds (Dutt 1991). Pritilata, on the other hand, was more of a feminine persona. She was an introverted, gentle, quiet person who could write well, sing and had a literary bent of mind (Dutt 1946: 78-81). She would be seen playing the ute alone on the rooftop of Bethune College in the evenings (Dastidar 2001: 49). Kalpana describes an incident in her memoirs to emphasise her friends extremely gentle character. Once during Puja holidays when she had gone over to Pritilatas for a feast, they were discussing who could slaughter a goat. While Kalpana said, Of course, I can. Theres nothing much in it, Pritilata felt, When I am ready to give up my own life for the countrys freedom, I wont hesitate a bit to take somebodys life too if necessary. But I shall not be able to kill a poor harmless creature so coolly (Dutt 1945: 56, 1946: 80). However, after the Chittagong Armoury Raid, convinced by the idea that in the righteous war against the British it was necessary to sacrice ones life at the altar of the mother country after legitimately taking other lives,6 this gentle soul had grown impatient to plunge into work. Sensing her anxiety and eagerness to be a part of the groups daring exploits, an elderly woman whose home in Calcutta was a support centre for the revolutionaries, suggested that Pritilata provide succor to Ramkrishna Biswas in his death cell in Alipore Jail (Dastidar 2001: 77). Biswas was sentenced to death for assassinating inspector Tarini Mukherjee in Chandpur and was hanged on 4 August 1931. Before his death Pritilata met him 40 times disguised as his sister Amita Das (Dutt 1946: 79). Some of Pritilatas papers found by the police show that Biswas calm surrender to death, sincere devotion to God, childlike simplicity impressed her deeply. Though Pritilata wrote that she felt ten times more inspired
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to ght for freedom after meeting Biswas (Chatterjee 1999: 289), she was also greatly depressed immediately after he was hanged so much so that she stopped attending classes for some time and let the college authorities know that she would not be appearing for her honours papers (Dastidar 2001: 81). Immediately after her nal examination in April 1932, she returned to Chittagong and took up a teaching job in a girls school there. So far Pritilatas rst action, so to speak, was to perform the feminine role of providing emotional support and tender company to Biswas in his last days. But getting to know him closely brought her face to face with a world of fearless young men. Biswas and his comrades had adopted a Death Programme in 1929. Deeply inspired by the Irish struggle for independence, the Chittagong group had earlier named themselves after the Irish Republican Army that had masterminded the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916. The IRA leaders wanted to re-enact the Easter Rising in Chittagong because they believed that the heroic deaths of brave young men in armed battle against the British, would spark off mass protest and anger and ultimately lead to an end of colonial rule in India. The IRAs Death Programme was adopted after the Chittagong revolutionaries were incensed with Jatin Das death on the 63rd day of his hunger strike in Lahore jail on 13 September 1929 (Chatterjee 1999: 54-61). It was their pledge to Do and Die and Pritilata wanted to emulate the daring men of IRA by getting into direct action as soon as possible.
Camaraderie and Commitment

created a huge impression on her. She seemed to have freely talked to him about her meetings with Ramkrishna Biswas and how she negotiated her duties towards her country and her family (ibid: 18-20). For an introvert like Pritilata, who had to keep her family and friends in the dark about her role in the secret society, this camaraderie that she was able to strike up with someone in a position to guide her, must have meant a lot. That night at Dhalghat when the police arrived, she was ordered by Surya Sen to be with the women downstairs. Within seconds of her going down, Nirmal Sen killed Cameron and in the crossre that followed, the revolutionary was fatally wounded. Recalling those painful moments, Pritilata wrote:
It was not possible for me to stay still any longer. I tried to run up but the women held me back. I could hear Nirmal-das agonising shriek, Rani, Rani! I tried my best to run up. I could just about free myself once and began running up the stairs but when I had gone halfway, they again hauled me down. Nirmal-da was still calling for me, Rani, Rani, Rani. I just couldnt bear his heartwrenching cries. If I could only just be with him once in those last minutes, I dont know what he might have told me. But God didnt let me see him before he breathed his last. This failure is piercing me to the core and threatening to shatter my equanimity (Sarkar 2000: 20; Roy 1993: 76).

But three months before her martyrdom, on 13 June 1932, Pritilata received a severe jolt. When she had gone to meet Surya Sen in Dhalghat village on 12 June 1932, Nirmal Sen with whom she shared a close camaraderie and a young comrade Apurba Sen were also there. On the second day of her visit, shortly after Pritilata had performed the traditional role of cooking and serving a meal, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by the police late at night. What followed was a bloody battle in which both the leader of the police team and Nirmal Sen were killed. Surya Sen tried to escape to another hideout taking Pritilata and Apurba with him. But Apurba, whose meal Pritilata had affectionately watched over earlier like an elder sister, was shot dead while the three of them were making their way through the jungle (Sarkar 2000). This encounter deeply affected Pritilata and she struggled to come to terms privately with it even as she was leading an extremely dangerous absconders life publicly. Going underground soon after, Pritilata tried to extricate a form of selfhood through writing and it is her piece entitled Abishwaranio Sannidhho or An Unforgettable Closeness which helps us recover her short-lived friendship with Nirmal Sen and every detail of the nal moments at Dhalghat as perceived by her (Sarkar 2000: 18-20). Pritilata had met Nirmal Sen a couple of times before she got a chance to meet Surya Sen and the easy-going commandant with ery eyes
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The suddenness and ferocity of that nights encounter, the rst that Pritilata witnessed and the one in which she lost two comrades, one of whom called out to her as he lay dying, shook her to the core. Being a disciplined member of a revolutionary party, Pritilata had to refuse to privilege her personal need to be with Nirmal Sen in his nal moments. While outwardly Pritilata proved her mettle so as not to be considered womanly and unpatriotic, she was struggling to come to terms with Nirmal Sens death inwardly. True to her resolve to ght the British, she did not break down after this brush with death and lead an absconders life from 5 July till her death on 24 September 1932, all the time on the run with Surya Sen from village to village. This was the time she had to prove her physical tness, endurance level, ability to forego all comforts, and extent of detachment with home and family. This is not to suggest that men joining revolutionary nationalist groups did not have to prove all of this. Trapped in gender stereotypes, some of them must have suffered greatly while trying to live up to notions of manliness and heroism and for having to suppress their innate natures while inicting violence on others. But for women like Pritilata it not only meant overcoming ones emotional resistances in living the life of a masculinised warrior among men, as we have seen earlier it also meant having to perform feminine roles like cooking and looking after male comrades as and when required. However, the tension produced as a result of continually having to shift between traditional and revolutionary roles was not something that was recognised by patriarchal groups. They did not empathise with the practical and emotional issues generated out of such gendered dilemmas. As womens private experiences were relegated beyond the recognised public realm, women had to carry the double burden of a
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[mostly unrecognised] private struggle tacked on the public one (Stree Shakti Sangathana 1989: 28-30).
Dangerous Action

Besides, the nationalist enterprise of which Pritilata became an icon, commanded its devotees entirely to reserve all affective space for an abstract devotion to the mother country. So not only did Pritilata have to repress her own true self while living the life of a warrior woman and stie her feelings for losing Nirmal Sen, she also had to remain separated from her parents and four siblings. They were nancially hard up and Pritilata had in fact taken up a school teaching job to run the household (Dutt 1946: 82). Having to sever all ties with her family soon afterwards and leaving them to fend for themselves, could not have been easy for her. In a poignant letter written to her mother, Pritilata had begged forgiveness and asked her to sacrice one child to free the mother country from enslavement (Dasgupta 1989: 132-33). In such intense mental turmoil, it was during this period of abscondence that Pritilata insisted on dying in a dangerous action (Chatterjee 1999: 220). By this time, that is between December 1931 and February 1932, Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Chowdhury, two schoolgirls from respectable families of Comilla and Bina Das, a college student from Calcutta, had already stunned the nation by taking up arms to assassinate high-ranking British ofcers and were serving life sentences. But the revolutionary terrorist movement was yet to see women in armed insurrection and get its rst woman martyr. Convinced of Kalpana and Pritilatas willingness and capabilities of being in action, Surya Sen included them in the Pahartali team after an earlier attempt to raid the European Club had failed. But Kalpana was arrested eight days before the siege while returning home disguised as a man (ibid: 286-87) and after her arrest, the mantle fell on Pritilata. On the morning of the Pahartali siege, Surya Sen ordered Pritilata to lead the team. By then she had already spent a couple of trying months in hiding and had earned the trust and respect of not only the leader, but her other comrades too. But true to Pritilatas introverted and self-effacing nature, she openly hesitated to lead the eight-member team though her teammate Bireswar Roy writes that her seven male comrades unhesitatingly accepted Priti-di as their leader (Roy 1993: 81-83). As parts of her diary and the last statement also reveal, obsession with wanting to take part and die in a dangerous action could not uproot her selfhood to such an extent that she got over all her inhibitions to be able to lead, rather than follow (ibid: 84). In response to her hesitance, Surya Sen had asserted:
Bengal doesnt lack brave young men today. From Baleswar to Kalarpol, their daring feats have infused fresh blood into the land time and again. But the fact that Bengal today is producing motherkind ready to play the role of Shakti in every home, has not yet gone down in the annals of history. Let your victory or your sacrice ensure that that episode gets written this is what I wish. Let the British know, let the world take cognisance that women of our country are no longer lagging behind (ibid:84).

If it were Pritilatas choice to join a militant group, participate in direct action and die a martyrs death, then it was her leaders prerogative to decide if she could do so and impose team-leadership on her. No other revolutionary party in India had a woman leading a group of men in action till then. Pritilatas achievement in such a role would surely mean IRA scoring a rst, as much as it would mean giving a tting reply to the imperialists claiming their supremacy by propagating the inferior status of the Indian women. Putting a woman who had led a gender-segregated and quiet life at the heart of the combat would most powerfully testify to the violence and inhumanity of the colonial occupation. Surya Sens writings also show that he believed that by appointing Pritilata to lead and by giving her permission to die, he had helped her full her dream of sacricing herself at the feet of the [mother country] goddess (Sarkar 2000: 14). For the leader, the desired impact of Pritilatas sacrice was to see more and more women as the erce Shakti personied. So it is not improbable that to make it exemplary, Sen may have edited Pritilatas last testament. Manini Chatterjees research shows us that of Surya Sens papers seized by the police after his arrest, a copy of this testament was found with some additions in Surya Sens own handwriting (Chatterjee 1999: 256). What would perhaps no longer be known is how much of this often-cited last statement was edited by the leader before it was published and widely circulated by IRA and without this knowledge we will continue to attribute its entire authorship to Pritilata. What is remembered about the Pahartali siege was how a young woman of 21 led a team of seven men bravely and successfully and became the rst woman martyr of the ery revolutionary movement. That Pritilata was unable to come to terms with her private grief and turmoil and chose not to come back alive if the siege was successful under her leadership, has not been recognised. Her political act has not been seen in relation to the opacity, mystery and complexity of the private, as the public/political arena has disallowed any recognition of the private and the intimate. It is possible for us to argue that there may not be a single motive but a cluster of motives that drove Pritilata to choose death. It was as if by taking part in a dangerous action, Pritilata wished to kill the enemy and kill herself in the same

EPW Index
An author-title index for EPW has been prepared for the years from 1968 to 2012. The PDFs of the Index have been uploaded, yearwise, on the EPW web site. Visitors can download the Index for all the years from the site. (The Index for a fewyearsis yet to be prepared and will be uploaded when ready.) EPW would like to acknowledge the help of the staff of the library of the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Mumbai, in preparing the index under a project supported by the RD Tata Trust.

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instance. As a colonised Indian driven to despair by British atrocities, Pritilata may have preferred death to a life of degradation. It could have originated from her wanting to protest social injustice against women as she clearly said in her last statement that if women are yet less t it is because they have been left behind. But her despair, which led her to prefer death to life, seems to have been drawn from the deepest wellsprings of her private grief.
Locating the Voice

Looking back on the time when the news reached Kalpana in her prison cell that her friend had died leading the Pahartali siege, Kalpana wrote:
Priti had grown eager to take part in action after Ramkrishna-das death. Then she met Master-da. Nirmal-das death in the Dhalghat encounter disturbed her greatly...The death of two of her very dear ones had caused her immense pain (Dutt 1946: 79-80).

Grief seems to have superseded all other emotions when she chose to die in a public action and the very nature of her grief makes the line between the private and the public rather fuzzy. As Kalpana realised, Pritilatas choice was made for not being able to come to terms with the death of her closest comrades and she was incapable of forgetting Nirmal Sens dying moments. Besides, having sacriced her duty towards her family for her duty towards the country, Pritilata was desperately trying to come to terms with the kind of patriotism that regarded sacrice of all affective ties with home and hearth as an afrmation of masculinity. Such a masculinity demanded astounding spiritual power and martial prowess and would naturally want to represent Pritilatas taking of her own life, after successfully executing the groups plan of action and seeing off her teammates to safety, as avowal of supreme strength and patriotism. Those who failed to successfully lead/complete a mission often found it difcult to confront the failure. This, of course, was not something particular to women, a case in point being Saileswar Chakraborty, the leader of the rst team that attempted the attack on the Pahartali club, who took his own life rather than carry the burden of disgrace after a failed attempt. In Pritilatas case, an acknowledgement by her compatriots that her suicide could be because of her inability to cope with private grief and inner struggle, would tantamount to her death looking unheroic and non-martyrlike. It was only Kalpana who resisted this martyrology and wrote that, I was convinced that she (Pritilata) could have done much more by coming back alive. If only I were by her side, in action together, I would never have let her commit suicide (Dutt 1945: 46). Unlike Surya Sen, it was important for Kalpana to understand her comrades private struggle and dissuade her from choosing death rather than be a political example before the women of the country through her martyrdom. For most of their other comrades, it seems it was far more important to represent Pritilata as a political icon free from affect. It is possibly because of this that Pritilatas biography by her cousin and comrade Purnendu Dastidar, rst published in
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1970, did not say anything about Nirmal Sens last moments at Dhalghat though her biographer quotes from other parts of her diary. And possibly it is for the same reason that parts of Pritilatas diary which gives voice to her uncensored feelings, has not been published until very recently (Sarkar 2000; Ghosh 2007). Interestingly, even Pritilatas last testament seems to have been selectively appropriated. Towards the end of her statement, Pritilata invoked the Almighty to help her discharge her grave duty and declared that Today I have come nally prepared to embrace His feet. Perhaps when she thought of her country, the invincible image of the Almighty Krishna emerged before her, like the Vaishnav Santans of Anandamath who worshipped Lord Krishna as the demonslayer. But mention of the Almighty Father has been mostly expunged from her widely published statement (Roy 1993: 8586). Is it because the Chittagong revolutionaries, most of whom had turned to communism in prison in the late 1930s, were not comfortable with such an invocation of the almighty? Or in their bafement, did they decide to purge whatever was mysterious? Postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have shown us that knowledge is never innocent and is generated in the interests of its producers. In Pritilatas case, the histories that have been produced and circulated almost never emerging from the location of the subaltern woman have not been interested in grappling with the complexity of Pritilatas choices. As a result, the more she has been celebrated as an icon, the less has grown the possibility of hearing her voice. Alternative histories of Pritilatas life and death got silenced, just as the stories of unheard and unseen women in revolutionary groups like IRA did not form a part of mainstream histories.7 But I would still argue, the last word is Pritilatas in the way she chooses death and effaces herself through her nal public statement. In Can the Sublatern Speak?, the 17-year-old unmarried Hindu Bengali woman, Bhubaneswari Bhaduris act of taking her own life while she was menstruating, foreclosed the possibility of interpreting her death as an act of shame for an illegitimate pregnancy (Spivak 1988: 314-15), Pritilata Waddedars suicide after successfully leading an action and seeing off all her comrades to safety, foreclosed the possibility of interpreting her decision as incompetence, dereliction of duty and privileging of the private over the public. Sixty-six years after Indias Independence from the British, do we still need to portray Pritilata either as a desexualised icon of valour or as a desiring woman without a political agency of her own? Must we interpret her choices only through the lens of over-public statements that have been part of the master narrative? Or, do we need to frame new questions betting the complexity of the choices and the gendered dilemmas she and some of her contemporaries faced? This essay is only a search in that direction to recast female political icons like Pritilata Waddedar in a multipleregistered way that can accommodate politics, religion as well as affect.
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Notes
1 Terrorist Outrage at Pahartali Institute, Chittagong, Letter No 1628/6/G-3 (Secret) in Home Poll D8671/32, National Archives of India, Government of India. Banglar Katha, Ashwin 11, 1335 BS/1928. Barun De recalled in a conversation with the author in February 2011 about his mother Pramila Des (Gupta) association with a revolutionary group as a student of Bethune College around 1929-30. He pointed out that the revolutionary-turned-communist Suhasini Ganguly had told him sometime in the 1950s about the circumstances under which Pramila was suddenly asked to make herself scarce by the party leaders. They thought that as a pretty woman Pramila was a bit of a distraction and her presence had begun attracting informers and the police as well. Apart from Pritilata and Kalpana, some of the other women who were variously part of IRA activities between 1930 and 1934, include Suhasini Ganguly, Indumati Sinha, Premlata Dey, Mrinalini Sen, Sarojini Pal, Kamala Banerjee, Renu Ray, Binodini Sen, Manorama Gupta, Khirodprobha Biswas and Sabitri Chakraborty. In Anandamath, the leader Satyananda explains to the newcomer Mahendra that santans are of two types the initiated and the uninitiated. The initiated are those who have renounced everything and they are the only ones who could be entrusted with important work. Bankim Rachanabali (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 1977), Vol 1, 756. Since the time of the Swadeshi movement, extremist literature in Bengal had tried to create a vanguard of revolutionaries prepared for selfsacrice through exemplary action. They ignited the imagination of the youth by calling out, If you are determined, you can put an end to English rule in one day Give up your lives by rst taking lives. Sacrice your life at the altar of liberty. The worship of the goddess will not be complete without the sacrice of blood. Svarajya Sthapan, Yugantar, 1, 49 (3 March 1907), quoted in Partha Chatterjees Bombs and Nationalism in Bengal: 2004. Consider for example, the story of Premlata Dey, another woman of the Chittagong group and wife of the senior-most Pahartali teammember Kalikinker Dey. Premlata, a poor, orphaned and barely literate girl was married off to Kalikinker against his wishes. But through her ascetic husband, she gradually got drawn into the revolutionary party and even received arms training. However, after Surya Sen was hanged in 1934 and Kalikinker sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in the Andamans, unable to bear the loneliness and drudgery of domesticity she committed suicide in 1935. She did so, signicantly, after writing to her husband for permission to die (Chatterjee 1999: 286-87).

2 3

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