As India marks eight decades of independence from British rule, public opinion remains sharply divided on how that independence was won. Some emphasise the importance of Gandhian non-violence, while others point to anti-colonial militants like Subhas Chandra Bose. These narratives are similar in one key respect: they are both overwhelmingly male.
In reality, many women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.
This absence led my colleague Shriya Dasgupta and me to establish the Agnijug Archive, an oral history project documenting India’s revolutionary movements. The term Agnijug, or ‘age of fire’, refers to the period of militant anti-colonial activism in Bengal between 1900 and 1946. Through interviews with descendants and visits to sites of resistance, the archive seeks to recover stories that exist beyond official records.
Since July 2022, the Agnijug Archive has recorded over one hundred interviews with the descendants of revolutionary activists, many of them women. These conversations reveal intimate dimensions of the anti-colonial struggle in which the personal and the political were deeply intertwined. The women we researched were revolutionary not only in their participation in armed struggle, but also in their defiance of social expectations that confined them to domestic life.
One such set of stories emerges from the Chittagong Armoury Raid of 18 April 1930. The uprising, led by the schoolteacher Surya Sen, saw around sixty young revolutionaries launch a coordinated attack on colonial institutions in Chittagong, now the second-largest city in Bangladesh. This attack led to a four-year-long insurgency across the surrounding districts marked by coordinated guerrilla attacks by Sen’s Indian Republican Army.
Sen’s group drew inspiration from anti-colonial movements around the world. The militants took their name from the Irish Republican Army, and conducted their raid on Good Friday in reference to the timing of the Easter Rising of 1916.
At first, militant leaders were sceptical of women’s participation. Ananta Lal Singh, one of the key leaders of the Chittagong group, was ‘strongly against taking girls into the revolutionary network’, fearing that women would distract the men and were physically unsuited to militant action. Singh’s disdain for female revolutionaries was strong enough that he refused to allow his own sister Indumati to participate in the armoury raid, much to her anger.
In the years of guerrilla warfare that followed, however, male activists were increasingly targeted and imprisoned by the colonial police. In response, revolutionary groups began to recruit women to play an active role in the insurgency. Their contributions ranged from providing shelter and logistical support to direct involvement in armed actions, which marked a significant shift in the gendered dynamics of revolutionary activity.
Through interviews conducted as part of the Agnijug Archive, we encountered the story of Pritilata Waddedar, whose life illuminates the opportunities and constraints faced by female revolutionaries. Pritilata was a skilled academic and headteacher of a girls’ school in Chittagong. Speaking with her grand-nieces, Sucharita Seal and Gopa Waddedar, we learned she was her family’s primary breadwinner.
Pritilata became involved in nationalist activity through women’s organisations such as Dipali Sangha in Dhaka, which conducted anti-colonial activism under the guise of social work, and later through similar networks in Kolkata. It was during this period that she came into contact with Surya Sen’s group. The militants assigned her the task of meeting with Ramkrishna Biswas, a revolutionary awaiting execution, and Pritilata visited him in prison by pretending to be his cousin.
This was not incidental. Women’s relative invisibility within colonial surveillance structures created new opportunities for revolutionary work. By assuming the role of a dutiful female relative, Pritilata was able to navigate spaces that were otherwise monitored, demonstrating how gendered expectations could be mobilised to carry out anti-colonial activity.
Meeting with Ramkrishna was transformative, helping Pritilata earn the trust of Surya Sen and strengthening her resolve to participate in anti-colonial action. In 1932, she led an attack on the Pahartali European Club, a site which was closely associated with colonial racial exclusion. Following the successful operation, she took her own life to avoid capture. She was twenty-one years old.
Colonial records sought to diminish Pritilata’s agency. Official reports speculated about her personal relationships, describing her as a ‘mistress’ or associating her with male revolutionaries in ways that undermined her own political motivations. A police lookout notice described her primarily in terms of her looks, calling her “ugly in appearance”—a form of gendered scrutiny absent in descriptions of male revolutionaries. Such portrayals reveal how colonial archives encoded bias, reducing women to bodies and relationships rather than recognising them as political actors.
Another story we studied was that of Kalpana Datta, a brilliant chemistry student who became actively involved in the revolutionary underground. Through interviews with her granddaughter Megha Joshi, the Agnijug Archive has preserved memories of Kalpana’s role in manufacturing explosives for the anti-colonial movement. Using her chemistry training and access to laboratory materials, she helped produce bombs for rebel operations.
Living in clandestine shelters and constantly evading police surveillance, Kalpana developed a close relationship with fellow revolutionary Tarakeshwar Dastidar, another science graduate involved in bomb-making. Their relationship unfolded amid police raids and underground meetings. For a generation of radical activists, even the harsh conditions of revolutionary struggle did not prevent personal bonds from forming.
The two were arrested on 16 February 1933. Kalpana was sentenced to transportation for life in the Andaman penal colonies, which was later commuted to life imprisonment in mainland India. Before their separation, Tarakeshwar asked if she would wait for him should his death sentence be commuted. He was instead executed on 12 January 1934 alongside Surya Sen.
Kalpana learned of his fate only later. She refused offers of marriage, and only wed the communist leader P.C. Joshi after she had been shown definitive proof of Tarakeshwar’s execution.
The Agnijug Archive also recorded memories of the activist Suhasini Ganguly through an interview with a family member, Arati Ganguly. When several key participants of the Chittagong uprising were evading police capture, Suhasini played a crucial role in sheltering them in the French colony of Chandernagore.
There, she made the remarkable decision to pose as the wife of fellow revolutionary Sashadhar Acharya so that they could rent a house together. In colonial Bengal, landlords were often suspicious of unmarried men renting rooms, fearing they might be revolutionaries. Presenting themselves as a couple played to the gendered expectations of colonial surveillance and allowed them to provide refuge for underground activists.
To maintain the deception, Suhasini adopted the outward markers of a married woman, wearing conch bangles (sankha-pola) on her arms and vermilion in her hair parting. Her performance was so convincing that even the revolutionaries staying in the house believed the marriage to be genuine.
This act involved significant social risk. In the early twentieth century, Bengali women were expected to follow a strict path from primary education to marriage and domestic life. Co-habiting with a man outside marriage could lead to severe stigma and make future marriage nearly impossible. Suhasini accepted these consequences. She never married. Eventually arrested by colonial authorities, she endured brutal custodial torture but refused to reveal the identities or whereabouts of her comrades.
Revolutionary movements played an important but often overlooked role in India’s anti-colonial struggle. Unlike earlier phases of militant nationalism in Bengal, activists like Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Datta and Suhasini Ganguly took part in a coordinated insurgency that combined organisational capacity with symbolic defiance through the declaration of a provisional government.
These campaigns challenged the myth of the colonial state’s invincibility and contributed to an unstable atmosphere that prompted new administrative responses. The most prominent of these was the Government of India Act of 1935, which expanded limited self-governance for Indians. Militant movements also shaped the wider struggle by radicalising political thought. Their legacy is visible in later developments such as the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946, which drew on similar traditions of militant resistance. Together, they suggest that revolutionary movements did not operate in isolation, but helped make imperial rule increasingly untenable.
The Indian government has recently begun to acknowledge the participation of women in the independence struggle. Early attempts, however, have been lacking. In 2022, the government’s official social media account mistakenly shared a photograph of Pritilata Waddedar in place of another freedom fighter, Kanaklata Barua. Such moments reveal how the institutional memory of a post-colonial nation continues to conflate, misrecognise, or overlook the contributions of female revolutionaries.
The Agnijug Archive seeks to address this by reconstructing history from below. Radical acts did not occur only in moments of armed rebellion but in the everyday decisions that brought women into the orbit of political struggle. These women revolutionaries repurposed the gendered structures that constrained them. By posing as female dependents – figures supposedly above suspicion – they facilitated clandestine revolutionary activities, turning Victorian ideals of domestic femininity into a camouflage for revolutionary action.
Recovering these stories challenges us to rethink not only the history of India’s independence but that of the feminist movement in the subcontinent. Women like Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Datta, and Suhasini Ganguly were not only participants in anti-colonial resistance but also agents of social transformation. In defying both imperial authority and entrenched gender norms of their times, they were revolutionary in more ways than one.