No history book mentions Sunitibala Sengupta alias Ma (mother), alias Mashimaa (aunt), arrested in January 1934 after police found dynamite in her custody. Born in Dhaka, she was 43 years old when she was arrested, and then incarcerated in several prisons, including the infamous Hizli Detention Camp (at Kharagpur, West Bengal), before being released.
However, Sunitibala is one of around 900 women recorded in file no 223/19 of the IB, titled ‘Recruitment of Females for the Formation of Women Branch of the Revolutions’, who were under direct scanner of the British intelligence. Between 1919 to 1947, the IB files documented the conviction of around 200 cases.
The black and white images of these unsung women revolutionaries are from the glass negatives which were with the IB office in Kolkata’s Lord Sinha Road. It was in the early 1990’s that the glass negatives were brought to the office of the State Archives.
There are others names as well, like the two young girls Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Chaudhury of Comilla, who killed a Magistrate in 1931. But again very little is in the public domain, other than occasional mention in a few nondescript websites or a Ph.D thesis.
“The IB files pertaining to Bengal Presidency show that Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Datta, or Bina Das did not represent isolated and stray attempts to risk a specific nature of involvement in politics that could lead to conviction and imprisonment,” Simonti Sen, Director of the State Archives said.
Madhurima Sen, archivist of the West Bengal State Archives, said the files reveal that the leading organisations which took part in revolutionary activities were the Anushilan and Jugantar groups with their district branches, Mukti Sangha or Bengal Volunteers, Chittagong Revolutionary Party and Stree Sangha.
Not mentioned by nameInterestingly, the earlier files did not mention the names of women but merely referred to them as the daughter, wife or sister of a particular person. However, in the later pages of the files, the names of the women start appearing. “It may imply that earlier the police thought that by pressurising the males, the women could be stopped. Moreover many family members of these revolutionary women were government employees,” said Ms Sen.
The Director of the State Archives points out that conviction of women in the eastern part of Bengal was far greater than those in the western part and most women mentioned in the files came from upper class Hindu families. The secret documents also reveal that by the 1940s, recruitment to Subhas Chandra Bose’s Jhansi Rani regiment and Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti, the women branch of the Left, was common.
