The Flag Did Not Fall

Matangini Hazra walked into police fire at Tamluk on 29 September 1942, at seventy-one, and the flag in her hands stayed up.

An unlettered widow from a Midnapore village, arrested at sixty for making salt, led one of five columns on the Tamluk police station on 29 September 1942. She was shot three times and kept walking. Eleven weeks later her district had a government of its own that lasted twenty-one months.

The Road North of the Court

It is about two in the afternoon on Tuesday, 29 September 1942, on the road that runs north of the criminal court building at Tamluk, in Bengal's Midnapore district. The monsoon has not finished. The road is wet and the paddy on both sides is green and high.

An old woman is walking at the front of a column of volunteers. Her name is Matangini Hazra. She was born in the village of Hogla in 1870, which makes her seventy-one this autumn. She is a widow. She cannot read or write. In her hands is a tricolour on a bamboo pole.

Behind her are hundreds of people, most of them women. Four other columns are converging on the same small town from four other directions. Their plan is to walk into the Tamluk police station and the court, take down the Union Jack, and put this flag up instead.

Ahead of her, across the wet road, armed police are standing in a line. An order has been read out under Section 144, which makes any gathering of five or more people illegal. The order says go home.

She keeps walking. What she does in the next two minutes puts her name on a railway station, a college, a district block and the first statue of a woman in free Kolkata. It is also why this lesson exists. Almost nobody outside Bengal can tell you who she was.

Who Walks at the Front of a Column at Seventy-One

Matangini Hazra had nothing that usually produces a leader. Her father, Thakurdas Maity, was a poor peasant. She was married as a child to Trilochan Hazra of Alinan village, a man much older than her. She was a widow by eighteen. She had no children, no schooling and no money.

What she had was a village that knew her. For years she nursed sick people in Alinan, including through a smallpox outbreak. The neighbours gave her a nickname that says everything about how she was seen: Gandhi Buri, old lady Gandhi.