Convocation Day
A twenty year old graduand fired five shots at the Governor of Bengal on Convocation Day, missed with all five, and then explained herself in writing.
On 6 February 1932 Bina Das sat among the graduands at the Calcutta University convocation with a borrowed revolver under her gown and fired five shots at Sir Stanley Jackson. She missed, and was sentenced to nine years. Her written statement to the court, censored by the government and copied by hand across Bengal, is the clearest account any Indian revolutionary left of what such an act costs the person who does it.
Under the Gown
It is Saturday, 6 February 1932, in the Senate House of Calcutta University. The hall is full. Black gowns, folding chairs, parents in the gallery, the smell of hot wool and old varnish. It is Convocation Day, and the graduating students are waiting for their degrees.
Sitting among the women graduands is a twenty year old named Bina Das. She has just finished a B.A. with Honours in English at Diocesan College. Under her gown is a five chambered Belgian revolver, bought secondhand for 280 rupees by a comrade named Sudhir Ghosh and put into her hands by Kamala Dasgupta. Bina has almost never held a gun.
On the dais, Sir Stanley Jackson, Governor of Bengal, begins the convocation address. He is famous in England for a reason that has nothing to do with Bengal. He captained England in the Ashes of 1905, won all five tosses, and topped the batting and the bowling averages for both sides. He is now four years into governing a province his police have been firing on.
Bina stands up. She moves toward the dais and fires.
She misses with all five shots. One passes close enough to his ear for the newspapers to say so. The Vice Chancellor, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Suhrawardy, gets his hands on her and takes the revolver away. Jackson ducks, straightens, and goes back to his speech. The hall cheers him.
That is the part everyone remembers. The part that matters is what she wrote afterwards, for a court that had already decided to convict her.
Why That Hall, and Not a Street
Bina Das could have waited for the Governor on a road. She chose the Senate House, on the day she was to collect her own degree, and she said plainly why.
