Pahartali, September 1932
The unfinished target from 1930, the fortnight of training, the night of 24 September 1932, and the leaflets found in her pocket
Pritilata Waddedar was a twenty-one-year-old headmistress when Surya Sen gave her command of the attack on the Pahartali European Club, the target that had been empty on the night of the armoury raid. She led seven men against it on 24 September 1932, was hit as the team pulled out, and swallowed cyanide rather than be taken. The leaflets in her pocket say, in her own words, why.
The Punjabi Boy at the Club Gate
It is a little before eleven at night on Saturday, 24 September 1932. Pahartali is the railway suburb of Chittagong, two miles north of the town, where the Assam Bengal Railway keeps its workshops and its officers' bungalows. The European Club sits behind a low hedge. Inside, about forty people are at dinner. Lamplight shows through the shutters.
Outside the hedge, seven young men crouch in the dark. With them is an eighth figure in a dhoti, a loose shirt and a turban, carrying a revolver. Anyone glancing over would see a Punjabi boy of about twenty.
She is Pritilata Waddedar. She is twenty-one, a philosophy graduate of Bethune College in Calcutta, and three months ago she was the headmistress of a girls' school in this district. In her pocket is a small glass phial of potassium cyanide. Every member of the team is carrying one.
A whistle goes. That is the signal. What happens in the next few minutes makes her the first Indian woman to lead an armed attack on the Raj. It also kills her before the sun comes up.
The Schoolteacher Who Kept Asking
Pritilata was born on 5 May 1911 at Dhalghat, a village in Patiya, south of Chittagong. Her father Jagabandhu Waddedar was a clerk in the Chittagong municipality. The family name had once been Dasgupta. Waddedar was an old title that stuck to an ancestor and then to the family. At home they called her Rani.
She was a serious student. She finished at Dr Khastagir Government Girls' High School in Chittagong in 1928. She stood first in the Intermediate examination from Eden College in Dhaka the next year. Then came Bethune College in Calcutta, where she took philosophy with distinction.
She never received that degree. The University of Calcutta withheld it because of what she did next. It was handed over in her name in 2012, eighty years late, at the same ceremony that honoured Bina Das.