The Girl Who Wrote It Down
Taken at nineteen, sentenced to life, and the one of the five who lived to write the raid down
Kalpana Dutt carried acid from Calcutta at sixteen, went underground with Surya Sen at nineteen, and was captured in a village house in May 1933. The court spared her the gallows because she was a woman and young, and sent her away for life. Released in 1939, she wrote the memoir that is now the inside source for everything we know about Chittagong.
A House at Gahira, Before Sunrise
It is early morning on 19 May 1933, in the village of Gahira, on the south bank of the river in Anwara, Chittagong district. A young woman of nineteen wakes in a borrowed room and finds the house ringed by police.
There are four of them inside. Kalpana Dutt is one. Tarakeswar Dastidar, whom everyone calls Phutuda, is another. With them is a boy of sixteen, Manoranjan Das. The house belongs to a farmer named Purna Talukdar, who took them in knowing exactly what it would cost him.
Shots are exchanged in the half light. Purna Talukdar is killed at once. His younger brother Nisi is hit in the chest, and Kalpana watches him die a few feet away. Manoranjan, who is sixteen, is killed too. Then the firing stops, and the police take the two who are left.
Three months earlier her leader had been captured. Now the last hiding place in the district is gone, and the woman the police have been hunting is in their hands. She is nineteen years old and she is about to be sentenced to life.
What she does with the next sixty years is the reason you have heard of any of this at all.
The Girl from Sripur
Kalpana Dutt was born on 27 July 1913 at Sripur, a village in Chittagong district. Her father worked for the government. By her own account the family leaned loyalist, and she was quietly ashamed of it.
She went to Dr Khastagir Government Girls' School in Chittagong town. There she met a girl one class ahead of her, Pritilata Waddedar, on the badminton courts. The senior girls had first claim on the courts, so the two of them played in the afternoon sun during the lunch break. That is how the friendship started.