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KALPANA JOSHI: MARTIAL ARTS HEROINE AGAINST THE RAJ
KALPANA JOSHI: MARTIAL ARTS HEROINE AGAINST THE RAJ
The Guardian
By Dipankar De Sarkar
Feb 21, 1995
Kalpana Joshi (nee Dutt), who has died in Calcutta aged 81, became a
legend in her lifetime for her part in India's independence struggle
against British colonial rule. She was among a large and dedicated group
of Bengali women who embraced the militant, non-Gandhian wing of the
freedom movement. Before the age of 20, she had become a leader of the
male-dominated revolutionary movement and a household name in Bengal.
Born into a wealthy Hindu family in the town of Sripur in the
Chittagong hills, Kalpana became politically involved as a teenager at
college in Calcutta in the late 1920s. This was a period of revolutionary
upsurge in Bengal, which had been divided by the British in 1905 along
religious (Hindu-Muslim) lines. Kalpana familiarised herself with
pro-independence, revolutionary literature and - unusually for women of
her time - taught herself martial arts, including the use of daggers and
sticks.
The real change in her life came during a summer visit home to
Chittagong, in the present Bangladesh. There, she came to know Surya Ben,
a leading revolutionary figure. Popularly known as "Master-da" - he was a
schoolmaster and "da" in Bengali denotes a figure of respect - Sen was a
member of the Chittagong district committee of the Indian National
Congress.
A brilliant and inspiring organiser, Sen also led a "revolt group" -
as the militants groups were known - called the Indian Republican Army. At
the same time, he was a soft-spoken and unpretentious man - a lover of
poetry who was fond of saying: "Humanism is a special virtue of a
revolutionary."
This was the message that was to inspire Kalpana through her life.
Having decided to stay on in Chittagong and work with Sen, Kalpana, then
in her fourth year of college, was given the task of organising the jail
break of two leading militants - Ananta Singh and Ganesh Ghosh. But police
got wind of the plan and put her under house arrest. A week later, Kalpana
went underground - disguised as a man - after another female member of
Sen's group, Preetilata Waddedar, swallowed cyanide when confronted by
police during a raid on the European Club. In these years in hiding,
Kalpana helped make bombs, acted as a courier of messages and arms and
ammunition and participated in numerous hit -and-run attacks on British
targets.
On April 18, 1930, while still in hiding, Sen organised a spectacular
act of rebellion that - more than any other in the Indian independence
movement - came to symbolise the heroism of the militants. Sixty-five
members of his group attacked the Chittagong police armoury and the
auxiliary force armoury. They hoisted the Indian national flag, took a
military salute and proclaimed a provisional revolutionary government.
Four days later, Sen and his men were surrounded by several thousand
troops in the Jalalabad hills and, in the ensuing gunbattle, more than 80
British troops and a dozen revolutionaries were killed. Sen's group fled
further into the hills, re-forming into small bands that conducted raids
on government personnel and property.
The raids were important in another respect - the Chittagong rebels
showed the importance of group action against the colonial state, as
against the individual assassinations that had characterised the earlier
phase of militancy in India. As Kalpana put it later, the plan was that
when, after the Chittagong rebellion, "the government would bring in
troops to take back Chittagong, they (the militants) would die fighting -
thus creating a legend and setting an example before their countrymen to
emulate."
Sen was arrested in February, 1933, sentenced to death and hanged.
Kalpana, who was captured 18 months later, was sentenced to life
imprisonment in the island jail of Andamans, the judge declaring she had
been spared the hangman's noose on account of her young age and gender.
The sentence unleashed fierce public protests supported by the
poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi himself, who, despite his
disapproval of militants, visited Kalpana in jail - she had, by now,
become a folk heroine. Her sentence was eventually commuted and she was
released in 1939.
Kalpana returned to her beloved Chittagong and joined the then
undivided Communist Party of India. During a visit to Bombay in 1942, she
fell in love with CPI general secretary Puran Chand Joshi. After their
marriage in 1943, she continued to work for some years in Chittagong,
before moving to Delhi, where the CPI gave her a task that many thought
wasted her talents - teaching Russian.
After her husband had been hounded out of the CPI for taking a
pro-independence line, she no longer wanted to be involved in politics.
However, she remained a member till the end, though for humanistic, rather
than purely ideological reasons. She bore the British no grudge nor did
she make herself out to be a heroine, though that was clearly what she
was.
Kalpana Joshi, freedom fighter, born July 27, 1913; died February 8, 1995
