This
year we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of our independence
from the British colonist. Unfortunately, the independent India drank so much
into oblivion that the sacrifices of countless young men and women in Indian
freedom movement slowly faded away into obscurity. This is especially true when
it comes to women radicals. Despite equal involvements in Indian freedom
struggle, the representation of women finds very little room in the
documentation of Indian freedom fighters. To our utter surprise, history
textbooks have been quite silent too about them. The present essay is on one
such unsung heroine Bina Das whose life and legacy deserve to be celebrated
with due honour and dignity.
Bina
Das was born on August 24, 1911 in Krishnanagar, West Bengal. Her father was
Beni Madhab Das, the educationalist and the well-known teacher at Cuttack’s
Ravenshaw Collegiate School and her mother was Sarala Devi, the noted social
worker. Beni Madhab Das inspired many of his students for the cause of Indian
freedom, the most notable being Subhas Chandra Bose, popularly known as Netaji.
Sarala Devi used to run a women’s hostel in Calcutta, which was used as a
shelter for the revolutionaries belonging to different underground groups. So
the seeds of revolution were sowed in Bina early. Her parents were deeply
involved with the Brahmo Samaj and they focused on the upliftment of women and
women’s right in Bengal. They believed in giving their daughters education,
freedom and a quest for learning.
“Subhas
Babu” was tremendously influenced and inspired by Bina’s father and was a
regular visitor to her parents’ home. Bina Das was a great admirer of Netaji
and his political beliefs appealed to young Bina, serving further push in her
stance against British Rule. In her school days, she first rebelled and refused
to welcome the British Viceroy’s wife, for her visit to their school, the way
the school authority had planned. In the English paper of her matriculation
examination, the students were asked to write about their favourite novel. Bina Das, who used to stand first in the class, wrote on Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay’s ‘Pather Dabi’ (The Call of the Road, 1926). The novel,
which was about a secret society that wanted to free India from the British
rule, was banned at that time. This act of defiance did cost Bina her marks in
the matriculation examination. In her memoir, Smt. Das recalled that the marks,
she had lost in the examination, was her first offering to her country.
After
matriculation, she was admitted to Diocesan College of Calcutta and later she
joined Bethune College under the University of Calcutta. During her Diocesan
days, she joined ‘Chhatri Sangha’, a semi-revolutionary women’s
organization. Netaji continued to play the role of a mentor in her life and she
cultivated her sense of political righteousness independently. The college
library books that urged theories of revolution and freedom encouraged Bina
further to see an independent India. Smt. Das, along with her group of fellow
students, organized their first student protests against Simon Commission in
1928 and faced threats from the college administration. The then English
Principal threatened her with dire consequences if she did not apologize. Smt.
Das cared a fig and the “overbeating Englishwoman” resigned from service and
left the Institution. This was her first taste of victory against British
oppression. In her college days, the conversations and meetings of her, the
mentee, with Netaji, the mentor left a lasting impression on her young and
impressionable mind. In her memoir, she mentioned that once she asked Netaji –
“How do you think our country will get freedom? Through violence or
non-violence?” The mentor replied – “You must want something madly before you
can achieve it. Our nation must want freedom passionately. Then the question of
violence or non-violence will not be important.”
Then
came the Spring of 1932. Smt. Das came to know that the Bengal Governor Stanely
Jackson would attend the convocation ceremony at the University of Calcutta.
She approached her friend Kamala Dasgupta of ‘Jugantor’, another
revolutionary group for weapons. Smt. Dasgupta first refused her to give
weapons and tried to convince her of the serious consequences of opening fire
on the Governor but finally agreed to supply weapons Bina needed to execute her
plans. In February 06, 1932, while Jackson was delivering a speech to a packed
hall of fresh graduates in the convocation hall of the University of Calcutta,
Bina Das came close to the dias using an excuse of being thirsty for a glass of
water and sat in an empty chair with a loaded Belgian revolver concealed in her
convocation gown. Moments into the speech, the timid-looking girl opened fire
and had five shots at Jackson at close range. After firing two shots, she was
overpowered by the then Vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta
Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Suhrawardy and in a state of being overpowered, she fired
three shots. Jackson’s ear was grazed by one of the bullets and another bullet
injured senior Professor Dr. Dinesh Chandra Sen. Bina Das made the headlines
next day and was arrested. After a one-day trial, she was sentenced to nine
years of rigorous imprisonment and the British, having been so impressed by
Suhrawardy’s ‘noble deed’, awarded him a Knighthood for the trouble. Bina’s graduation
degree was also withheld. The gravitas of Smt. Das’s revolutionary impact lies
in her statement she gave at Calcutta High Court after the attempted
assassination. She said – “I fired at the Governor, impelled by the love for my
country which is repressed…I invite the attention of all to the situation
created by the measures of the Government. This can upset even a frail woman
like myself, brought up in all the best traditions of Indian womanhood. I can
assure all that I have no personal ill will against the Governor. As a man, he
is just as good as my father. But as a Governor of Bengal, he represents a
system which has kept enslaved 300 million of men and women of my country.” Before
her trial, her distraught parents were brought to Lalbazar, the police
headquarters, to meet Bina. The police requested them that if their daughter
revealed where she got the gun, she would be treated with leniency. Bina snarled
to her captors that “my father did not raise traitors”. She was sent to
Midnapore prison to serve out her terms and she started a hunger strike there
to protest the poor conditions. The authorities accepted her demands within a
week. In 1939, she was released from the prison, two years before her terms on
interference of Mahatma Gandhi. After release, she met her mentor Netaji for
the last time, only to never see him again. She joined Congress Party upon
release and in 1941, she was appointed head of the Party’s South Calcutta
Chapter. She actively participated in the Quit India movement and in support of
that, she called for a public meeting at Hazra Crossing in South Calcutta,
flouting the police orders. This led her to imprisonment again, this time for
three years in Presidency Jail. She was a member of the Bengal Provincial
Legislative Assembly from 1946 to 1947 and of the West Bengal Legislative
Assembly from 1947 to 1951. In 1947, she married a fellow revolutionary Jatish
Chandra Bhaumik, a member of the ‘Jugantor’ group. In early 1950s, the
workers’ union of the leading Calcutta daily ‘Amrita Bazar Patrika’
started an agitation demanding better working conditions and pay. Bina Das was
then the head of the trade union. While the much-publicized policy of the
ruling Congress Party was the amelioration of the abject conditions of the
working class, the Party sided with the Management, to Das’s utter surprise.
Needless to say, Smt. Das sided with the workers. Indian independence came at
the cost of the partition leaving a permanent scur. Countless freedom fighters
like Bina Das were not naturally happy to see their motherland divided. When
the partition refugees from East Bengal were barred from settling in the West
Bengal and sent to far off Dandakaranya in Madhya Pradesh, she protested
strongly and refused her freedom fighter pension from the Government of India,
along with her husband, for the rest of their life. She discovered a world
different from the one, that she had been to a decade ago. With the country
switching over to electoral politics, Bina Das kept herself aloof from the
politics of power, profit and pelf in the name of public welfare. In 1960, the
Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri for her contributions in social
work. Not much is known about her life after that. She took up teaching as a
profession. It has been learnt that professionally she suffered since she did
not have a graduation certificate. However, nearly 80 years later, in 2012, the
University of Calcutta posthumously awarded Bina Das her pending Bachelor of
Arts degree with Honours in English for the year 1931. It is to be noted here
that Pritilata Waddedar was also conferred the graduation certificate by the
University of Calcutta in 2012.
After
the death of her husband, Smt. Das led a very lonely life and isolated herself.
Finally, she left Kolkata and was living in Rishikesh (now in Uttarakhand) in
penury. On December 26, 1986, a woman’s dead body in a partially decomposed
state was found roadside by the passing crowd. The police were informed and
they recovered the body from a roadside ditch in Rishikesh. It took the authorities
a month to confirm the identity of the dead body as Bina Das. It has been
learnt that Dr. Triguna Sen, the first Vice-chancellor of the Jadavpur
University, Kolkata and the former Union Minister for Education in Government
of India, helped the police in identifying her dead body. That a dignified
personality who sacrificed her today for our tomorrow, a freedom fighter in
British India and a Padma Shri winner in independent India died homeless, ‘unknown,
unwept and unsung’, is cruelly ironic.
Let
us hope that in the year of diamond jubilee celebration of our independence,
Smt. Bina Das will be granted a dignified space in the mainstream narratives of
the documentation of Indian freedom fighters and will find a significant
mention across the pages of history textbooks.
