Clandestine Heroines

The Women Behind the Panel of the Jugantar Party

Abstract

Throughout history, women were marginalized through a process of systematic exclusion from the public arena where the production of knowledge and material resources took place. The fight for Indian independence by these revolutionary secret societies has generally been projected as being male-dominated, with a focus on well-known male leaders purportedly fighting for India’s freedom. In this article, we have tried to highlight how three women of Bengal inspired by the patriotic zeal for their Motherland played active roles on their own, and how they were the direct participants in the nationalistic revolutionary secret society like the famed Jugantar Party. We focused our work on three revolutionary women Nanibala Devi, Kamala Dasgupta, and Bina Das. Besides being directly involved, these women provided a large motivational support system by helping to hide, giving shelter, and carrying secret messages and weapons for the men fighting the war. They gave an unprecedented push to break the seclusion of women in revolutionary secret societies. By taking instances from Swadhinata Sangrame Banglar Nari and Women in Modern India, we delved into the contributions of Nanibala Devi, Kamala DasGupta and Bina Das towards the revolutionary activities of freedom struggle and tried to highlight how dynamic their struggles were and how they pushed their way forward for active participation in the political scenario and tried to take on the establishment at a time when women were expected to be more passive and generally expected to be confined in the social arena.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.46700/asssr/2023/v5/i1/223398