Kamala Das Gupta

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Kamala Das Gupta (1907-?) was born to a bhadralok Vaidya family of Bikrampur in Dhaka, now in Bangladesh; the family later moved to Calcutta, where she got a Master of Arts degree in history from Calcutta University. Nationalist ideas were current among the young people in Calcutta she met at university, and she was filling with a strong desire to take part in the freedom struggle. She tried to quit her studies and enter Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, but her parents disapproved. Finishing her education, she became friends with some members of the extremist Jugantar Party, and was quickly converted from her original Gandhism to the cult of armed resistance.

In 1930 she left home and took a job as manager of a hostel for poor women. There she stored bombs and bomb-making materials for the revolutionaries. She was arrested several times in connection with bombings but was released every time for want of evidence. She supplied Bina Das with the revolver that she used to try to shoot Governor Jackson in 1932, and was arrested also on that occasion, but released. In 1933 the British finally succeeded in putting her behind bars. In 1936 she was released and placed under house arrest. In 1938 the Jugantar Party aligned itself with the Indian National Congress, and Kamala also transferred her allegiance to the larger party. Thenceforth she became involved in relief work, especially with the Burmese refugees of 1942 and 1943 and in 1946–47 with the victims of communal rioting. She was in charge of the relief camp at Noakhali that Gandhi visited in 1946.

She worked for women’s vocational training at the Congress Mahila Shilpa Kendra and the Dakshineshwar Nari Swabalambi Sadan. She edited the pathbreaking women’s journal Mandira for many years. She authored two memoirs in Bengali, Rakter Akshare (In Letters of Blood, 1954) and Swadhinata Sangrame Nari (Women in the Freedom Struggle, 1963).