All images
Portraits
Bengal & Context
Freedom Movement
1942
Memorials
Public Memory
Portraits
The archival photograph. The most widely reproduced likeness of Matangini Hazra, surviving as a halftone newspaper reproduction rather than as an original photographic print. It shows her in later life.
Portraits
A colourised treatment. A later colourised version of the same archival photograph, with the background rendered as a golden halo. The colour is an interpretation added afterwards, not part of the original image.
Portraits
Illustrated likeness. An artist’s illustration of Matangini Hazra as an older woman. No image of her as a young woman is known to exist; every likeness we have shows her already elderly.
Bengal & Context
Portrait with memorial. A modern illustration combining her likeness with the memorial statue that depicts her carrying the national flag — the two ways she is most often pictured, placed together.
Freedom Movement
Statue against a crowd. A composite image pairing a memorial statue of Matangini Hazra with an archival photograph of a mass gathering. It captures the two halves of the history: the individual who is named, and the thousands who are not.
1942
The flag in her hand. A painted rendering of the memorial statue, showing her upright with the tricolour. In every account of 29 September 1942 the flag is the constant element — she was carrying it, and it did not reach the ground.
Memorials
The memorial at Tamluk. A statue at Tamluk, near the place where she was killed, garlanded with marigolds. She is shown mid stride with the flagstaff over her shoulder — in motion rather than at rest.
Memorials
The statue in Kolkata, 1977. The bronze statue raised on the Maidan in Kolkata in 1977, on a red plinth. It is reported as the first statue of a woman put up in the city in independent India.
Public Memory
India Post, 2002 · ₹5. A five-rupee commemorative stamp marking sixty years of the Quit India Movement and of the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar. Her portrait sits beside a depiction of the procession.
No images in this category.
About these images. Photographs of Matangini Hazra taken during her
lifetime are extremely scarce, and the best-known one survives only as a printed halftone.
Everything else here is either a memorial made decades later or a modern artist’s
interpretation. None of the illustrated portraits should be treated as a photographic record
of her appearance.
