History you can actually use

Matangini Hazra (1869–1942) was an Indian freedom fighter from Hogla village in the Medinipur district of Bengal. Born into a poor peasant family, married as a child and widowed at eighteen, she had no formal education. She joined the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1932, was imprisoned for six months for protesting the chowkidari tax, and was shot by colonial police on 29 September 1942 while leading a Quit India procession at Tamluk. Her neighbours called her Gandhi Buri — the old lady Gandhi.

The Indian independence movement was the long campaign to end British rule in India. It ran from the nineteenth century to independence in 1947, and it took many forms — constitutional argument, mass non-violent non-cooperation, revolutionary activity, labour and peasant organisation.

From about 1920 the Indian National Congress, under Gandhi’s influence, made mass participation its central method. That decision is what brought people like Matangini Hazra into political life: it created ways of taking part that did not require education, money or social standing.

Civil disobedience means deliberately breaking a specific law you consider unjust, openly and without violence, and accepting the punishment. It is different from ordinary protest in three ways: the act is illegal by design, it is done publicly rather than in secret, and the penalty is invited rather than avoided.

In India this meant making salt in defiance of the government monopoly, refusing to pay particular taxes, picketing shops selling imported cloth and liquor, and assembling in defiance of prohibitory orders. Matangini Hazra did the first, the second and the fourth of these.

On 8 August 1942 the All India Congress Committee passed a resolution demanding an immediate end to British rule — the Quit India resolution. Within hours, in the early morning of 9 August, the British administration arrested Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and effectively the entire Congress leadership, and banned the organisation.

Because there was no leadership left to direct the campaign, what followed was decided locally, district by district. Some districts saw little; a few, including Medinipur in Bengal, saw sustained risings in which people attempted to remove colonial administration altogether.

Medinipur had unusually deep nationalist organisation reaching down to village level, and a population with direct experience of earlier salt and no-tax campaigns. When the national leadership was imprisoned, the district already had the structures needed to act on its own.

On 29 September 1942 there were coordinated actions against the police stations at Tamluk, Mahisadal and Sutahata. Matangini Hazra was killed during the action at Tamluk. In December 1942 the district established the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, a parallel government that ran for roughly twenty months.

A procession of around six thousand people, a large proportion of them women volunteers, moved toward the police station and government offices at Tamluk, intending to take possession of them and raise the national flag. Matangini Hazra, then in her seventies, was at its head.

At the edge of the town the police ordered the procession to disperse under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Accounts describe her stepping forward and appealing to the police not to fire on the crowd. She was shot, continued to advance holding the flag, was struck again, and died still holding it while calling Vande Mataram. Nine other people were killed at Tamluk that day, including two boys aged thirteen and fourteen.

A very large one, and larger than most textbooks record. From the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 onwards, Indian women took part on a mass scale: breaking the salt law, picketing shops, spinning khadi, refusing taxes, marching in processions, and going to prison in unprecedented numbers.

In the Tamluk region in 1942 this went further than in most places, with the formation of a women’s wing, the Bhagini Sena. The procession Matangini Hazra led was made up largely of women.

A parallel government constituted on 17 December 1942 for the Tamluk and Contai subdivisions of Medinipur, named after Tamralipta, the ancient name of Tamluk. Satish Chandra Samanta was its head; Sushil Kumar Dhara commanded its armed wing, the Bidyut Bahini.

It ran courts, collected revenue, maintained order, operated a postal arrangement, and organised relief after the cyclone of 16 October 1942. It was wound up on 8 August 1944 at Gandhi’s request, and is the longest-running parallel government of the Quit India period.