She Was Just 21 When She Led An Armed Attack On British Raj And Set Fire To A Club That Declared 'Dogs And Indians Not Allowed'

In the early 1930s, when the freedom movement was often narrated through the names of men and mass marches, a quieter and far more dangerous story was unfolding in Bengal. It belonged to a young schoolteacher

from Chittagong who did not wait for permission to be brave. At an age when most women of her generation were expected to settle into domestic roles, Pritilata Waddedar chose the underground, the gun, and the certainty that her life would likely be short. She was educated, fiercely political, and acutely aware of the humiliations baked into colonial rule. By 21, she was leading an armed attack against the British Raj, not as a foot soldier but as the commander of a mission designed to puncture imperial arrogance at its most visible. The night she chose for that act has since become part of revolutionary lore. On 23 September 1932, Pritilata and her comrades targeted the Pahartali European Club, a place that stood as a daily reminder of racial segregation. The club openly displayed a sign that read, "Dogs and Indians not allowed." The attack was symbolic as much as it was tactical. It was meant to say that Indians would no longer swallow insult in their own land. What followed ensured that Pritilata would be remembered not only as a rebel but also as one of Bengal’s earliest women martyrs.

A student who refused to be small

Pritilata Waddedar was born on 5 May 1911 in Dhalghat village in Chittagong, in a middle-class Bengali Baidya family. Her father, Jagabandhu Waddedar, worked as a clerk with the Chittagong municipality and placed enormous value on education. Pritilata excelled early. She studied at Dr Khastagir Government Girls’ School, where literature and history stirred her imagination, particularly stories of Rani Lakshmibai that teachers used to quietly seed nationalist thought. She moved to Eden College in Dhaka and topped the intermediate examinations in 1929, standing first across the Dhaka Board. At Bethune College in Calcutta, where she went on to study philosophy, her political consciousness sharpened. The campus was alive with dissent and debate. It was here that she came into contact with women revolutionaries such as Leela Nag and Bina Das, figures who proved that political defiance was not the preserve of men. Though she graduated with distinction, the colonial administration would later refuse to formally award her degree.

Entering the world of armed resistance

By the time Pritilata returned to Chittagong and took up work as a schoolteacher and headmistress, she had already made up her mind. Teaching paid the bills, but revolution claimed her loyalty. In 1932, she joined the underground group led by Surya Sen, also known as Masterda. His organisation, the Indian Republican Army of Chittagong, was responsible for some of the most audacious acts of armed resistance in Bengal. There was resistance within the group to a woman joining their ranks. Weapons and explosives were considered a male domain. Yet Pritilata’s discipline and fearlessness soon settled the argument. She became involved in disrupting telephone and telegraph lines and in supplying explosives, work that required calm nerves and absolute secrecy. Her presence also made tactical sense. Women were less likely to be searched, a fact the revolutionaries quietly exploited.

The Chittagong Armoury Raid connection

Pritilata’s political baptism came in the shadow of the famous Chittagong Armoury Raid of April 1930. The plan, led by Surya Sen, was to seize British armouries, cut communication lines and declare a provisional revolutionary government. Although the raid did not unfold exactly as planned, it electrified nationalist imagination. Pritilata was closely associated with this circle of revolutionaries and worked alongside figures such as Kalpana Datta, another formidable woman of the movement. The raid also intensified British surveillance in the region, pushing the revolutionaries further underground. It was in this atmosphere of constant pursuit that plans for the attack on the European Club began to take shape.

The night the club burned

With Kalpana Datta arrested, leadership of the European Club attack fell to Pritilata. Surya Sen made a deliberate decision to appoint a woman to lead the mission. The message was internal as well as external. Women were no longer on the margins of the struggle. Disguised as a Punjabi man, Pritilata led her team to the club late on the night of 23 September 1932. Accounts differ slightly on the exact timing, but what is clear is that the group set the building on fire and opened gunfire. Inside were around forty people, including armed British officers who retaliated. Several club members were injured. As the revolutionaries withdrew, Pritilata was hit by a bullet. Badly wounded and surrounded, she made the choice that had been planned in advance. Rather than be captured and tortured, she swallowed potassium cyanide. She was 21. A police report later confirmed that the bullet wound was not fatal. Cyanide was the cause of death.

Words that outlived her

When police recovered her body the next morning, they found leaflets and a diary. In her own words, she wrote that Surya Sen had placed the mantle of leadership on her so that the English would learn, and the world would notice, that women of India were no longer lagging behind. Another leaflet expressed her hope that Indian women would stop believing they were weak and instead join the armed struggle for freedom. According to historian Sandip Bandyopadhyay, whose work on women in the Bengal revolutionary movement is frequently cited, these words travelled far beyond Chittagong. They circulated quietly among students and activists, becoming a rallying cry for young women who had grown up being told that courage was unfeminine.

A legacy often sidelined

Pritilata Waddedar’s name does not always appear in school textbooks, yet her afterlife in public memory has been persistent. In Kolkata’s Maidan, a statue depicts her in a sari, arm outstretched, as if still mid-command. In Chattogram, a bronze sculpture stands near the site of the European Club, and a road bears her name. Educational institutions across India and Bangladesh honour her legacy. Her story has also reached cinema. The 2010 film Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, featured her character, while Chittagong revisited the uprising with renewed attention to the women involved. In recent years, activists in Chattogram have demanded that the Pahartali European Club be restored as a memorial museum dedicated to her. It is a demand rooted not in nostalgia, but in the belief that spaces of humiliation should be reclaimed as sites of memory.