Matangini Hazra was everything a warrior could be. A strong-willed Indian revolutionist who did not let her gender or widowhood, come in her way of her resolve to fight for India's independence. She was only twelve when her father, a poor peasant married her off to Trilochan Hazra of Alinan. He was around sixty-years-old at that time, five times her age. And so, when he died six years later, Matangini Hazra found herself widowed and childless at the age of eighteen.
This author cannot even fathom how she must have summoned her courage and decided to devote herself to social causes in the 1880s, the times when a woman was considered merely a piece of property that belonged to either her father, her husband, or her son. Matangini Hazra had none of these men in her life, and yet, history can now find her name proudly linked to many notable movements like Civil Disobedience and Salt Revolution. She was jailed, and yet she decided to fight back by becoming an active member of the Indian National Congress.
A true Gandhian, Matangini Hazra was affectionately addressed as 'Gandhi Buri,' Old Lady Gandhi in Bangla, and she lived up to the name successfully.
It was in 1942, when, as a part of the Quit India Movement, Hazra, who was 73 years at the time, led a procession of six thousand supporters, mostly women volunteers, for the purpose of taking over the Tamluk police station in Bengal. She had stridden forward fearlessly, appealing to the policemen to not shoot, chanting "Vande Mataram" all the while when she was shot once. Then two more shots followed as she had decided not to stop. She kept marching on. The guns could not stop her, even when the bullets had found their mark...
Both her hands were bleeding, and yet, she kept her hold on the Tiranga, the tricolour, intact.
Even as the blood trickled down her forehead, she kept on marching ahead, clutching the flag high, chanting, "Vande Mataram!" As she fell, she became immortal in the history of unsung warriors who did not shy away from sacrificing their lives for their motherland.
This historical fiction follows the life of Binodini, a fictitious character, and is a representation of all the women whose lives Matangini Hazra had managed to inspire knowingly or unknowingly-throughout her life and even after she had bravely embraced martyrdom.
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