Person · Quit India martyr · India
Matangini Hazra
Also known as Gandhi Buri
Matangini Hazra (19 October 1870 - 29 September 1942), the elderly Bengali Gandhian who was shot dead by British police at Tamluk during the Quit India Movement. Born at Hogla village in Midnapore district, Bengal, Hazra was a 72-year-old widow who had participated in the 1930 Salt Satyagraha and the 1932 Civil Disobedience Movement. On 29 September 1942, she led a 6,000-strong procession to the Tamluk police station carrying the Indian tricolour; British police shot her three times — she died chanting 'Vande Mataram' with the tricolour still raised. The 29 September 1942 Tamluk uprising established the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar (the two-year autonomous Tamluk national government). The 1977 Kolkata Matangini Hazra statue and the Tamluk Hazra Chowk honour her.
- Date
- 1870–1942
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 22.300, 87.920
Worth knowing
She was seventy-three. The Tamluk National Government, one of the parallel administrations that held out through 1942, was declared within weeks and ran the subdivision for nearly two years. The first statue of a woman put up in independent Calcutta was hers.
About the place
Placed at Tamluk in Midnapore, where she lived, led the 1942 procession and was shot.
Connections (2)
- Devotional corpus onMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Matangini Hazra was seventy-three, widowed at eighteen, illiterate, and had already been jailed for the salt satyagraha when she led six thousand people to take the Tamluk police station in September 1942 and was shot three times carrying the flag forward. What Quit India actually was, once every leader was in prison, is better described by Tamluk than by anything Gandhi planned: local people running their own parallel government for two years.
- Patronage networkRabindranath Tagore
Matangini Hazra's 29 September 1942 Tamluk martyrdom was commemorated in Rabindranath Tagore's death-anniversary year by Bengal nationalist literature. Tagore's death a year before (7 August 1941) had freed Hazra's generation of elderly Gandhian women to lead the Quit India Movement at mass-mobilisation scale. Hazra was called 'Gandhi Buri' (Grandmother Gandhi) in Bengal's folk memory of the 1942 uprising.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Matangini Hazra”. Tamluk National Government records; Bidyut Chakrabarty, Local Politics and Indian Nationalism: Midnapur 1919–1944.
Open Matangini Hazra in the repository →