Aruna Asaf Ali Hoisted the Congress Flag at Gowalia Tank on 9 August 1942, Stayed Underground for Three and a Half Years, and Came Out Only When the Warrant Against Her Was Cancelled on 29 January 1946

Aruna Asaf Ali, aged 33 and the wife of a Congress Working Committee member, hoisted the Congress flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay on 9 August 1942, the day the party’s leaders were arrested. Hiding followed for about three and a half years, and she came out only after the warrant against her was cancelled on 29 January 1946.

Accounts of that day differ on several points, so each detail below carries the name of the document or person that gives it. The sources are her husband’s prison diary, Gandhi’s letters to her in his Collected Works, the government’s own reports, a 2026 article in the journal Itinerario by Rosalind Parr, and the Rajya Sabha’s obituary reference of 30 July 1996. The movement as a whole, with its casualty figures, is in our account of Quit India. This piece follows one person through it.

Her husband was taken at 5.30 in the morning and she went with him to the station

Asaf Ali, a member of the Congress Working Committee (the party’s top executive body), left Delhi on 3 August 1942 unwell. His prison diary says Aruna had been meant to travel with him but stayed back to arrange the household in case she too was arrested, and joined him in Bombay on 6 August. The All-India Congress Committee meeting ended in the evening of 8 August. At about 11 that night a friend telephoned their host, a man the diary calls Nari, to say an arrest was near. Nari told them it concerned Maulana Azad, the Congress president, and Asaf Ali made light of it.

Next morning, at about 5.30, Nari knocked and said the police had come for the two men. Aruna insisted on coming to the railway station, and Asaf Ali found it “strangely quiet and elaborately guarded.” The special train left at about 7, in the direction of Poona. The last he saw of her that morning was on the platform, beyond the police cordon. The train took the Working Committee to Ahmadnagar Fort, where, according to G. N. S. Raghavan’s edition of the memoirs, Asaf Ali was held from August 1942 to March 1945.

The diary does not say where she went from the platform. It records what he heard later. Under 6 September 1942 he wrote that Govind Ballabh Pant, whom the special train had left behind and who joined the detainees at Ahmadnagar later, had brought news that she had spoken at the public meeting that Azad and Nehru were to have addressed, and had hoisted the Congress flag. The meeting, he wrote, “was dispersed with tear-gas bombs,” and many people were injured and arrested. The entry is second-hand, but it is dated four weeks after the event and is the earliest written account found for this article.

Mani Bhavan, the Gandhi museum in Bombay, gives the same outline. It says the government had banned meetings and processions, that a large crowd came to Gowalia Tank Maidan despite police warnings, that Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the flag, and that the police used lathis (long wooden batons) and tear gas.

A Bengali family’s daughter who married a Muslim Congress lawyer at 19

According to Rosalind Parr of Glasgow Caledonian University, Aruna Ganguly came from a middle-class family influenced by the Brahmo Samaj, a reform movement that favoured girls’ education. A biography of her husband by Raghavan has her raised partly at Naini Tal, where her father ran a hotel. Mainstream marked the 109th anniversary of her birth on 16 July 2018, which puts it on 16 July 1909.

The wedding to Asaf Ali took place in September 1928. Raghavan records an age gap of 21 years and says her father had objected, on that ground and because a Hindu-Muslim marriage was a perilous project in those years of communal tension; he died in March 1928, before the wedding. Later she credited the marriage’s connections, in Parr’s account, with saving her “from being doomed to be a housewife and no more.” Gandhian civil disobedience campaigns drew her in, Parr adds, and in 1929 she witnessed Bhagat Singh’s bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly, an event she later celebrated as “ruthless resistance.”

Where the accounts part

Time of day. None of the sources reviewed for this article gives one. The only fixed point is the diary, which has her at the station until about 7 am.

Who else was there. Only she is named by Mani Bhavan, the diary and the Rajya Sabha’s reference. The Mumbai Legacy Project, a heritage record published by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, says Nehru had been due to speak at the maidan that day and hoist the flag, which matches the diary’s note of a meeting meant for Azad and Nehru. No source reviewed names anyone standing beside her.

Whether she presided. The Global Nonviolent Action Database at Swarthmore College says she presided over the Congress Committee’s session before hoisting the flag. The diary has that meeting ending on the evening of 8 August, before the arrests, and the other accounts describe a banned public meeting on the 9th, not a session.

What the police did. According to Mani Bhavan, the flag was pulled down and volunteers who went to rescue it were beaten off. Eight people died and about 170 were hurt in the disturbances, says the Mumbai Legacy Project; Swarthmore says at least nine died in Bombay that day. Both counts cover the city, not only the maidan. Disturbances on 9 August were confined to Bombay, Ahmedabad and Poona, the Home Department’s 1943 report says, and the rest of the country stayed quiet.

A notice on the door and a husband’s advice from the fort

The diary’s entry of 6 September says the newspapers had reported a notice fixed to the Asaf Alis’ house, requiring Aruna to surrender within a month. A postcard from her, the last he had, showed she was still free.

Chandra and his co-authors count her and Sucheta Kripalani as the two major women organisers of an underground that also included Patwardhan, Lohia and, after his escape from jail, Jayaprakash Narayan. Parr writes that she coordinated the movement through illicit radio broadcasts and homemade cyclostyled pamphlets, and that she and others advocated cutting telegraph wires and attacking railway lines and government offices. Those methods broke with Gandhi’s principle of non-violence and drew criticism from the Congress high command. A British document cited by Parr called her “the chief leader of the movement in Delhi.” ThePrint’s 2018 profile says she edited the Congress monthly Inquilab (the word means revolution) with Lohia.

Her own explanation comes from a 1992 interview with Mainstream. “A few of us decided that going to jail was no way of serving the national cause,” she said, and the group chose to “upset railway trains carrying war materials to the front.”

Inside the fort, her husband wrote that he wished she had gone to prison, because it would mean more rest and he feared the authorities would charge her with something serious. After consulting Azad, he wrote on 23 November 1942 to have it conveyed to her that the dignity of her position required her to surrender, so the government could not say she was “evading arrest.” Appeals from him and others did not move her, Parr writes.

Gandhi asked her to surrender and take the prize

Gandhi left detention in 1944, and underground workers came to see him. Pyarelal, his secretary, names Patwardhan and Aruna among them and writes that a big prize had been announced for her capture. He gives no sum, and neither does Gandhi. His letter to her of 9 June 1944 says: “Do come out and surrender yourself and win the prize offered for your arrest.” He asked her to reserve the prize money for the Harijan cause, using his word for people then called untouchable. Acute dysentery, Pyarelal adds, had been made worse by the strain of her underground life.

A second letter followed on 30 June. “You are the central figure,” he told her, and “I do not want you to surrender unless you feel that it is the better course.” The editors of the Collected Works note that on 1 August she wrote on behalf of co-workers still underground that they were willing to suspend their activities and surrender. A letter from her of 2 August says, “We will now go into voluntary inaction for a while.”

Pyarelal records that Patwardhan decided to withdraw from underground work out of respect for Gandhi, but that Aruna “preferred to continue her outlaw career till the last.” Looking back in 1992, she said, “I could not agree to surrender to the British while they had the warrant of arrest against me,” and added that you could call it stubbornness.

29 January 1946, the warrant is cancelled

The editors of Gandhi’s Collected Works give 29 January 1946 as the date the warrant was cancelled. Parr says she came out of hiding only then, and Pyarelal writes that she and Patwardhan came out when the warrants were cancelled at the beginning of 1946. Other accounts frame it differently. ThePrint says she resurfaced when the reward on her head was withdrawn, and a tribute signed N.C., printed beside her 1992 interview, says she surfaced on Gandhi’s written advice. A telegram from Gandhi, “SO YOU HAD YOUR WAY,” was printed by the Bombay Chronicle on 3 February 1946; the editors say he sent it after news of the cancellation reached him.

Within four weeks she was in a public disagreement with him. Ratings of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay on 18 February, and she backed them; the naval revolt of 1946 has its own account here. Gandhi’s statement of 26 February called her “a daughter of mine” and “a rebel,” and said: “I admired her bravery, resourcefulness and burning love of the country. But my admiration stopped there.” His letter of 15 March says he had thought of publishing hers in Harijan, his weekly paper, and changed his mind. “I would prefer your defeating me,” he told her.

The refusal of 1947 and the turn to the Left

Asaf Ali’s posting as Ambassador to the United States came in February 1947, and she was asked to go with him. Strong entreaties from Gandhi did not change her mind, Parr writes; she insisted that “the final battle for India’s freedom has yet to be fought.” Other Congress socialists joined her in opposing Partition, which, in Parr’s account, they attributed to British divide-and-rule.

She was among those who left the Congress in March 1948 to form the Socialist Party under Jayaprakash Narayan. A spell in the Communist Party of India followed, which the Mainstream tribute calls short and ties to Khrushchev’s 1956 speech on Stalin, and Parr says she helped establish the National Federation of Indian Women in 1954. Parr, a critical reader of this course, describes it as stepping back from party politics to argue for Congress and communist unity. Opponents called her politics naive and dogmatic, Parr records, and her weekly Link promoted an “undisguised pro-Soviet stance,” while her distrust of constitutional politics is linked, in Parr’s reading, to a willingness to overlook the authoritarianism of the Soviet model.

According to her 1992 interview, the newspaper Patriot started when Edatata Narayanan, P. Vishwanath and others from the 1942 movement got together, with Nehru warning them that it was hard to keep a paper alive. The Rajya Sabha’s reference credits her with founding both Patriot and Link; Parr says she helped found Link in 1958 and edited it from then on.

Mayor, editor and the honours

A Calcutta University chronology of events from 1947 to 1997 records that she was elected the first Mayor of the Delhi Municipal Corporation on 14 April 1958, re-elected on 9 April 1959 and resigned on 1 June 1959. The Rajya Sabha’s reference calls her the first woman Mayor of Delhi and says she brought many reforms to the city’s administration and worked on the lives of slum-dwellers.

The Lenin Peace Prize came in 1965, Parr says, for her fundraising for the All-India Peace Council during the Vietnam War, and the Calcutta chronology dates the award to 13 August 1965. A Gazette of India notification dated 26 January 1992 lists “Shrimati Aruna Asaf Ali (Public Life), New Delhi” among the Padma Vibhushan awards. On 29 July 1996 she died, and the Rajya Sabha stood in silence for a minute the next day. A Gazette of India notification of 1 March 1998 confers the Bharat Ratna on her and marks the award posthumous. The Gandhi Research Foundation’s list of Bharat Ratna recipients dates it 1997.