Matangini Hazra Was Shot Holding the Flag at Tamluk on 29 September 1942, and Within Three Months the Sub-Division Had a National Government of Its Own That Ran Until 1944

Matangini Hazra, a widow from the village of Hogla near Tamluk in Midnapore district, Bengal, was shot dead on 29 September 1942 while leading a batch of volunteers to take Tamluk police station with the Congress flag in her hands. Less than three months later, on 17 December, the Tamluk sub-division inaugurated its own national government, the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, which ran courts, a militia and relief work until Gandhi’s call to end the rebellion in 1944.

The two events come from one district and one movement, and the sources disagree on details of both. The national story of Quit India is in our account of 1942. This piece stays in Midnapore and leans on the Government of India’s dictionary of martyrs, the historian Hitesranjan Sanyal’s study of the district, Sumit Sarkar’s survey, and a pamphlet the Government of India published in 1943. Where they differ, each figure carries the name of whoever gave it.

A district the government called a Congress stronghold

The 1943 pamphlet Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances says that in provinces without Congress ministries the disorders of 1942 stayed moderate compared with four provinces it names, “except in the Congress stronghold of Midnapore.” Sanyal places the core of that stronghold in the Kanthi (Contai) and Tamluk sub-divisions in the east of the district, where, he writes, the movement lasted longest, about two years. Anwesha Roy, in a Cambridge University Press study published in 2025, treats Midnapore as the main rural storm centre of Quit India in Bengal.

The war had already pressed on the coast. Sanyal writes that, fearing a Japanese landing, the government withdrew lorries, buses, cycles and boats from the coastal districts, and that taking away canoes from a region of rivers and creeks stopped most of its trade. Sumit Sarkar adds that the Congress in the area campaigned from mid-1942 against that policy and against the export of grain.

Sanyal says the Congress began preparing in June 1942 and raised a large volunteer band in Tamluk, 3,000 trained men at first and soon 5,000. After the arrests of 9 August came hartals (strikes) and processions of 5,000 to 10,000 people outside government offices. In the middle of August the sub-divisional Congress committee was purged of what Sanyal calls the orthodox followers of non-violence. Sushil Kumar Dhara, who led the militia, became its secretary, and the committee turned itself into a War Council.

The volunteers trained in drill, attack, self-defence and guerrilla tactics under Dhara. The corps at Mahishadal was named the Bidyut Bahini, the Lightning Army, and women volunteers at Mahishadal and Sutahata formed a Bhagini Sena, a Sisters’ Army. A Bengal government report quoted by Sanyal noted that the “forces of disorder” went “accompanied by doctors and nursing orderlies to attend to casualties.”

Gandhi buri of Hogla

Banglapedia says Matangini Hazra was born in Hogla, in the Tamluk thana (police-station area), to a poor peasant family, had no schooling, was married young and was widowed at eighteen without children. The Dictionary of Martyrs, published by the Ministry of Culture and the Indian Council of Historical Research in 2016, names her husband as Trilochan Hazra and gives her birth year as 1870.

Banglapedia records that in 1932 she made salt at the Alinan salt centre and was arrested for breaking the salt law. She also joined the campaign against the chowkidari (village watchman) tax, was arrested again while marching towards a court, and was sentenced to six months in Baharampur jail. After her release she spun thread and wore khadi (hand-spun cloth), joined the Mahakuma Congress Conference at Serampore in 1933 when police charged protesters with batons, and nursed people during a smallpox epidemic. Both Banglapedia and the Dictionary say she was known as Gandhi buri, old lady Gandhi.

The plan for 29 September and the firing at Tamluk

Sanyal writes that the War Councils of Tamluk and Kanthi met jointly and fixed 29 September for simultaneous attacks on police stations and other government buildings. During the night of 28 September the main roads of Tamluk sub-division were cut in several places, culverts broken, trees felled across them and telegraph wires cut. Seven stations were attacked between 28 and 30 September, three in Kanthi and four in Tamluk.

Tamluk, Mahishadal and Sutahata were raided on the afternoon of the 29th. By Sanyal’s count 20,000 people gathered in Tamluk town and moved on the station in five groups. He says government sources described the police as seriously threatened, and that the police, reinforced by a military picket, fired at three points. Ten people died, among them Lakshminarayan Das, aged 13, Purimadhab Pramanik, aged 14, and Matangini Hazra, aged 73.

The Dictionary of Martyrs describes her part. She led one of five batches of volunteers of the Bidyut Bahini, formed by the War Council to take the station and hoist the Congress flag. Soldiers under one Anil Kumar Bhattacharya stopped the batch on the way, a lathi charge (a charge with bamboo batons) failed to scatter it, and they fired. She was shot dead holding the flag. The entry cites a handwritten Bengali account by Banamali Maity in the All India Congress Committee papers.

The same entry calls her the first Quit India martyr in Tamluk and Midnapore. Sanyal’s account has police killing three people at Danipur on 8 September, so the label cannot mean the first person to die.

Elsewhere that day, Sanyal says, 12,000 people attacked Mahishadal station four times and 13 were killed, while Sutahata station fell to a crowd led by the Bidyut Bahini and was set on fire. Sumit Sarkar writes that 44 people were killed on a single day across Tamluk, Mahishadal, Sutahata, Nandigram and Bhagabanpur, including Matangini Hazra, “a 73 year old poor peasant widow” who kept the flag aloft after being shot. Adding Sanyal’s figures for 29 September (Tamluk 10, Mahishadal 13, Bhagabanpur 16) gives 39, and he puts Nandigram’s seven deaths on the 30th. Neither author explains the gap.

Her age, her wounds and her last words

Her age at death is given as 72 by the Dictionary of Martyrs, Banglapedia and Outlook India, and as 73 by Sanyal, Sumit Sarkar and Feminism in India. The Department of Posts stamp notes give a birth date of 19 October 1870, which would make her 71 on 29 September 1942, although the same page says she was about 73.

The wounds are described two ways. Banglapedia says a bullet hit her arm, she went on appealing to the police not to fire on their own people, and a second bullet struck her forehead. Anuranjan Jha in Outlook India (26 August 2022) writes of three bullets, in her right hand, left hand and forehead, and cites no sources. The Dictionary says only that she was shot dead holding the flag.

The popular accounts also differ on what she said. Ruchira Ghosh in Feminism in India (23 November 2017) writes that she kept chanting “Vande Mataram” after she was hit, and Jha has her shouting it again as she fell. Neither names a witness. Banglapedia, the Dictionary and Sanyal record no words from her, so the chant rests on later retellings in the sources checked here.

Crowd sizes differ too. Ghosh and Jha both put her procession at about 6,000 people, mostly women, while Sanyal’s 20,000 is the whole of Tamluk town in five groups.

Sixteen October: the cyclone and the argument over relief

On 16 October a cyclone and tidal bore struck the Tamluk and Kanthi sub-divisions. Sanyal gives the official estimate for the two sub-divisions as 10,000 dead, and writes that nearly half the houses were destroyed or damaged and three quarters of the cattle perished. Sumit Sarkar puts the toll at about 4,000 in Tamluk sub-division alone, with half the crops destroyed and nearly 70,000 cattle lost.

Sanyal writes that the government suppressed news of the disaster for about fifteen days. Niaz Muhammad Khan, the District Magistrate, recommended that “relief be withheld from the disaffected villages until the people hand over the stolen guns,” in Sanyal’s quotation of his note to the Chief Secretary. The Superintendent of Police, S. G. Taylor, disagreed, thinking that delay would send people to the Congress for help. On 27 October Taylor still found that “very few persons have come forward as yet to ask for help.” Bhuyan quotes a Hindu Mahasabha inquiry report that alleged the magistrate had written that relief should be withheld for a month so that people could be taught a permanent lesson. The Congress began its own relief. The storm and the grain shortage that followed fed into the famine of 1943.

Seventeen December: the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar

Sanyal quotes the pamphlet that announced the new government. It said neither official relief, which it called hypocrisy, nor the most sincere private efforts could save the people from famine and epidemic, and that without order “this region will turn into a vast graveyard.” The Tamluk War Council decided on 14 December 1942 to set up the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, and it was inaugurated on 17 December. Satish Chandra Samanta, a veteran Congress leader, became its first sarbadhinayak, a title Sanyal translates as dictator and which meant head of the government.

The Jatiya Sarkar combined the thana corps into one Bidyut Bahini under Dhara. Sanyal dates the declaration of the Bahini as a National Militia, and the formation of thana-level governments at Tamluk, Mahishadal, Nandigram and Sutahata, to 26 January 1943. Bhuyan gives 26 November 1943 for the thana governments. Departments covered defence, finance, revenue, home, police, external affairs, justice, health, education, agriculture and publicity. Sanyal adds that it ran a postal system, registration offices for property deeds and a two-tier court system, and spent about Rs 79,000 on public health and protection against natural calamities, and that many schools in Tamluk received grants.

Bhuyan writes that the courts tried 2,907 cases and disposed of 1,681, and that fines on 523 people came to Rs 33,937 and were later spent on relief. Sumit Sarkar, drawing on the 1946 account by Samanta and others, repeats the figure of 1,681 cases and adds a plan to hand surplus paddy from the well-off to the needy.

Most senior leaders were arrested between March and July 1943, Sanyal writes: Samanta, then Ajoy Mukhopadhyay, who had succeeded him, and Dhara. Dhara was released on town bail in July, absconded, and the work revived under a third sarbadhinayak, Satish Chandra Sahu. Sanyal reports a claim that one reason for founding the government was to be ready to help Subhas Chandra Bose if he arrived with victorious forces, and our piece on the Indian National Army covers Bose’s campaign.

What the critics and the officials recorded

Sanyal is blunt about the methods. Notices went to zamindars (landlords), other landholders and merchants demanding money and grain, sometimes as much as 500 maunds of rice (about 18.7 tonnes) or Rs 40,000 in cash, and refusal led to fines, detention or ransom. Suspected police spies were tried in the national courts, and some were dealt with summarily by the militia, in many cases, he says, killed. His verdict is that the Jatiya Sarkar had “taken to terrorism.” Of the other side, he writes that under military protection the police carried out looting, arson, torture and organised rape in Tamluk. Bhuyan reports the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee’s claim that police in Tamluk sub-division burnt 124 houses and looted 1,044.

Officials gave their own assessments. Herbert, the Governor of Bengal, called the Midnapore rising a “large scale rebellion,” and the Additional District Magistrate, M. M. Basu, reported that “The mob in Tamluk Sub-division is apparently not afraid of (police or military) firing.” Four platoons of the Lincolnshire Regiment and a company of the Punjabi Regiment were sent to Tamluk. Sumit Sarkar, for his part, calls the national governments of Tamluk, Satara and Talcher impressive but no longer a serious threat to British rule or the war plans, which he gives as a reason the Tamluk government could last until September 1944.

How it ended, and the stamps

The end date varies. Sanyal says the Jatiya Sarkar decided in August 1944 to obey Gandhi’s call to end the rebellion and disbanded on 1 September. Bhuyan says it dissolved on 8 August 1944 after Gandhi’s release and that the Bengal government declared it unlawful in September. The Department of Posts notes say it continued until August 1944, when Gandhi advised it to wind up, and Sumit Sarkar and the Chandra history say September 1944. Richard Casey, the Governor of Bengal, had told the Viceroy that August that the situation in Tamluk was “clearly intolerable.” The District Magistrate, by Sanyal’s account, thought the Jatiya Sarkar’s base remained intact and would act on a different policy if Gandhi changed his mind.

The Dictionary of Martyrs notes a 13-foot bronze statue of Matangini Hazra at the crossing of Red Road and Guru Nanak Sarani on the Calcutta Maidan. The Department of Posts issued a pair of Rs 5 stamps for her and Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee on 17 December 2002, sixty years to the day after the Jatiya Sarkar was inaugurated, with a print quantity of 0.8 million. The first-day cover shows Biplabi, the Jatiya Sarkar’s newsletter, in its issue of 26 January 1943.