ABSTRACT
On 11 February 1932, a British intelligence report noted that 'girl students' are among the 'most generous potential assassins possessing a desire for 'martyrdom' akin to the early Christians'. The report was probably responding to an event that took place five days earlier – Bina Das, a student aged 21, had shot Bengal Governor Sir Stanley Jackson at the Convocation of Calcutta University. To frame the questions using such binaries is to occlude the fact that the meanings of these terms were then in flux, in part because of the activities of such women. Hagiographic accounts of revolutionary women often fail to elaborate the differences between the demands made of them by the revolutionary nationalist underground and by mainstream nationalists. The romance of revolution created in Pather Dabi was attractive for those men and women who were impatient with Gandhian decorum and eager to follow a more radical path to freedom.
