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| ALL FOR FREEDOM: Jyotirmoyee Devi. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya |
Jyotirmoyee Devi’s blurred eyes light up as she relives the heady 1920s, when she risked her life to help Surya Sen, Ananta Singh and Pritilata Waddedar to carry out the Chittagong armoury raid.
“I ferried letters, bombs and revolvers for Surya Sen’s men. Everyone called him Masterda, but to me, he was just dada,” recounts the 92-year-old, sitting in the courtyard of her house in Subhasgram, where she stays with her younger son.
“As a teenager, I used to sneak out of home in the dead of the night and cycle to the meetings of the freedom fighters,” she says.
Jyotirmoyee’s mother-in-law Shantana Devi used to cover up for her. “She would get up at 4am to dry cow-dung cakes. If neighbours saw me returning home in the morning and asked her where I had been, she would say: ‘Had my daughter-in-law not been at home, who do you suppose did all the housework?’”
At 16, Jyotirmoyee took a bullet on her right leg. Pointing to the mark, she says: “The British never caught me red-handed but they had their eyes on me. They shot at me without provocation at Chattagram (Chittagong) railway station, where I had gone as part of an unarmed women’s group.” She was married with a child — the first of her five sons and one daughter — then.
Jyotirmoyee’s father, doctor Surendranath Mukherjee, who had introduced the teenager to Surya Sen, had operated on her to remove the bullet. The family lived in Poroikhora, near Sen’s village, Noapara.
The freedom fighters often took shelter on the terrace of Jyotirmoyee’s in-laws’ house. One night, just before the armoury raid, police came looking for the revolutionaries, but Jyotirmoyee, a 15-year-old pregnant with her first child, refused them entry into the house.
“They threatened to break down the main door, but I maintained that there were no men in the house and I could not let them enter. They were sceptical but could not do anything as my husband used to work in Rajshahi and I lived alone with my mother-in-law,” recounts Jyotirmoyee.
