Sources, in order of authority
Books
& Further Reading
Everything on this site is a summary of something better. This page lists the better things. Publication details are given only where they could be verified; where they could not, the field says so instead of guessing.
Start here
Chittagong Armoury Raiders
Reminiscences
Kalpana Dutt
How to read this list
Three kinds of source, and they are not interchangeable.
-
01
Primary accounts
Written by people who were there. Partial, interested, invaluable. Read first, and read knowing whose side the writer was on.
-
02
Historical studies
Written afterwards by researchers working across many sources. Slower, cooler, better at contradiction. Read second, to test the first.
-
03
Reference works
Encyclopaedic entries. Terse and checkable, and the backbone of the dates on this site. Useful for confirming a fact, insufficient for understanding one.
01
Primary accounts
Written by participants.
-
Chittagong Armoury Raiders: Reminiscences
Her own account of the Chittagong revolutionaries, written in Bengali and published in English translation. It is the single most important text on this list: a first-person narrative by a woman who was tried and sentenced in the armoury raid case, published while many participants were still alive and the events still politically live. Everything this website says about the movement is downstream of texts like this one.
- Originally
- Written in Bengali
- English edition
- Recorded as published in 1945
- Translation
- Associated with Arun Bose and Nikhil Chakraborty
- Publisher
- Not verified by this archive
-
Bina Das: A Memoir
The English translation of Bina Das's Bengali memoir Shrinkhal Jhankar. It covers the 1932 shooting at the Calcutta convocation, her imprisonment and her later political life. Read alongside Kalpana Datta's memoir, it gives a second first-person view of the same Calcutta student world, from a woman who was released in the same year.
- Original title
- Shrinkhal Jhankar, in Bengali
- Translator
- Dhira Dhar
- English edition
- Zubaan, Delhi, 2011
02
Historical studies
Chittagong, researched after the fact.
-
Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930–34
The standard book-length treatment of the uprising in English, and the place to go after the memoirs. It reconstructs the raid, the Jalalabad engagement, the years of dispersal and the trials, with the individuals treated as people rather than as symbols. It received the Rabindra Puraskar in 2000.
- Published
- Penguin, 1999
- Award
- Rabindra Puraskar, 2000
- Note
- The author is married to Chand Joshi, Kalpana Datta's son.
03
Women's history
The wider frame her life sits inside.
-
Women in Modern India
A volume in The New Cambridge History of India series, covering women's education, social reform, organisation and political participation across the colonial period. The best single starting point for understanding why a woman entering political life in 1930s Bengal was doing something both possible and costly.
- Published
- Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Series
- The New Cambridge History of India, IV.2
-
The Women Revolutionaries of Bengal, 1905–1939
A focused study of exactly the cohort this archive keeps pointing at: the women who entered Bengal's revolutionary organisations across three and a half decades. Harder to find than the others on this list, and worth the effort for anyone researching beyond the famous names.
- Published
- Minerva Associates, Calcutta, 1991
04
Chittagong and revolutionary nationalism
The tradition the Chittagong group belonged to.
-
The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910
The prehistory. Chittagong in 1930 did not appear from nowhere; it drew on organisational forms, arguments and personnel developed in Bengal a generation earlier, in the years around the 1905 partition of the province. This is the standard account of that earlier phase.
- Published
- Oxford University Press, 1993
-
Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947
The other half of the story: how the colonial state responded. Detention without trial, emergency ordinances, special tribunals and the legal machinery that produced sentences like transportation for life. Essential for understanding what happened to Kalpana Datta between 1933 and 1939.
- Published
- Cambridge University Press, 2017
05 — Further research
If you want to go past the books.
Reference entries used here
- Kalpana Datta — Wikipedia Dates, family, education, trial and later life; the starting point for this archive's chronology.
- Datta, Kalpana — Banglapedia The national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh. Useful for the Chittagong-side detail and for cross-checking dates.
- Chittagong armoury raid — Wikipedia The raid itself: targets, participants, the Jalalabad engagement and the trials.
Where a researcher would look next
- Trial and police records The Chittagong Armoury Raid case generated a main trial and supplementary trials. Court and police papers of the period are held in state and national archives in India and Bangladesh.
- Contemporary Bengali press Newspapers of the 1930s reported the trials and the political prisoner campaigns, and are likely the origin of at least two of the halftone photographs in this archive's gallery.
- Bengali-language memoirs Several Chittagong participants wrote accounts in Bengali that have never been translated. This is where the largest untapped body of first-person material sits.
These are directions for research, not claims about specific holdings. This archive has not itself consulted the collections named.
Something missing, or something wrong?
If you know of a book, an archival reference or a translation that belongs on this page — or if a publication detail here is inaccurate — that correction is worth more to this project than any amount of new prose.