The Chittagong armoury raid

On the night of 18 April 1930 about 65 young men led by Surya Sen, a schoolteacher known as Masterda, seized the police armoury and the auxiliary force armoury at Chittagong, cut the telegraph and railway lines, and proclaimed a provisional revolutionary government. They took the rifles but could not find the ammunition. On 22 April troops caught them on Jalalabad hill outside the town, and about a dozen of the raiders were killed in the fight.

The survivors carried on a guerrilla campaign from the villages for three years. On 24 September 1932 Pritilata Waddedar led an attack on the Pahartali European Club and took poison rather than be caught; Kalpana Dutta was arrested and later wrote the account cited here. Surya Sen was betrayed and captured in February 1933, and was hanged in Chittagong jail with Tarakeswar Dastidar on 12 January 1934.

Chittagong went to East Pakistan in 1947 and has been in Bangladesh since 1971. The raid was among the most ambitious armed actions of the Bengal revolutionaries, and its women fighters, Pritilata and Kalpana among them, became as famous as its leader.