Four institutions, three cities and one examination system — the machinery through which a village girl became a graduate in philosophy.
Dhalghat, 1911
A house in Patiya, a clerk’s salary, and a district with an unusually strong appetite for schooling.
Pritilata Waddedar was born on 5 May 1911 in the village of Dhalghat, in the Patiya area of Chittagong district. The Bengal Presidency was then in its final month of partition: the 1905 division of the province was annulled in December 1911, six months after she was born.
Her father, Jagabandhu Waddedar, held a clerical post in the Chittagong municipal office. Her mother was Pratibhamayi Devi. She grew up in a household with several siblings, on a salary rather than land — a distinction that mattered a great deal in eastern Bengal, where the difference between a rentier family and a salaried one shaped what a daughter could expect.
The family surname was originally Dasgupta. Waddedar was a title granted to an ancestor — the kind of administrative honorific, common in the region, that outlived the office it referred to and settled into use as a family name. At home she was called Rani.
Chittagong district in this period was not a backwater. It had a port, a railway headquarters, an English-medium school system with a long reach, and a strong tradition of local political argument. Boys and, increasingly, girls from families like hers went to school as a matter of course.
Chittagong: Dr. Khastagir Government Girls’ School
She was educated at Dr. Khastagir Government Girls’ School in Chittagong, one of the district’s established institutions for the education of girls.
In 1928 she passed the matriculation examination — the school-leaving qualification administered by the university board, and the gate through which anyone hoping to reach college had to pass. She was placed in the first division.
The bare fact deserves its context. In the late 1920s, the number of girls in Bengal reaching matriculation at all was a very small fraction of the age cohort. Reaching it in the first division put her in a smaller fraction still, and made further study a realistic proposition rather than an aspiration.
Nothing about that outcome was automatic. It required a family willing to spend on a daughter’s fees, a school within reach, and an examination system that — whatever else it did — recorded results without regard to sex.
Popular accounts of her school years often include vivid material: a particular teacher who introduced her to nationalist history, an early absorption in the story of the Rani of Jhansi, a childhood resolve. These accounts are widely repeated and may well be true.
They are not, however, documented in the way her examination results are documented, and this archive does not present them as though they were. Where a fact rests on later recollection rather than contemporary record, we say so.
What a girls’ school was for
Government and mission schools for girls in Bengal had been established through the nineteenth century by reformers who argued, in varying combinations, for literacy, companionate marriage, and national regeneration. Very few had argued for professional careers.
By the 1920s that framing was under strain. The schools were producing women who could pass the same examinations as men, and who then wanted the same things that passing those examinations was supposed to lead to. Institutions built to make better wives were turning out candidates for college.
Pritilata’s cohort is the point at which the strain became visible. Her contemporaries include the first substantial group of Bengali women to hold university degrees, and the first to be prosecuted for political offences in significant numbers.
Dhaka: Eden College, and a political education
She went from Chittagong to Eden College in Dhaka for the intermediate stage. Accounts record that in the 1929 intermediate arts examination she placed first among candidates of the Dhaka board.
Dhaka gave her something the examination results do not capture. There she joined Sreesangha, an organisation in the orbit of Leela Nag — later Leela Roy — who had been the first woman admitted as a postgraduate student at Dhaka University and who founded the Deepali Sangha in 1923.
Leela Nag’s network was unusual and deliberately so. It ran schools for girls, organised physical training, published, and held political discussion. It was built on the premise that women were not to be recruited as helpers to a male movement but were to organise as principals in their own right. It was watched by the authorities and its members were, in due course, detained.
This was not yet armed politics. It was, more importantly for what followed, an apprenticeship in running an organisation: minutes, membership, discipline, secrecy, money, and the habit of taking political decisions collectively.
- 1928
- Matriculation, Dr. Khastagir Government Girls’ School, Chittagong — first division
- 1929
- Intermediate arts, Eden College, Dhaka — recorded as first in the Dhaka board
- c. 1929
- Joins Sreesangha, in the circle of Leela Nag’s Deepali Sangha
- 1932
- BA in philosophy, Bethune College, Calcutta — with distinction
- 1932
- Degree withheld by the colonial authorities
- 1932
- Headmistress, Nandankanan Aparna Charan School, Chittagong
- 2012
- Degree conferred posthumously by the University of Calcutta
Calcutta: Bethune College, and philosophy
Bethune College had been founded in the mid-nineteenth century and was among the oldest institutions of higher education for women in Asia. Pritilata entered it to read philosophy and graduated with distinction in 1932.
Philosophy is worth taking seriously as a choice. It was not a route to employment. For a young woman from a provincial clerk’s family, the practical subjects were the ones that led to teaching certificates and salaries. Philosophy led to argument: ethics, logic, metaphysics, the grounds on which obligation rests and authority is justified.
She was reading it in the years 1930 to 1932, in a city under Civil Disobedience, in a college whose students were being arrested. Her fellow Bethune student Bina Das fired at the Governor of Bengal at the university convocation on 6 February 1932 — the year Pritilata sat her final examinations in the same institution.
It would be a mistake to read the curriculum as the cause of the politics. It is fair to say that the two were not happening in separate rooms.
She earned the degree in 1932. The state that governed her decided she should not be given it.
Editorial statement by this archive — not a quotation of Pritilata Waddedar
The withheld degree
Pritilata Waddedar and Bina Das both completed their degrees at Bethune College and both were refused their certificates by the colonial authorities on political grounds. The refusal is not incidental colour. It is the clearest available demonstration of what the colonial education system was for: it would train Indians, and it would withhold the credential the moment training and politics converged.
In 2012, eighty years later, the University of Calcutta conferred both degrees posthumously. That act is usually reported as a gesture of honour. It can equally be read as an admission — that a university allowed a government to decide who its graduates were.
Back to Chittagong: the headmistress
Degree completed, she returned to Chittagong and took charge of the Nandankanan Aparna Charan School, a girls’ school in the town, as its headmistress.
She was twenty-one. The post was one of a very small number of professional positions genuinely open to an educated Bengali woman in 1932, and it placed her at the head of an institution doing precisely what her own schooling had done for her.
The overlap between this appointment and her entry into Surya Sen’s organisation is a matter of months. For part of 1932 she was simultaneously running a school and belonging to an illegal body — until the encounter at Dhalghat on 13 June forced her underground and ended the first of those two lives.
What we cannot know
The educational record for Pritilata Waddedar is unusually good for a woman of her time and unusually thin as a portrait of a person.
We know the institutions, the years and the results. We do not have her essays, her marginalia, her letters home, a diary, or a reliable account of what she thought about any of the books she read. Nothing survives that lets us reconstruct her inner life with the confidence a biographer would want.
That absence is itself historical evidence. Women’s papers of this period were rarely collected, rarely archived and rarely thought worth keeping. What survives of Pritilata Waddedar survives because a colonial police file, a nationalist press and a movement’s memory all had reasons to keep it — and each of those kept a different thing.