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Pritilata Waddedar (1911–1932) was a Bengali revolutionary, a graduate in philosophy from Bethune College in Calcutta, and the headmistress of a girls’ school in Chittagong. In 1932 she joined the revolutionary organisation led by Surya Sen and, on the night of 23 September 1932, led an armed attack on the Pahartali European Club — an institution that excluded Indians. She was wounded during the withdrawal, took poison rather than be captured, and died. She was twenty-one.

She was born on 5 May 1911 in the village of Dhalghat, in the Patiya area of Chittagong district, then part of the Bengal Presidency of British India and now in Bangladesh. Her father, Jagabandhu Waddedar, was a clerk in the Chittagong municipal office and her mother was Pratibhamayi Devi. The family surname was originally Dasgupta; "Waddedar" was an inherited title used as a surname. At home she was called Rani.

At Dr. Khastagir Government Girls’ School in Chittagong, where she passed matriculation in the first division in 1928; then at Eden College in Dhaka, where accounts record her placing first in the Dhaka board in the 1929 intermediate examination; then at Bethune College in Calcutta, where she took a degree in philosophy with distinction in 1932.

The colonial authorities refused to issue her certificate on political grounds — as they also did with her fellow Bethune student Bina Das. The University of Calcutta conferred both degrees posthumously in 2012, eighty years after they were earned. It is the clearest single illustration of how the colonial education system worked: it would train Indians and withhold the credential the moment training and politics converged.

An armed anti-colonial organisation in Chittagong district led by Surya Sen, a schoolteacher known as Masterda, which styled itself the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch. On 18 April 1930 it seized the district’s armouries, cut communications and proclaimed a provisional revolutionary government. It could not find ammunition and withdrew to the Jalalabad hills, where British forces attacked on 22 April and about a dozen revolutionaries were killed. The organisation survived underground until 1933–34, when Surya Sen was captured and executed.

The Pahartali European Club served the European staff of the railway administration outside Chittagong and, like comparable clubs across British India, excluded Indians. On the night of 23 September 1932 a small party of revolutionaries led by Pritilata Waddedar attacked it. A woman named Mrs. Sullivan was killed and a number of people were injured. Pritilata was wounded during the withdrawal and died; her body was recovered on 24 September. This archive does not describe how the attack was carried out.

Accounts circulating since the 1930s describe such a notice at the club, and most later histories repeat it. Some historians have questioned whether that exact wording existed at that exact place, noting how readily the phrase attached itself to colonial institutions in memory. What is not in dispute is that the club excluded Indians, that this was the general rule for European clubs in British India, and that this exclusion is why the club was chosen as a target.

No, and treating her as an exception is one of the commonest errors about this period. Kalpana Datta joined the same organisation in 1931 and was later sentenced to transportation for life. Leela Nag had been building women’s political organisations in Dhaka since 1923. Santi Ghose and Suniti Choudhury, both schoolgirls, shot the district magistrate at Comilla in December 1931. Bina Das fired at the Governor of Bengal in February 1932. Behind all of them stood many more women who sheltered members, carried messages and organised — and whose names were mostly not recorded.

Partly because of what she did, and partly because of how records get made. Colonial policing and nationalist commemoration both had reasons to write down a dramatic armed action led by a young woman who died. Neither had much reason to write down the women who sheltered wanted members for years. The shape of the surviving record is not the same as the shape of what happened, and that is itself worth teaching.

As a historical fact with historical consequences, not as an ideal. She took poison to avoid capture; that is why no trial followed and part of why the episode became a symbol. It is not a model for anyone, and it should not be presented as admirable in itself. The more useful teaching questions are about what a person has to conclude about their society before that becomes their reasoning — and what the state that produced those conclusions was doing.