DURGA BHABHI; THE AGNI OF INDIA: A REVOLUTIONARY LEGEND 0 0

Abstract

The revolutionary movement in the United Provinces and Punjab, which emaciated in activity in the years 1928–1932, is often thought of in inherently gendered terms, and as being reinforced by a masculine agenda of revengeful anti-colonial violence. This paper attempts to analyse the layers of masculinity attributed to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), through a study of the life of Durga Devi Vohra (1907–1999), more popularly known as ‘Durga Bhabhi’, ‘The Agni of India’, the young mother who famously supported the escape of the prominent HSRA member, Bhagat Singh, from Lahore succeeding his involvement in the murder of a British policeman in 1928. The article pushes beyond this much-celebrated incident, to prove the astonishing roles played by women, not only as wives and mothers of male revolutionaries, but as activists. This paper focuses on the gendered outlines which prevailed in HSRA. Furthermore, it discusses one of the crucially infamous incidents in the life of Durga Devi ‘The Lamington Road Outrage.’ The paper concludes by saying that women took up revolutionary roles at all stages and was often interpreted in the 1930s as a sign of how domineering the government had become and that they were willing to leave from their expected roles. Mostly, the narrations mentioned later in this paper are based on censored sources and interviews which were preserved at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library’s Oral History Project in 1972.