The year is 1935. In Titagarh, British police break into a quiet house and find a girl barely out of her teens sitting among revolvers, explosives, and fellow revolutionaries who have nowhere left to run.
She does not resist as she is taken into custody. She does not give up a single name either.
By then, the British already had a name for her: Comilla’s Goonda. It is meant as a warning. To the young women she has spent years quietly training in secret, it means something closer to respect.
Long before a recent OTT drama put four young underground revolutionaries on screen, one of the real women behind that story was already doing the work no one wrote down. Her name was Parul Mukherjee.
Born into a house the British were already watching
Mukherjee was born in 1915 into a Bengal household that revolution had already claimed. Her elder brother, Amulya, was a respected local leader of the Anushilan Samiti, the underground network responsible for some of the era’s boldest strikes against colonial rule, including bombings and assassination attempts on British officials.
Anushilan Samiti men moved in and out of her home to meet Amulya, and Mukherjee grew up watching her family absorb the risks that came with defying an empire.
Mukherjee helped build the organisation’s women’s wing, recruiting young women and leading study circles that combined revolutionary ideas with physical training. Photograph: (The Hindu)
It was not a distant cause to her. It was dinner-table conversation. In 1929, while still a teenager, she was formally recruited into the organisation herself. Her younger sister, Usha, followed soon after, turning the family’s revolutionary work into something the sisters carried together.
The women’s wing nobody was supposed to notice
Women in the Anushilan Samiti were rarely trusted with real operations. Most were handed narrow, supporting roles and expected to stay there.
Mukherjee refused to stay there.
She became the driving force behind building up the organisation’s women’s wing, recruiting new members and running study circles where young women absorbed revolutionary ideas alongside hard physical training.
At the centre of it all was self-defence, including swordplay, teaching women to protect themselves and to take part directly in underground work instead of watching it happen from the next room.
She was not working in isolation. Groups like Calcutta’s Chhatri Sangha ran near-identical study circles around the same period, teaching young women everything from swordplay to motor driving, quietly building a generation of women capable of standing beside male revolutionaries instead of behind them.
She trained women in self-defence and swordplay, helping them move beyond supporting roles and participate more directly in the freedom struggle. Photograph: (GOI – Ministry of Culture)
Mukherjee’s own circle in Bengal was cut from the same cloth, and her results spoke loudly enough that the police gave her a nickname of their own.
The raid that ended one chapter
On 20 January, 1935, that work collided with the colonial state. Police stormed a house in Titagarh and arrested Mukherjee alongside other revolutionaries, along with a cache of explosives that left little room for the British to treat her as a minor player.
Her arrest folded her into the same sweeping crackdown that hit hundreds of Bengal’s revolutionaries through the 1930s, as British authorities worked, raid by raid, to dismantle networks like the Anushilan Samiti.
It is the same pattern that swallowed other women of the movement, women who built secret communication and logistics networks that historians are only now starting to properly piece together.
Anushilan Samiti was a secret revolutionary organisation in Bengal that trained and organised young Indians in resistance against British colonial rule. Photograph: (TheStoryIndia)
What happened to Mukherjee in the years immediately after her arrest is not fully recorded in the accounts that survive, a silence that says as much about how women’s contributions were archived as it does about her own life. She died in 1990, by which time India had already been independent for more than four decades.
A footnote that deserves to be the headline
Today, Mukherjee’s life survives largely through a single Wikipedia entry and one official record in the government’s Digital District Repository. It is a thin paper trail for a woman who helped arm and train an entire generation of underground revolutionaries.
As period dramas bring fresh public curiosity to figures like Rash Behari Bose and Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Mukherjee’s real story offers something rarer than another dramatised hero.
It offers proof that the women written into such narratives as symbols were, in real life, often the ones doing the organising, the training, and the leading, whether or not history ever thought to write it down.
