Durga Bhabhi and the Revolutionaries

AbstractThis paper reconstructs the revolutionary career of Durga Devi, remembered popularly as DurgaBhabhi, and her place within the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), drawing onher own recollections and on testimony recorded by her contemporaries. It traces her early lifeand marriage to the revolutionary Bhagwati Charan Vohra, the political environment in Punjaband the United Provinces that produced the HSRA, and her personal work smuggling weapons,sheltering fugitives, and sustaining the organisation through repeated crises. Particularattention is given to the internal suspicion that nearly destroyed her husband's standing withinthe movement, to his eventual death, and to her close relationships with Chandrashekhar Azadand Bhagat Singh, both of whom she described in unusually intimate terms. The paper argues thatDurga Bhabhi's testimony matters both as the record of a revolutionary in her own right and as acorrective to accounts of India's armed independence struggle that have tended to overlook thecontribution of women.