The real ‘Comilla’s Goonda’: The teen revolutionary the British feared in 1935 Bengal
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.
She does not resist arrest. She does not give up a single name either. By then, the British already had a name for her: Comilla’s Goonda. It was meant as a warning. To the young women she had spent years quietly training in secret, it meant respect.
Long before OTT dramas put young underground revolutionaries on screen, one of the real women behind such stories was already doing the work no one wrote down. Her name was Parul Mukherjee.
Born in 1915 into a Bengal household already on the British watchlist, Mukherjee grew up as revolutionaries of the Anushilan Samiti moved in and out of her home to meet her elder brother Amulya, a local leader of the secret organisation known for bombings and assassination attempts on British officials.
In 1929, while still a teenager, she was formally recruited into the Samiti. Her younger sister Usha followed soon after.
Women in the Anushilan were rarely trusted with real operations and were largely confined to supporting roles. Mukherjee refused to stay there.
She became the driving force behind building its women’s wing, recruiting new members and running study circles that combined revolutionary ideas with hard physical training, including self-defence and swordplay. Similar circles, like Calcutta’s Chhatri Sangha, were quietly teaching young women everything from swordplay to motor driving, building a generation capable of standing beside male revolutionaries.
Her work ended in a raid on January 20, 1935, when police arrested her in Titagarh along with other revolutionaries and a cache of explosives.
Her arrest was part of a sweeping crackdown in the 1930s as British authorities worked raid by raid to dismantle networks like the Anushilan Samiti.
What happened to Mukherjee in the years immediately after is not fully recorded — a silence that says as much about how women’s contributions were archived as about her life. She died in 1990, more than four decades after Independence.
Today, her life survives largely through a single Wikipedia entry and one official record in the government’s Digital District Repository — a thin trail for a woman who helped arm and train an entire generation of underground revolutionaries.
