Kalpana Dutt

From N.C.’s Writings

The following lines were written by N.C. twentyone years ago and published in this journal’s February 18, 1995 issue. It is being reproduced on the occasion of the distinguished revolutionary Kalpana Dutt’s twentyfirst death anniversary which fell on February 8 this year. It came and went with hardly anyone remembering her on that day. Kalpana’s birth centenary on July 27, 2013 also went virtually unnoticed. But we in Mainstream have decided to offer our homage to her memory by reproducing the following piece. Incidentally N.C. had also translated Kalpana’s reminiscences from Bengali to English under the guidance of P.C. Joshi, Kalpana’s husband and the legendary General Secretary of the CPI (1943-48). 

Kalpana Dutt

On February 8 passed away in a Calcutta hospital a frail figure who sixty years ago became a legend in the classical mould. Kalpana Dutt, born in 1913 in a middle-class Bengali home in East Bengal, was a student in Calcutta’s Bethune College in 1930 when she came in contact with the group of Chittagong revolu-tionaries whose leader was the great Surya Sen, fondly called ‘Masterda’ by all his disciples.

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