Shanti Ghosh was born on 22 November 1916 in the district of Coomilla (undivided Bengal) into a deeply patriotic Bengali family, her father Debendranath Ghosh being a freedom fighter and philosophy professor at Victoria College, Comilla. Growing up amid political discussions and anti-colonial sentiment, she absorbed nationalism early and was encouraged to see education and sacrifice as tools against British rule.
As a teenager in Comilla she helped found the Chhatri Sangha (Girl Students’ Association), soon becoming its secretary and turning it into a training ground for militant, disciplined young women. Influenced particularly by Prafullanlini (Profullanandini) Brahma, she gravitated from student activism to the underground revolutionary Jugantar Party.
Within Jugantar, Shanti underwent systematic training in the use of swords, clubs and firearms, breaking the contemporary stereotype of “respectable” Bengali girls confined to symbolic politics. Through Chhatri Sangha she helped build a clandestine support network that ferried messages, money, arms and documents to revolutionaries, while also recruiting and hardening other young women for dangerous missions.
The early 1930s in Bengal were marked by brutal repression: torture of political prisoners, assaults on women activists and public humiliations of satyagrahis by colonial officers such as Comilla’s District Magistrate Charles G. B. Stevens. This atmosphere of terror, especially after the execution of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, convinced Shanti and her comrades that spectacular armed action was necessary to answer imperial violence.
On 14 December 1931, 15-year-old Shanti Ghosh and 14-year-old Suniti Chaudhury entered the Comilla District Magistrate’s office under the pretext of submitting a petition. As Stevens rose from his chair, they drew pistols and fired at close range, killing the magistrate in his own courtroom and instantly transforming a colonial space of authority into a symbol of defiance.
Their act was meant both as vengeance for the executions in Lahore and as a direct blow against a notoriously oppressive official whose name had become synonymous with abuse of power. The assassination shocked the British administration because it revealed an organized, ideologically driven female revolutionary presence in provincial Bengal, not just in big cities.
Shanti and Suniti were promptly arrested, tried in a highly publicized proceeding and sentenced to life transportation, the colonial government arguing that their youth made the death penalty politically risky. During interrogation and in court, Shanti reportedly displayed composure and ideological clarity, framing the assassination as an act of patriotism rather than personal revenge.
She spent about seven years in prison, where she endured humiliation and harsh treatment intended to break both her spirit and the example she set for other girls. Yet her incarceration only increased her symbolic status among nationalists, who held up Shanti and Suniti as evidence that even schoolgirls were ready to die or suffer for freedom.
In 1939, as part of an amnesty arrangement arising out of negotiations between Mahatma Gandhi and the colonial government, Shanti Ghosh and some other political prisoners were released. Leaving jail, she did not retreat into anonymity but resumed studies, enrolling at a Bengali women’s college to complete her education and reorient herself to legal political work.
She joined the Indian National Congress, aligning with the mainstream national movement while retaining sympathy for left-wing and communist causes that emphasized workers, peasants and women. Her journey from underground conspirator to open political activist reflected a broader shift within the freedom struggle as mass politics and constitutional negotiations gained ground in the 1940s.
After Independence, Shanti Ghosh emerged as a significant public figure in West Bengal’s democratic institutions, symbolizing the continuity from revolutionary sacrifice to constitutional governance. She served on the West Bengal Legislative Council from 1952 to 1962 and again from 1967 to 1968, and was a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from 1962 to 1964.
Within these bodies she advocated issues related to education, women’s participation and the welfare of the poor, translating the ethos of her teenage rebellion into policy-oriented work. Her legislative career illustrated how a once-clandestine fighter adapted to parliamentary methods without abandoning her commitment to social justice and national reconstruction.
Beyond formal politics, Shanti stayed engaged in public life, encouraging young women to combine higher education with active citizenship rather than accept passive roles after 1947. The memory of Chhatri Sangha informed her efforts to make women’s organizations more assertive, not merely charitable, in addressing inequality and violence.
She also maintained links with left-leaning and communist movements, reflecting her long-standing belief that political freedom had to be complemented by economic and social transformation. This placed her in the wider spectrum of Bengali women activists who moved from anti-colonial militancy into campaigns for land reforms, labour rights and gender equality in the new republic.
Shanti Ghosh died in 1989, decades after the Independence for which she had risked her life as a schoolgirl. Her birth anniversary on 22 November now invites remembrance not just of a sensational assassination, but of a lifetime spent moving from pistol to platform, from juvenile prisoner to seasoned legislator.
Her story underscores how the Bengal revolutionary movement nurtured women who were prepared first to confront colonial terror with arms and later to rebuild the nation through law, policy and organized social work. Remembering Shanti Ghosh in this wider arc restores to the freedom struggle a figure whose courage at fifteen was matched by four decades of disciplined, post-1947 public service.
