The first and the only lady State Prisoner of British Bengal arrested under the notorious Bengal Regulation III of 1818, the life story of Nanibala Bandyopadhyay(1888 – 1967) reads like a novel. Born in a pious Brahmin family in the Bally village of Howrah district of present-day West Bengal, her husband died at the age of sixteen years, when she returned to her father Suryakanta. Her nephew Amarendranath Chattopadhyay drew her to their revolutionary group (Yugantar); overnight she became the universal aunt of his fellow revolutionaries like Jadugopal Mukhopadhyay, Mananath Biswas, and Atulkrishna Ghosh, who were then hiding in Rishra. With increasing police vigilance, she along with the revolutionaries moved to a safer shelter in French Chandannagore.
In 1915, when Ramchandra Majumdar, a convict in the Messrs R B Rodda & Company’s arms looting case, was lodged in the Presidency Jail, Nanibala dressed as a married lady impersonated as his wife; met him in the jail, and got the location of the hidden revolvers – a feat unthinkable in those days for a Brahmin widow of her age. Later, when the police came to know about her identity and closed in on her, she escaped to Peshawar, where she got infected with cholera; but was arrested and brought to the Varanasi jail. The police put chilly dust on the soft part of her body to exact information, but in vain; frustrated, they sent her to the Presidency Jail in Calcutta, only to resume torture. In protest, she resorted to fasting for 21 days, following which she was declared a state prisoner.