Nanibala Devi, the first woman state prisoner of colonial India, died unrecognized in 1967. She was arrested under the notorious Bengal State Prisoners Regulation III of 1818—a legislative provision that entitled the colonial government to detain a person without trial for reasons of security. The exact date or year of Nanibala's arrest is unclear; it is said that she was interned for two years under the regulation and released in 1919 as part of the clemency granted by the royal amnesty. Little is known about her post-release life other than the fact that her family rejected her, she contracted tuberculosis and lived in great poverty in Kolkata, she was cured by a wandering holy man and she received the freedom fighters’ pension. Apparently, the holy man inspired her to renounce the world and don the saffron. A limited bio sketch— inclusive of her birth, her child marriage, widowhood, political education under her nephew, enrolment in a Christian school and her involvement in revolutionary activities in the context of the Indo-German conspiracy of 1914—was collated and printed by Kamala Dasgupta, a revolutionary turned satyagrahi, in 1963 in a book entitled Swadhinata sangrame Banglar nari: Women of Bengal in Freedom Movement. Undoubtedly, Nanibala finds an honourable mention in the list of freedom fighters and fragments of her life story can be found in diverse sources, thanks to the initial efforts made by Kamala Dasgupta and subsequently gathered by other scholars. But what is disheartening to note is a small news item in 2005 in the Bengali national daily Anandabazar Patrika, which mentioned how the municipality in Bally town failed to fulfil its 2001 promise towards honouring its resident, Nanibala Devi. The newspaper article states that while a children's park was named after Nanibala, her statue was never installed and the adjoining road, Mohanlal Bahalwala Road, was never renamed after her (S. Bhattacharya 2005: 6). It is within this history of absent participation that one can find fragmentary stories of other female revolutionaries—Sindhubala, Dukaribala, Yamuna Das—who were associated with sensational conspiracies and were arrested by the colonial police. While the relation between revolutionary activities and women has been a subject of discussion, the question is how did widows and rural wives endure incarceration?