In the early hours of 29 May 1970, eight Naxalites including a young woman were arrested in a massive police-cum-paramilitary operation in the hilly terrain of the Ruam forests near Jaduguda town in erstwhile Bihar's East Singhbhum region. Hours before her arrest, the unarmed young woman had escaped after being intercepted by the vehicular light of a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jeep by jumping down the ravine. The jawans had identified her as a Naxalite and shot at her but missed. A bullet had landed close to her feet. The woman, Kalpana Bose, was part of a large contingent of 54 Naxalites belonging to the Revolutionary Communist Council of India (RCCI), which had undertaken an attempted Long March in the area.

While the Naxalite blunders at Jaduguda became part of an eponymously named conspiracy case which languished for seven long years, the matter became sensational because of the presence of another woman, the British-born Mary Tyler who was arrested and incarcerated for five years before being released in July 1975. Tyler's book My Years in an Indian Prison (1977) jolted the British audience as it reminded them of their differences from Tyler: ‘Altogether a remarkable book. But it is not one that you cannot put down; rather, it is your own life that you cannot pick up again—without shame that is’ (Bourne 1977: 429). A year later, the Indian edition was published, and it was immediately translated in several regional languages. In his review,

Ranajit Guha (2009: 607) remarked on how Tyler was able to ‘objectify her sympathy’ for her fellow prisoners, ‘into an instrument of struggle against the condition of her own bondage and that of the others’. While Tyler's story has been well documented, it is the other woman who is the subject of discussion here—Kalpana Bose, the longest serving woman political prisoner of the Naxalite era in Bengal. Unlike Tyler, who by her own admission had little contact with Naxalites before she arrived in India (Tyler 1978b: 17–24), Kalpana had voluntarily joined the RCCI's core group, Man-Money-Gun (MMG), and the police had been after her.

How and why did Kalpana become a Naxalite? Pursuing her story at her present residence in a home for the aged outside Bankura town was revealing.