Nellie Sengupta
Nellie Sengupta, 1886-1973. freedom fighter. Daughter of Frederick William Gray and Edith Henrietta, she was born in Cambridge, U K. In 1909 she married the Congress leader, Jatindramohan Sengupta, who was a students there, and a frequent visitor to the family. Both husband and wife joined the national movement on return to India. She gave up a life of comfort to share the rigours of the national struggle. In 1931, she was sentenced to four months imprisonment for addressing a public meeting in Delhi. With all other Congress leaders in Jail in 1933, she presided over the Calcutta session of the Congress, for which she was bodily lifted and thrown into the police van. Even after the death of her husband in detention in 1933, she continued to be active in public life. She was returned unopposed to the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1940 and re-elected in 1946. She chose to stay in East Pakistan after the partition a nd was elected to the East Pakistan Legislature in 1954. She died in Calcutta, when she had come for medical treatment in 1973.
