‘The Bethune College Sensation’: Gender, Archive and Radical Passivity

Abstract

This article explores the student protests at Bethune College, Calcutta, on 3 February 1928, against the Simon Commission, a British parliamentary delegation that excluded Indian representation. On this day, female students staged a quiet but radical act of defiance by refusing to attend classes, sign apologies or vacate their hostel, despite threats of expulsion from Principal Gertrude Marian Wright. These acts of refusal exemplify what Agamben (1998) terms ‘radical passivity’, a quiet yet potent resistance that unsettled colonial authority and disrupted established gendered and infantilising narratives of student activism. The Bethune protests are situated within the broader context of colonial education in Bengal, which was simultaneously a tool of imperial control and a site of political dissent. Educational institutions, especially women's colleges, became spaces of revolutionary activity, challenging the colonial government's attempts to depoliticise education. Drawing on archival records, nationalist historiography, and multilingual sources, this article critiques the masculinist framing of the protests and re-centres the experiences of women, who were often reduced to symbolic figures in historical narratives. By adopting feminist historiographical approaches, the article reimagines archival practices to foreground women's voices, revealing the complexities of resistance in colonial Bengal and highlighting the generative intersection of education, gender and political activism.