Matangini Hazra was widowed young and lived much of her life in poverty in rural Bengal, largely uninvolved in politics until her sixties, when she began attending meetings connected to Gandhi's civil disobedience movement, gradually becoming one of the most active local organizers in her district despite having no formal education.
By 1942, in her early seventies, she had become a respected local leader in the Quit India Movement, a nationwide push demanding an immediate end to British rule. When authorities banned public gatherings in her district, she helped organize a large procession toward a local police station in open defiance of the ban.
As the procession approached the police station, officers opened fire on the unarmed crowd. Hazra, at the front carrying the national flag, was shot multiple times. According to accounts passed down from witnesses, she continued walking forward and kept the flag raised even after being hit, reciting a patriotic chant as she fell.
Her death at over seventy years old, marching unarmed at the front of a banned protest, became one of the most cited symbols of ordinary, elderly civilians' willingness to risk everything for independence, and she remains commemorated in her home region with statues and annual observances.