Born in 1911, Bina Das was the daughter of Beni Madhab Das, a respected Brahmo teacher whose pupils had once included a young Subhas Chandra Bose. She grew up in a household shaped by the ideals of the freedom movement. Her elder sister, Kalyani, was already a committed revolutionary, and by the time Bina was a student in Calcutta, she had joined the Chhatri Sangha, a semi-revolutionary association of women students. She was not a trained fighter. When she resolved to strike at the colonial state, she obtained a five-chambered revolver through a fellow revolutionary, Kamala Dasgupta, for 280 rupees, despite having almost no experience with firearms.
