North Calcutta wakes slowly on a Sunday morning.
Before the traffic gathers and the markets grow loud, there is a gentler prelude. Birdsong filters through the air. A tram glides past with its familiar metallic sigh. Somewhere a kettle whistles at a roadside tea stall.
Last Sunday morning, standing outside Bethune College, it felt as though the city was stirring not only from sleep but from memory.
Palash and shemul blossoms lay scattered across the pavements like small flames fallen from the trees. The narrow lanes of North Calcutta seemed momentarily suspended between the present and another century.
It was here that the Kadambini Trail began.
A small group gathered before the gates of Bethune College, drawn together by curiosity about a woman who had once dared to imagine a life beyond the expectations of her time.
The walk was led by heritage enthusiast Navpreet Arora. Walking alongside us was Dr Madhurima Vidyarthi, whose historical novel The School for Bad Girls served as both inspiration and narrative thread for the walk.
Before we began, Vidyarthi shared a reflection that lingered throughout the morning.
“History is always written by the victors,” she said. “But we rarely notice how history is being made around us. In this city, every brick has a story to tell.”
To follow Kadambini’s footsteps is to step into the intellectual ferment of nineteenth-century Bengal, the era known as the Bengal Renaissance.
Colonial Calcutta was then a city restless with debate. Western education had begun reshaping intellectual life, and reformers were questioning customs that had long defined society.
The questions that animated these debates now sound deceptively simple.
Should girls go to school?
Should women attend colleges?
Yet in the nineteenth century these questions unsettled the very foundations of social order.
Across western India Savitribai Phule had already begun opening schools for girls. In Bengal, reformers such as Keshab Chandra Sen and Dwarkanath Ganguly championed women’s education through the reformist circles of the Brahmo Samaj.
Meanwhile Annette Akroyd Beveridge helped establish one of the earliest advanced institutions for girls in Bengal.
Yet the social world that reformers hoped to transform remained deeply restrictive. Women from elite households often lived behind purdahs, travelling in covered palkis carried by beharas.
Against this landscape, the ambitions of Kadambini Basu carried the quiet audacity of rebellion.
Her path into higher education was not straightforward. In the entrance examination of December 1878 she fell short by a single mark. The following year she joined Bethune College, where Dwarkanath Ganguly served as both professor and mentor.
Her achievement soon altered the course of history.
Together with Chandramukhi Basu, Kadambini became one of the first two female graduates not only in India but across the British Empire.
At the annual convocation of Calcutta University on 25 March 1879, Vice-Chancellor Alexander Arbuthnot referred cautiously to “one young lady educated at Bethune School” who had passed the entrance examination with great credit.
The remark stirred murmurs across the hall.
That young woman was Kadambini Basu.
For women in colonial India, the university had suddenly become the threshold to a brave new world.
As the walk progressed through North Calcutta’s streets, Vidyarthi paused at several points to read excerpts from The School for Bad Girls. The novel traces the journey of Kumud, a fictional protagonist who becomes a widow at the age of eleven and must confront the emotional and social hardships of nineteenth-century Bengal.
Through Kumud’s struggles, the book evokes the resilience of women who refused to surrender their dreams.
One passage conjured a quiet yet powerful image.
Kadambini studying late into the night. A candle burning beside her books. The flame flickering and nearly dying out.
Yet she keeps reading.
The candle grows smaller and smaller.
Still she does not stop.
The image felt almost symbolic of the quiet persistence required to challenge a world that had never imagined women inside its institutions.
The trail unfolded as an ongoing conversation between Vidyarthi and Arora, interspersed with historical anecdotes about the city and it’s past.
Cornwallis Street, now Bidhan Sarani, appeared repeatedly in that narrative. In the nineteenth century it had been one of the busiest thoroughfares of Black Town. Palanquins moved through its lanes. Torchbearers carrying flaming moshals lit the streets after dusk. Students, reformers and intellectuals animated the neighborhood.
But the street was also a crucible of political awakening.
Here the echoes of the Swadeshi Movement once reverberated. Indigenous handlooms were promoted. British goods were boycotted. National weaving schools emerged as symbols of resistance.
The trail paused outside a house associated with the revolutionary organization Anushilan Samiti, whose members later became linked with the Alipore Bomb Case.
At another moment, Vidyarthi read from an imagined diary entry reflecting Kadambini’s nationalist consciousness.
“The upliftment of women, of society, of a nation,” the entry reads. “How I wish I could do something to help.”
Near Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, the walk paused once more.
Down a narrow alley stands the house where Kadambini and Dwarkanath Ganguly once lived after their marriage.
Across the lane stands a dilapidated structure long known as Abala Barrack, associated with House No. 13 Cornwallis Street where the couple lived for several years. The nickname carried a hint of irony. Dwarkanath’s outspoken advocacy for women’s education had earned him the title Abala-Bandhab, or friend of women.
Residents stepped outside as the group gathered, their curiosity turning into delight as the history of the house unfolded.
Moments like these revealed something essential about heritage. It does not exist only in monuments or archives. It lives in neighbourhoods, in memory and in conversation.
For Sukanya Mitra, Assistant Professor of History at Loreto College, the experience carried particular resonance.
“I have been on a few heritage walks and I have also conducted walks myself,” she said. “But for the first time I have been on a walk where a woman’s story gained momentum. Although I know this neighborhood, today I encountered many nuggets of history that I had not really come across in books. It felt like situating history within a lived reality.”
Navpreet Arora reflected that her personal take away from the trail was the satisfaction of giving people a renewed sense of pride in their heritage.
“I hope people go back and read about trailblazing women like Kadambini who have shaped the contours of the city’s cultural reality. I hope this trail inspires people to rediscover and fall in love with this city once again.”
Beepsa Biswas, founder of The Marketing Poet Agency, emphasized that experiential events like these aim to connect readers with stories in meaningful ways.
“Our aim is not just numbers,” she said. “We want people who are genuinely enthusiastic about this history. Experiential events like these engage people in a very unique way.”
For Vidyarthi, the impulse to write Kadambini’s story began with a question that continues to resonate.
“When did the women of Calcutta begin their journey into science?” she reflected. “What legacy did our scientific grandmothers leave behind and what will we leave behind for future generations?”
As the walk concluded, I returned to the words that frame the end of her book.
“It is not a sin to fulfil my dream, my ambition, the potential I know I possess. It is what I would wish every girl would do, sweeping away every hindrance in her path. Tomorrow will be a new beginning.”
By then the city had resumed its ordinary rhythm.
Trams rolled past again. Shops reopened. Markets filled with the familiar sounds of bargaining.
Yet something of the morning lingered.
In the narrow lanes of North Calcutta, history does not simply remain in the past.
It waits quietly, for someone to walk by and listen.