Anushilan Samiti
Anushilan Samiti (Ōnūshīlōn sōmītī, "lit": body-building society) was a Bengali Indian organisation that existed in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and propounded revolutionary violence as the means for ending British rule in India. The organisation arose from a conglomeration of local youth groups and gyms ("Akhara") in Bengal in 1902. It had two prominent, if somewhat independent, arms in East and West Bengal identified as Dhaka Anushilan Samiti centred in Dhaka (modern day Bangladesh), and the Jugantar group (centred at Calcutta) respectively.
Chandraprava Saikiani
Saikiani started her career as a teacher at a primary school in Nagaon and later, became the headmistress of the Girls’ M. E. School, Tezpur. During this time, she refused to honour her parents' commitment to marry her off to an elderly person and got engaged to Dandinath Kalita, an Assamese writer. The relationship resulted in Saikiani becoming a mother out of marriage and she remained a spinster for life after Kalita married another woman. She was reported to have faced strong opposition from the conservative society in bringing up her son as a single mother but her life in Tezpur brought her opportunities to meet and interact with social and cultural leaders such as Chandranath Sharma, Omeo Kumar Das, Jyotiprasad Agarwalla and Lakhidhar Sarma. In 1921, she joined the non co-operation movement of Mahatma Gandhi and worked to spread the message among women of Tezpur. She was an invited speaker at the Nagaon session of the Assam Sahitya Sabha in 1925 where she called upon the women attendees who were seated in a separate enclosure to break the barriers and the women heeded her call to come out to the open area. Returning to her village, she joined Kaljirapara school as a teacher but resigned her job when she was denied permission to attend the Guwahati session of the Indian National Congress. She continued her social activism and founded Assam Pradeshik Mahila Samiti in 1926 to act against child marriage, polygamy and the discrimination of women at the temples and to take up issues like women's education and self-employment. Her efforts were reported in getting the Hayagriva Madhava Temple, Hajo, near Guwahati opened to women. Her involvement with the civil disobedience movement landed her in jail in 1930 and later in 1943, she was jailed again while participating in the non co-operation movement.