On 20 September 1942, seventeen-year-old Kanaklata Barua was shot dead by the police of the Indian Imperial Police while leading an unarmed procession to hoist the national flag at the Gohpur police station in the undivided Darrang district of Assam. Within Assamese nationalist memory, her death was rapidly transformed from a single act of local defiance into an enduring symbol of youth nationalism, the distinctive, generationally and gender-marked form that the Quit India Movement took among Assam's adolescents and young Congress volunteers. This paper offers a historical analysis of that transformation. It situates Barua's martyrdom within the concrete organizational context of the Mrityu Bahini youth volunteer corps and the wider student politics associated with the All India Students' Federation; compares her death with the near-simultaneous firing at Dhekiajuli, where the twelve-year-old Tileswari Barua and several others were killed on the very same day; and traces the process by which commemoration, statues, a Coast Guard vessel and a state award consolidated her image as Assam's most recognizable icon of youthful sacrifice for the nation.
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