Born in the small village of Hogla, near Tamluk in Bengal, Matangini Hazra was the daughter of a poor peasant and did not receive a formal education. She was married early and became widowed at the age of eighteen.

In 1905, she became actively interested in the Indian independence movement as a Gandhian. In 1932, she took part in the Civil Disobedience movement and was arrested for breaking the Salt Act. She was released, but protested for the abolition of the tax. Arrested again, she was incarcerated for six months at Baharampur. After being released, she became an active member of the Indian National Congress and took to spinning her own Khadi. In 1933, she attended the subdivisional Congress conference at Serampore and was injured in the ensuing baton charge by the police.

As part of the Quit India Movement, members of the Congress planned to take over the various police stations of Medinipore district and other government offices. Hazra, who was 72 at the time, led a procession of six thousand supporters, mostly women volunteers, with the purpose of taking over the Tamluk police station. When the procession reached the outskirts of the town, they were ordered to disband by the Crown police. As she stepped forward to appeal to the police not to open fire at the crowd, Hazra was shot. She continued marching despite wounds to the forehead and both hands.

As she was repeatedly shot, she kept chanting Vande Mataram. She died with the flag of the Indian National Congress held high and still flying.

Post independence, numerous schools, colonies, and streets were named after Hazra. The first statue of a woman put up in Kolkata, in independent India, was Hazra’s in 1977. In 2002, as part of a series of postage stamps commemorating sixty years of the Quit India Movement and the formation of the Tamluk National Government, the Department of Posts of India issued a five rupee postage stamp with Matangini Hazra’s likeness.