India's fiercest female politician faces a fight for survival

For 15 years, Mamata Banerjee and her regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) party seemed to embody a political law of India's West Bengal state: they always found a way to survive.

On Monday, that ended.

The firebrand populist's defeat to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended her bid for a fourth consecutive term as chief minister - a feat that would have placed her alongside long-serving regional titans such as Jyoti Basu and Naveen Patnaik.

Banerjee's loss brings one of the most remarkable political careers in contemporary India to a moment of profound uncertainty - one that began with street protests and now culminates in the weakening of the political fortress she herself built.

Dimunitive and draped in a plain cotton sari and rubber sandals, Banerjee hardly looked like a politician who would topple one of the world's longest-running elected Communist governments.

Modi's BJP conquers Bengal, one of India's toughest political frontiers
The 'daughter of Bengal' taking on Modi
Yet in 2011 she defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) after 34 uninterrupted years in power, overturning a political order that had come to define West Bengal itself. The state, once India's intellectual and commercial capital, had drifted through decades of industrial decline and political fatigue.

At the time, The New York Times memorably called her "the blunt instrument knocking down their own Berlin Wall". And Time magazine named her among the world's 100 most influential people.
 
Banerjee's rise was forged in Bengal's combative political culture, where elections often resemble prolonged street wars - her supporters called her the "fire goddess".

Born to a lower middle class family in Kolkata, Banerjee entered politics through the student wing of the Congress party. By the 1980s she had become one of the state's most visible anti-communist faces, eventually breaking away from Congress to form the TMC.