Autumn 1947, New Delhi. British rule in India had ended. Cyril Radcliffe had drawn a line dividing the subcontinent into two. In the violent Partition riots that ensued, half a million people died and 10 million fled. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay arrived at the newly created Relief and Rehabilitation Secretariat in New Delhi seeking to resettle the thousands of refugees in desperate need of shelter and stability. Finding the bureaucrats unresponsive, she identified a patch of open land near the city and declared that unless an alternative site was given within three days, she would personally accompany the refugees to claim it. The night before the group was to occupy the space, the clearance arrived. This is how Kamaladevi helped set up a new settlement for refugees in Faridabad in newly independent India.
Nico Slate’s biography of Kamaladevi is thoughtful and deeply researched. Kamaladevi was among the most remarkable Indian women of the 20th century: married at the age of 11 and widowed a year later; defying convention by falling in love and getting remarried at the age of 16 at a civil registry office, outside language, caste, and region; performing on stage in public; and travelling across the country and the world as a key leader of India’s freedom struggle.
Kamaladevi’s life story contains much more, and Slate retells it with rich detail and insight. At the age of 18, she went to England and did fieldwork in London’s slums. In the 1920s, she was one of the first women to stand for election to a legislature in colonial India. She was a founder and the first secretary of the All India Women’s Conference. She was one of the first women to be arrested in the freedom struggle. She co-founded a socialist group within the Indian National Congress. She opposed partition. In the true spirit of Gandhian action, she worked for grassroots social change through the revival of Indian arts and crafts for sustainable livelihoods. She founded institutions that became part of the narrative of modern India.
In addition to these extraordinary achievements, she wrote incessantly and reflected on the work. Slate quotes the socialist leader Yusuf Meherally’s vivid description of her writing style: “She always carries a typewriter with her even on her travels, much to the exasperation of her friends, and sits in a crowded third-class railway compartment typing out articles direct on the machine instead of writing them first by hand.”
Making of a feminist
Kamaladevi was born into an affluent and progressive family in colonial Mangalore. Her mother, Girijabai, an associate of Pandita Ramabai, helped to form the first women’s organisation in the district. When Kamaladevi’s father died, the family property went to a male relative. Kamaladevi felt this injustice sharply: “Women had no rights and we should qualify to stake our claims and assert them. The question was not one of possessions but of principle.”
Also Read | Woman with a mission
A child widow herself, she saw the suffering and ostracism that widows experienced. She noted that the word “widow” itself was used as a term of abuse; they were “souls in agony”. Another issue that concerned her greatly was domestic violence. Spousal abuse had led to early deaths within her family. Kamaladevi was determined to work for a future in which no woman would need to fear such abuse.
In 1919, in Bombay, Kamaladevi went with her sister-in-law Sarojini Naidu to hear Gandhi speak. The draconian new Rowlatt Act allowed the colonial state to detain political prisoners without trial. In protest, Gandhi had called for a day of fasting and prayer. A sea of humanity had gathered on Chowpatty Beach. The next day, Gandhi spoke with measured clarity about his new strategy of “satyagraha”, or passive resistance: “This is going to be a great struggle with a powerful adversary. If you want to take it up, you must be prepared to lose everything and train yourselves to the strictest non-violence and discipline.”
The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India
Fourth Estate
Pages: 365
Price: Rs.799
Kamaladevi was ready. For her, satyagraha was a compelling force: “The application of this concept of satyagraha as a political weapon was startling and exciting. It was like gazing on a new instrument, complicated and powerful to operate.”
How women joined the Dandi march
Even as she threw herself into nationalist politics, Kamaladevi continued to work for women’s rights across the country. In Madras, she fought for maternity leave for women workers. In Madurai, she spoke to unionised women textile workers. In Mangalore, she helped organise women workers in the transport sector and cashew processing plants. In Bengal and Assam, she inquired into women’s working conditions on tea plantations. And most powerfully, in March 1930, on the road between Jambusar and Amod in Gujarat, she challenged Gandhi himself. Catching up with the leader on his great Salt March to Dandi wherein only male satyagrahis had been chosen to accompany him, she urged Gandhi to recognise that women could indeed participate in every part of the freedom struggle, including direct action. “The significance of a non-violent struggle,” she told Gandhi, “is that the weakest can take an equal part with the strongest and share in the triumph as you yourself have said.” Gandhi agreed. “I felt I had won the world,” Kamaladevi would recall later.
The woman whom Yusuf Meherally described as a “fearless crusader” was also fearless about prison. When she entered the Bombay Stock Exchange to sell banned salt, she was arrested. Arrested again near Vijayawada, she laughed off the difficult jail conditions: “I have had the most glorious experiences in Gudivada—two days to get a change of clothes, four days to get toothpaste, five for a comb and on to the sixth day a cake of soap actually arrived!” In Vellore jail, in intense heat, she was kept in solitary confinement and allowed only one letter a month. Even the women who brought her food were not allowed to speak to her. Nevertheless, she wrote sardonically to fellow freedom fighter Acharya Kripalani about the British colonialists: “You and I will stick to the plains and its gloom while our very illustrious friends rush to the Imperial Capital of the cool hill-station of Simla. Don’t you wish they would settle down there forever and never come down again?”
In an important dimension of this biography, Slate describes how Kamaladevi challenged those who shaped India’s freedom struggle to think beyond political independence from British rule to a more expansive meaning of freedom. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
In an important dimension of this biography, Slate describes how Kamaladevi challenged those who shaped India’s freedom struggle to think beyond political independence from British rule to a more expansive meaning of freedom. In Kamaladevi’s powerful vision, true freedom implied equal rights for all and the overall flourishing of human potential. She insisted on a proposal to make primary education compulsory across India. She pushed a proposal for radical land reform through the gradual elimination of intermediaries between cultivators and the state. In a resolution on fundamental rights and economic policy, she argued with Jawaharlal Nehru over the word “protection”, pointing out that the use of the word was paternalistic and implied the inherent weakness of women. Even if her efforts did not always meet with success, they were ambitious in scope and added value to the quality of the deliberations.
Through her extensive travels around the world, Kamaladevi built bridges of solidarity. In a lecture on BBC Empire in 1939, she spoke about Gandhi’s vision for “the liberation of the world”. In the US, apart from the corridors of power, she also visited Sing Sing prison. With Eleanor Roosevelt she shared the belief that a country is a “collection of human beings”. In 1941, encountering Jim Crow racism on a segregated train in Louisiana, she self-identified as a coloured woman and refused to move from her seat. Writing about racial discrimination across the world, she pointed out that the “Africa problem” was in fact a “world problem”, one that “divides the world between the White and the Coloured, the dominating and the exploited, a basic human problem that can only be overcome with a radical change in our social and economic values.”
Integrity matters
Kamaladevi was a woman of principle and action. At a meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, when the US declined to ratify the covenant on human rights, the discussions that followed felt tedious and empty: “For weeks we wrangled over punctuation marks in our meticulous drafts on notional decisions.”
Also Read | Socialists and writers
Slate shows how Kamaladevi, the institution-builder, worked on a foundation of cooperation and collaboration. “Planning of projects is not a compiling of figures or tabulation of needs,” she wrote with wisdom gained from decades of impactful work on the ground. “It is very definitely a social act. It can succeed only with the active responsible participation of the widest range of individuals and groups.” An important example of such collaborative work was a massive national handicrafts survey over several months and across 56,000 kilometres. Kamaladevi’s effort to make handicrafts a part of daily life was based on a Gandhian vision of self-reliance. She herself travelled to the small town of Chamba in the Himalayas, to visit a master artist known for her exquisite embroidered rumals. In Kalahasti, she went to meet one of the last surviving master craftsmen of Kalamkari. From Hyderabad, in blazingly hot weather and wearing a wet towel on her head, she drove to Pochampally to offer support to handloom weavers. It is an example of Slate’s quiet style that this one telling detail—the wet towel—conveys Kamaladevi’s dauntless commitment to endure the heat and get on with the work.
It seems almost unbelievable that so much can be put into one life; yet somehow, Kamaladevi did it all. Slate tells her story with clear-sightedness and balance. As a biographer, he respects Kamaladevi’s lifelong privacy about her personal life even as he draws connections between her personal life and the principles for which she fought. The Kamaladevi who comes alive in these pages is a Gandhian who argues with Gandhi but also lives by his ideals throughout her life; a socialist who argues for women’s rights; a feminist with an inclusive and intersectional approach; a nationalist political leader with a global vision of freedom; a woman of action who fights for refugee rehabilitation; and a fierce believer in arts and crafts not only as a source of sustainable livelihoods but as a wellspring of human creativity.
“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!” wrote Wordsworth about the French Revolution. Like the best books about the freedom struggle, The Art of Freedom conveys, through the life of its extraordinary subject, the powerful and deeply felt emotions of another dawn. Slate weaves a textured narrative about a woman of action and intellect who was far ahead of her times, who challenged orthodoxy with her own radical and uncompromising vision of freedom, and who wore her achievements lightly. This is a tremendous book that deserves to be widely read.
Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS.
