Podcast: Child widow to single mother, political icon – how Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay blazed a trail

As India ushers in its 78th year of freedom, its historians have been busy making up for lost time.

For decades, prone to the vagaries of academic fashion, Indian historians mostly turned up their noses at writing biographies. Luckily, over the past decade or so, a new generation of historians has started filling in this gap with exciting new works on everyone from Ashoka through Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But one constituency has been largely missing amongst these books: women.

Luckily, in Nico Slate’s new publication, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom, we now have a richly detailed account of someone who has been described as “indisputably the most remarkable Indian woman of the 20th century”. Slate – a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, someone whose previous books have explored Indians’ and African Americans’ shared struggles for social justice – demonstrates the staggering breadth of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s thought and accomplishments.

Kamaladevi (she was almost always referred to by her first name) was not simply an innovative socialist and feminist; not merely a champion of handicrafts and a sharp commentator on global affairs. She was a pioneer of something called intersectionality: the linking together of myriad movements and campaigns against injustice and inequality. “Here is the key lesson that Kamaladevi’s story reveals about the making of modern India,” Slate writes. “It was the coming together of multiple causes that gave the freedom struggle its dynamic strength.”

In this episode of Past Imperfect, Slate demonstrates how Kamaladevi spent her life shattering taboos. Born in the coastal town of Mangalore in 1903, she defied orthodox conventions by pursuing her education despite being a child widow. And then, at the age of 16, she defied conventions again, re-marrying and choosing as a husband a Bengali dramatist and poet, Hirendranath Chattopadhyay, the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu. Kamaladevi’s marriage into the illustrious Chattopadhyay family helped propel her into the front ranks of nationalist politics. It also caused her a lifetime of heartache due to Hirendranath’s repeated infidelities. In her 30s, she shattered yet another taboo, divorcing Hirendranath and thereby becoming a single mother.

If gender was one axis of Kamaladevi’s politics, then Slate illuminates another one: youth. Her first encounter with Gandhian political activism was at the age of 16, and she was a nationally recognised political figure well before her 30th birthday. Despite her youth, Kamaladevi had no compunctions about confronting and criticising the older, male stalwarts of the Congress Party.

When Mohandas Gandhi initially refused to involve women in the Salt Satyagraha, she traveled to Sabarmati Ashram and successfully convinced him to change his mind. After Vallabhbhai Patel critiqued Kamaladevi’s fellow socialists, she publicly ridiculed him as “the old Sardar”, an out-of-touch defender of “vested interest.” These were acts of bravery, but they also took a toll on her political career: she was shut out of the Congress Working Committee in 1937.

When the guns of war broke out in 1939, Kamaladevi embarked on a two-year tour around the world. This was yet another act of bravery. In Japan, she spoke out against Japanese imperialism and patriarchal attitudes. She visited Chungking, the capital of Nationalist China, while it was under intense Japanese bombardment. But most of her time was spent in the United States, where she forged ties with women’s rights advocates, socialists, and African Americans. “No other prominent Indian visitor to the United States connected so many social struggles,” Slate notes.

After independence in 1947, Kamaladevi’s career underwent a radical transformation. Once a fiery critic of multiple injustices, and a rising star in the firmament of Indian socialism, Kamaladevi spent the last four decades of her life almost wholly consumed in the promotion of handicrafts and theatre.

She turned down multiple offers from Jawaharlal Nehru to join the government, and her global-mindedness narrowed to the world of art and culture. Was this a retreat from politics, perhaps brought on by disillusion about India’s post-independence trajectory? Did her radicalism soften and mutate into a sense of complacency? Slate cautions that there are no easy answers. On the one hand, Kamaladevi’s handicrafts work represented politics by other means: the promotion of rural employment and the dignity of labour. On the other hand, as Slate acknowledges, it is hard to overlook Kamaladevi’s stark silence and inactivity during episodes like the Emergency.

Kamaladevi’s position within the Indian women’s movement also became contested. In her youth, she had been dramatically ahead of her time, denouncing Indian patriarchy and laying out a vision of radical gender quality. Matters changed by the 1970s and 1980s. Kamaladevi had always rejected being labeled as a feminist, but now she staunchly argued that the Indian women’s movement “was not and never can have a feminist character”. Many Indian feminists condemned her for such attitudes.

During the final years of her life, Kamaladevi became “both a historian and a historical figure,” writing about the freedom movement, the Indian women’s movement, and authoring her own memoirs two years before her death. Slate quotes the Jadavpur scholar Supriya Chaudhuri about this dichotomy between Kamaladevi’s own writings and the paucity of historical work on her: “While women’s autobiographies have been of quite extraordinary importance to feminist scholarship in India, biographies of women are relatively scarce and, with some notable exceptions, unremarkable.”

This book is anything but unremarkable. Slate’s biography deftly highlights Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s importance to both Indian and global history. More significantly, it provides Indian historians with an instructive example of how to recover women’s life stories.