The unsung ‘feminist’ freedom fighter

Ninety-four years ago this month, in March 1930, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay convinced Mahatma Gandhi to change his mind. Gandhi had launched his Salt March with a carefully selected band of some seventy-eight satyagrahis, all of whom were men. He excluded women from the most confrontational protests until Kamaladevi reminded him of an argument he had himself long asserted — that the power of non-violence was open to all. Born in Mangalore in April 1903, Kamaladevi was not yet 27 when she rushed to Gujarat, joined the Salt March, and challenged Gandhi to recognise that women should be able to contribute to every facet of the freedom struggle. That is why Gopalkrishna Gandhi views Kamaladevi as “crucial to the political life of Mahatma Gandhi.” Unlike many of his followers, she challenged the Mahatma.

Her willingness to defy authority does not, however, fully explain why Ramachandra Guha has stated that Kamaladevi “has strong claims to being regarded as the greatest Indian woman of modern times.” To assess that claim, we have to understand how Kamaladevi combined women’s activism with opposition to injustice of many kinds and resisted what she saw as narrow labels — including the term “feminist.”

It is fitting to celebrate Kamaladevi during International Women’s Month, but she herself was wary of being seen only as a women’s advocate, and she rejected the term “feminist” as a Western import that divided women from their male colleagues in the struggle for India’s freedom. She was not alone. Her sister-in-law, Sarojini Naidu, proclaimed, “I am not a feminist,” and many Indian women similarly scorned the label “feminist” in the years preceding Indian independence. It would be a mistake, however, to draw a sharp line between Kamaladevi and the range of beliefs and causes often linked with feminism. As the historian Ellen Carol DuBois has pointed out, Kamaladevi fought for nearly everything we associate with the word “feminism”: including full suffrage, equal pay for equal work, fair inheritance laws, equal access to divorce, and access to birth control. In 1926, Kamaladevi campaigned to become the first woman to be elected to a provincial legislature in British India. Throughout her career, she routinely challenged gender-based barriers. And while she worked closely with a range of men — from Gandhi to Nehru to Jayaprakash Narayan — Kamaladevi also believed in the importance of autonomous women’s organisations.

Kamaladevi played a key role in the most important women’s organisation in colonial India, the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC). She served as the AIWC’s secretary during the crucial years after it was founded in 1927. More than anyone else, she did the heavy labour of building up the organisation’s membership and extending its impact beyond its annual gatherings. She also challenged her fellow AIWC members to focus not just on empowering women, but on empowering women to fight for India’s freedom broadly understood. “Obviously women were not the only victims of social and economic disabilities and discriminations,” she later wrote.

“The women’s struggle had therefore to be an indivisible part of the larger political, social and economic struggle.”

For Kamaladevi, the women’s struggle was also deeply personal. When her father died, her mother’s inheritance was limited by patriarchal laws and traditions. Kamaladevi herself was widowed as a child, and with the support of her mother, rejected the life of austerity traditionally reserved for widows of her community and class. Breaking yet more norms, Kamaladevi later remarried across the lines of caste and region. When her husband, the actor and poet, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, refused to stop having affairs with other women, Kamaladevi broke another taboo by divorcing him.

Kamaladevi’s activism took her beyond the borders of India, where she routinely fought stereotypes of Indian women as passive — stereotypes often used to defend British imperialism.

In June 1929, Kamaladevi travelled to Berlin to attend a gathering of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship. Founded by leading American and European suffragists, the International Alliance remained heavily Western, and Egypt and India were the only non-Western nations to have their own representation at that particular gathering.

Kamaladevi forged strong ties with a range of Western women, but she also fought against the imperialism and racism that existed within the International Alliance and other Western women’s groups.

In the Spring of 1941, Kamaladevi linked her opposition to sexism with her long-standing opposition to racism by taking a brave stand against injustice on a train travelling across the Southern United States. She took a stand by refusing to leave her seat. When the ticket collector demanded that she vacate a “white’s only” car, Kamaladevi could have defused the situation by explaining that she was an Indian dignitary fresh from a meeting with the president of the United States. Instead, she declared, “I am a coloured woman obviously and it is unnecessary for you to disturb me for I have no intention of moving from here.” By refusing to move, Kamaladevi challenged American racism. By proclaiming herself “coloured,” she expressed solidarity with the millions of African-Americans who were then known as “coloured.”

Eleven years had passed since Kamaladevi challenged Gandhi to open the Salt March to women. In the years ahead, Kamaladevi would continue to defy injustice of many kinds, while building bridges across social movements and national borders. After Indian independence, Kamaladevi emerged as one of the most influential supporters of Indian handicrafts and of the arts broadly understood. She helped to found the Crafts Council of India as well as several regional Crafts Councils. She travelled across India and abroad, helping support Indian artisans — many of them women — and working to secure markets for their products.

Kamaladevi refused to be limited — whether by patriarchal conceptions of womanhood, narrow conceptions of feminism, or the borders of race and nation. Her legacy of courage, creative trouble-making, and inclusive bridge-building remains vital today — in India and throughout the world. One of the greatest women in 20th-century India, Kamaladevi was also a global figure whose legacy should inspire us all.

(An exclusive by Nico Slate, the author of  ‘Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom’ published by HarperCollins India.)