Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

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Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (3rd April 1903, Mangalore – 29th October 1988) was born in a Saraswat family. She was a social reformer and a freedom fighter, and is remembered for her contributions to Indian handicrafts which activated a handicraft renaissance in post-Independence India. In her book Indian Handicrafts (published 1963), she stressed the significance which handicrafts have played in the social and economic life of the Indian people.

[edit] Biography

Kamaladevi's father was the District Collector of Mangalore, and her mother Girijabai, from whom she inherited an independent streak, came from one of the wealthiest families in Karnataka. Her parents’ friends included many prominent freedom fighters and intellectuals such as Mahadev Govind Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Annie Besant. She became an early enthusiast of the swadeshi nationalist project.

Married at fourteen and widowed two years later while she was still at school, she nevertheless took up acting, an activity quite unsuitable for women from respectable families at the time. She then married the poet-playwright Harindranath Chattopadhyay, brother of Sarojini Naidu, in 1920, and even acted in two silent films. A few months later she and Harindranath went to London, where she joined Bedford College to study sociology. However, they returned in 1923 to take part in Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. Kamaladevi joined the Seva Dal, a Gandhian organisation set up to promote social uplift, and was soon training women as sevikas across the country.

In 1926 she met the suffragette Margaret H. Cousins, who inspired her to run for a seat in the Madras Provincial Legislative Assembly. She lost by only 200 votes. In the 1930s, she was arrested for entering the Bombay Stock Exchange to sell packets of contraband salt, and spent almost a year in prison. In 1936, she became president of the Congress Socialist Party, working alongside Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Minoo Masani. For her, feminism was inseparable from socialism, and where necessary she opposed her own colleagues when they ignored or infringed women’s rights. For instance, when Mahatma Gandhi opposed the inclusion of women in the Dandi March (claiming that Englishmen would not hurt women, just as Hindus would not harm cows), Kamaladevi spoke out against this stand. Some time in the 1920s she and Harindranath separated and divorced by mutual consent; their marriage had largely been one of convenience and they had followed different paths.

When World War II broke out Kamaladevi was in England, and she immediately began a world tour to represent India’s situation to other countries and drum up support for Independence after the war. However, Independence brought Partition in its wake, and she threw herself into working for the refugees. Her first task was to set up the Indian Cooperative Union to help with rehabilitation, and through the Union she made plans for a township on cooperative lines. At length Mahatma Gandhi reluctantly gave her permission on the condition that she did not ask for state assistance, and after much struggle the township of Faridabad on the outskirts of Delhi was founded by 30,000 Pathans from the Northwest Frontier. Kamaladevi worked with Suhsila Nayyar in setting up health facilities for the new town.

Around this time she became concerned at the possibility that the introduction of Western methods of factory-based mass production in India as part of Nehru's vision for Indian's development would affect traditional artisans, especially women in the unorganised sectors. She set up a series fo crafts museums to hold and archive India's indigenous arts and srafts and serve as a storehouse for indigenous known how. This included the Theatre Crafts Museum in Delhi. She also set up the National School of Drama and later headed the Sangeet Natak Akademi. She saw no difference between arts and crafts, and founded several awards for master craftsmen. The culmination of this enterprise was the setting up of the All-India Handicrafts Board.

The Government of India conferred on her the Padma Bhushan (1955) and later the Padma Vibhushan, which are among the highest civilian awards of the Republic of India. She also received the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1966) for community leadership.