Nico Slate’s ‘The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’: A firebrand leader of women’s and workers’ rights

Mahesh Rangarajan

Updated At : 08:47 AM Oct 13, 2024 IST

The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay by Nico Slate. HarperCollins. Pages 365. Rs 899

Few can doubt that Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was extraordinary to the core. She went from being a widow at a young age to a woman who married for love and also divorced her husband, upholding a woman’s right in a most basic way. More important was the way her work spanned not one but many spheres: women’s rights and the freedom struggle, labour unions and the world of art and theatre. Most lasting would be her contribution to the arts and crafts in Independent India, when she went from being a militant socialist and democrat in the Congress to being a builder of institutions that bear her mark of quality.

Late in life, given several honours in India and abroad, she was seen as one of the great women who had worked closely with Gandhiji and other stalwarts during the freedom movement. It is to the credit of Nico Slate that he takes us to the woman behind the legend, and to her times and not just her persona, fascinating as it was and always will be.

How could the women’s struggle be part of the freedom struggle and how could the same be said of workers and tenants’ movements? This was a conundrum at the heart of the nationalist struggle, but Kamaladevi brought her own distinctive experiences, both from her place of upbringing and her own choices in public life. Her mother, Girija, had been a founder member of two women’s organisations in Mangalore. Kamala studied both at Queen Mary’s College, Madras, and in London and became an active feminist over time.

She became active in the All India Women’s Conference and was a long-time office-bearer of it. As she said in a famous speech, she stood not for any party or community, but for all women. Madras and Bombay, the first provinces to get women’s suffrage, were among her early places of work. Most importantly, she was active in the campaign for the Sarda Act of 1929 that led to the raising of the age of consent.

Kamaladevi was part of the left wing of the Congress and played a role in the drafting of the resolution on the rights of workers and toilers at Karachi. In an important intervention, she made the point that housework was as much labour as factory work. Reading Slate and the short but pithy excerpts from her writings, one is struck more often than not by their abiding relevance not only in India, but the wider world of today.

If it was Nehru whose philosophy she was closer to, the inspiration to service came from the Mahatma. It is not widely known that it was her quiet but firm arguments that convinced him that women could and should take part in the Salt Satyagraha and the wider Civil Disobedience Movement. It was not for nothing that she told an American audience many years later — 1941, to be precise — that those in the movement could debate and differ with or even convince Mr Gandhi of another point of view!

Despite the formation of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, and its many efforts, the party as a whole did not endorse the views of the younger, and more militant, members, of whom Kamaladevi was one.

Partition came as a bitter blow. It is here that we see a major transformation in Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s role and place in public life. Her herculean efforts to establish a refugee city at Faridabad are chronicled here.

After her unsuccessful foray into electoral politics in 1951, she did not join her former socialist colleagues. Instead, she engaged her energies in the sphere of the aesthetic: the Cottage Industries Emporium and its associated body, Handicrafts Council, became a powerhouse of handicraft production in the 1950s and early 1960s.

If there were any qualms about the early firebrand not taking on the unequal division of wealth and the power of business over labour that she had decried earlier in life, Slate does not tell us. If she had disappointments with how India turned out to be, she kept them to herself. Perhaps the sheer example she made of her life speaks for itself. A fine account of not just a life, but the times.

— The writer is a historian