Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's View of the Second World War (1)

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay(1903-88) was an Indian woman who lived a long and exceptionally fruitful life.
She was born in a South Indian city of Mangalore of well-to-do parents. The family atmosphere, particularly her mother, was very encouraging, so that she played tennis with boys, or did mountain trekking, not usually allowed under the prevailing circumstances.
Soon she was immersed in the freedom movement. She was the first woman to stand for a provincial(Madras) assembly, though losing it by a narrow margin. She became a member of the AICC as early as 1928. At the time of Gandhi's Salt March of 1930, she appealed to Gandhi and convinced him that women could be recruited in large number. So at the time Gandhi was picking salt at Dandi, she was boiling the sea water with a small stove at Bombay's Chowpatty beach, got salt, sold it in small packets, and was arrested. She spent five years in jail altogether.
Later on she became the President of the Congress Socialist Party, and a member of the Working Committee under Jawaharlal Nehru. But with the arrival of independence she refused all invitations to be in politics.
Instead, she became engaged in the rehabilitation work for the refugees, and built a large industrial township at Faridabad 'like magic'. Then she pursued the 'two passions of her life', handicrafts and theatre. The latter, including puppetry, was her 'first love', but in the former also she served as Chairman of the All India Handicrafts Board for 20 years. She said, 'We had been made to feel primitive by the British-that we had nothing of modern aesthetic values'.
She also fought for the rights of women. She served long for AIWC(All India Women's Conference). She worked to build the home science curriculum at the Lady Irwin College for Women, Delhi. She was a founder member of the Family Planning Association of India.
Very importantly, she 'disappoved very clearly of gender-based reservations'. She in fact opposed 'the principle of reservations, on any basis'. She also stood for a Uniform Civil Code for the Indians.
Toward the end of her life, she wrote, 'To accommodate minorities and weaker sections, the Constitution of India is mutilated from time to time...Every single citizen is forced to think of himself or herself as a member of a certain socio-economic group, and no more as an Indian, proud of being a citizen of a great country. Whole groups, under some social label or other, now strive to become 'backward''. On the same principle she was opposed to the formation of lingustic States as it destroys the idea of 'one country.
Shortly before the Second World War she travelled abroad, and was in Britain when the war broke out. She went to Eritrea to see the war graves and was caught by bandits, but was released with a comb as a present as she was from the country of Gandhi.
The above is a summary of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, The Romantic Rebel, her biography by Shakuntala Narasimhan, Sterling, 1999. The book is of much worth. Still I would like to add one thing.