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...

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