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ABSTRACT

KAMALADEVI CHATTOPADHYAYA, ANTI-IMPERIALIST AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST, 1939-41

by Julie Laut Barbieri

This paper utilizes biographies, correspondence, and newspapers to document and analyze the Indian socialist and women’s rights activist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya’s (1903-1986) June 1939-November 1941 world tour. Kamaladevi’s radical stance on the nationalist cause, birth control, and women’s rights led to block her ascension within the leadership, partially contributing to her decision to leave in 1939. In Europe to attend several international women’s conferences, Kamaladevi then spent eighteen months in the U.S. visiting luminaries such as and Margaret Sanger, lecturing on politics in , and observing numerous social reform programs. This paper argues that Kamaladevi’s experience within Congress throughout the demonstrates the importance of gender in Indian nationalist politics; that her critique of Western “international” women’s organizations must be acknowledged as a precursor to the politics of modern third world feminism; and finally, Kamaladevi is one of the twentieth century’s truly global historical agents.

KAMALADEVI CHATTOPADHYAYA, ANTI-IMPERIALIST AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST, 1939-41

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of History

By

Julie Laut Barbieri

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2008

Advisor______(Judith P. Zinsser)

Reader______(Mary E. Frederickson)

Reader______(David M. Fahey)

©

Julie Laut Barbieri

2008

For Julian and Celia who inspire me to live a purposeful life. Acknowledgements

March 2003 was an eventful month. While my husband was in Seattle at a monthly graduate school session, I discovered I was pregnant with my second child. One week later I received an acceptance letter from Portland State University’s graduate history program. There were to be no illusions about returning to school. Like many women faced with this same challenge, my path to this point has been neither smooth nor straight. In fact, ‘meandering’ might best describe the last five years. But with sustaining support and encouragement from my mentors, friends, and especially my family, I am right where I wanted to be. At PSU, David Johnson encouraged me to pursue an advanced degree. Brittany Ferry offered friendship and editing expertise, but I especially benefited from her assurance that skimming is not a form of cheating. In my detour to Ohio, I have encountered an amazing community of feminist historians. Judith P. Zinsser has been my champion since the day we met, I am grateful for her wisdom and guidance. Because of her mentorship I am a better writer and a better historian. Her work is an inspiration. Barbara Ramusack generously opened her home and shared her expertise. Intrigued by Kamaladevi’s radical stance on birth control, Barbara interviewed her in the 1970s and stockpiled Kamaladevi research, which she allowed me to utilize for this thesis. With this invaluable material collected from Delhi, London, and elsewhere, I drove home as though I had a newborn baby in the back seat! Antoinette Burton offered key insight and shifted the framework of my thesis with just one conversation. My instructors at Miami have led me through a comprehensive introduction to gender and comparative women’s history: Carla Pestana, Rene Baernstein, Yihong Pan, Wietse DeBoer, Kimberly Hamlin, and Liz Wilson. Thanks also to my readers, Mary Frederickson and David Fahey. My daughter was still in utero when I started my graduate career, my son just three and a half. Now four and seven, their beauty and brilliance makes this all worthwhile. I hope my work will one day inspire them to live purposefully just as their lives have inspired me. When I had to be away, Meliah, Jen, Apple, and Juju changed diapers, made dinner, monitored homework, and most importantly laughed with and loved my children. By some miracle, my parents still love me unconditionally despite the fact that I left Oregon. This space is much too limited to list all they have done for me, so I hope this sentence will suffice. Friends also offered strength and love from start to finish: Ellen U., Wendy, Kapree, Marjie, Ellen S., and Vanessa. Thanks also to Dave for his support. I look forward to the next leg of this journey, wherever it may lead.

But it never becomes intolerable to me until it hurts me as it passes through my own body, and drags me into this spot of insoluble contradictions, impossible to overcome, this place I have never been able to get out of since: the friend is also the enemy. All women have lived that, are living it, as I continue to live it. ‘We’ struggle together, yes, but who is this ‘we?’… I, revolt, rages, where am I to stand? What is my place if I am a woman? Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman (1986)

On the one hand, women ally with men in national liberation, union, or peace movements, but within these movements they engage in feminist struggles where their male allies are at the same time their enemies. On the other hand, women of different races and nationalities ally with each other in feminist movements, but at the same time engage in struggles for racial justice or national liberation where white feminists from imperialist countries can be the enemy…as ally or adversary, any individual or group is internally different. Leslie Wahl Rabine, “A Feminist Politics of Non-Identity” (1988)

1

By all accounts Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya (1903-1986)1 did not plan to circle the globe when she left India with her sixteen-year old son, Ramakrishna (1923-), in June 1939. Aware of the growing conflict in Europe, she nevertheless accepted invitations to two international women’s conferences and toured several countries throughout the summer, returning to England from Finland just before the war broke out on the continent. With help from several friends in London including Krishna Menon, president of the India League, and Agatha Harrison, Gandhi’s London secretary, she and obtained two-month travel visas through the U.S. in order to return to India safely. Her stay there, however, lengthened considerably. In all she toured North America for eighteen months and spent time in Japan and Southeast Asia before returning to India in November 1941. As the world edged toward conflict, this seasoned Indian independence activist, lecturer and writer, a thirty-six-year-old single mother, visited over one dozen countries on three continents, staying just ahead of the expanding world war. Kamaladevi’s contemporaries and modern Indian biographers—who generally write with a tone of reverence—utilize Kamaladevi’s 1939-41 journey as the exemplar of her ‘woman rebel’ persona. Hilda Wierum Boulter, Kamaladevi’s secretary during her time in North America, foreshadowed more recent biographies when she wrote in a 1942 article in Asia magazine, “There are so many stories told of Kamaladevi that she has become almost legendary.” Sakuntala Narasimhan author of : The Romantic Rebel (1999), invoked her subject’s anti-imperialist stance, describing how Kamaladevi “gave even the mighty British empire anxious moments as she dodged and defied them, refusing to be thwarted as she went merrily globe-trotting as an invited and honoured guest of kings, presidents and world leaders.” Kamaladevi’s most thorough biographer to date, Reena Nanda, in her assessment of the same trip, utilized heroic imagery to describe Kamaladevi’s ability to succeed despite formidable opposition: These daredevil exploits through dangerous, war-torn territory, without visas, and fighting her way through obstreperous ships’ captains and consulate officials, with the police always on her trail, reveal her fascination for overcoming obstacles and opposition, seeking challenges and meeting them headlong, something that would have tested the endurance of most people. Invariably, with dogged persistence and pitting her wits against those of her opponents, she won.2

For those interested in telling the story of a unique and celebrated Indian woman, it is not surprising that Kamaladevi’s travels between 1939 and 1941 have been used primarily as further evidence of her “remarkable” life. In her first thirty-six years, Kamaladevi transcended her caste, her nation, and her sex through both personal and political actions. Born in 1903 into ’s less orthodox Konkan Saraswat

1 It is common practice in South India to refer to both men and women by their first names. This caused confusion during Kamaladevi’s travels in the United States and reporters at times mistakenly referred to her as Chattopadhyaya Kamaladevi or Mrs. Kamaladevi. Her last name (from her second husband) is spelled several different ways even in modern Indian sources (i.e. Chattopadhyay and Chattopadhyayya). 2 Hilda Wierum Boulter, “Kamaladevi—Gentle Warrior,” Asia 42:3 (1942): 180; Sakuntala Narasimhan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: The Romantic Rebel (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private, Ltd., 1999), 2; Reena Nanda, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 92.

2 Brahmin community, she was married at age eleven out of financial necessity and widowed just one year later. With support from her liberal mother and in-laws, she escaped the traditional life of a Brahmin widow, but shocked society by remarrying out of caste in an unusual civil ceremony at age sixteen.3 In her early twenties, she was the first woman to contest a representative seat from . She was a founding member of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC) in 1927. One year later she became a member of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) and secretary of the Indian Social Conference. In 1929, Kamaladevi presided over the Bombay Youth League, a key point in her turn to national politics. During the Gandhi-led Movement (1930-34), she became one of the most recognized woman activists for her brazen acts of defiance. Her first political imprisonment came one day after she led a procession of over 5,000 youth through Bombay, an exploit that garnered international attention. In all, she served four separate jail terms during Civil Disobedience, including one year in solitary confinement at Vellore prison from which she emerged in 1934 to help found the . By 1936, Kamaladevi was nationally recognized and admired for her intelligence, leadership, and beauty. She had strong connections to the most prominent Indian leaders of the day including , her sister-in-law and the first female Congress president, , and Mohandas Gandhi.4 Why, then, was Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya traveling the world in 1939? Though each of Kamaladevi’s biographers touches on her experiences between June 1939 and November 1941, none of them offers significant primary research. Instead, they rely heavily on Kamaladevi’s synopsis in one chapter of her 1986 memoir, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, a resource with significant limitations. During her lifetime, Kamaladevi wrote and/or contributed to almost one dozen books. She frequently published articles in newspapers and magazines about politics, social reform, and travel. She is reputed to have corresponded regularly with friends and colleagues. Nonetheless, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya is an illusive historical figure. Many scholars hoped that her memoirs would answer lingering questions about her politics and personal life, but instead she chose not to reveal a great deal about herself. She warned her readers shortly into the memoir that despite the modern trend, “I do not think that in a life story one is required to lower the barriers of the discreet reticence which govern our everyday life and affairs.” As such, the bulk of the memoir excludes details such as names and dates as well as a more personal account of her motivations. In the most striking example of omission, she does not mention either of her marriages or her son’s birth.5

3 While these seem to be the most reliable dates for Kamaladevi’s early life, there are discrepancies between her modern biographers regarding the decade from 1910 and 1920. For example, Nanda claims that the boy died in 1915, which would have made Kamaladevi eleven when she was married; Narasimhan puts his death in 1918 during the flu epidemic, one year after Nanda records that Kamaladevi and her mother moved to Madras. Jamila Brijbhushan, author of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: Portrait of a Rebel (New Delhi: Abhinav Productions, 1976), offers no clear dates in this time period, and Kamaladevi’s memoirs do not mention her first marriage at all. 4 Nanda, 80. The year Kamaladevi spent at Vellore was atypical for its severity at the end of Civil Disobedience. In her analysis, Nanda suggests that Kamaladevi’s refusal to compromise in order to keep herself out of Vellore combined with the divorce “reveals a trace of masochism” (Nanda, 65). 5 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces: Memoirs (New Delhi: Navrang, 1986), 2.

3 Kamaladevi’s previous level of commitment to the Indian cause makes an extended absence in 1939 rather anomalous. By largely accepting her rather simple explanations and representations, too many gaps remain to explain the circumstances that led to her decision to travel abroad for over two years. After decades of almost frenetic political action, why did Kamaladevi, according to her memoirs, feel “dispirited,” with “no indication of any purposeful activity in sight” in 1939? Why did she leave India and why did she stay away for over two years? Once war broke out in Europe and she and Rama sailed to North America, what did she hope to achieve from this unexpected opportunity? What networks existed (or did she create) to sustain her throughout this period? And how did her travels influence her when she returned to India?6 A critical analysis of Kamaladevi at large in the world in 1939 requires research that goes beyond current biographies and previously published material. As exemplified by Kamaladevi’s reticence to discuss her personal life in her memoirs, there are dramatic contrasts in the way her voice is presented in the historical record. These multiple representations in turn influenced the tone of this paper. Assuming Boulter is correct and Kamaladevi maintained a “voluminous correspondence” during her trip to North America, unpublished documents must exist that will shed light on her motivations, the networks that supported her, and what she took back to India, but the primary material acquired for this project varies widely. Events surrounding the inner workings of the Indian National Congress leadership in the 1930s preceding (and partially prompting) Kamaladevi departure in 1939 come almost exclusively from her memoirs, modern biographies, and a small selection of primary sources from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and papers from the All India Women’s Conference. Like the aforementioned memoirs, Kamaladevi’s biographies must be approached cautiously. Each of her biographers knew her personally and writes in their introductions about being motivated out of admiration for such an exceptional individual. Kamaladevi’s time in the United States—November 1939 through April 1941—draws on newspaper articles and correspondence collected in the Mary van Kleeck Papers at Smith College. Van Kleeck (1883-1972), an influential figure in women’s labor reform in the U.S., collected over one hundred pages of material pertaining to Kamaladevi’s time in North America including speakers’ pamphlets and letters of introduction. But it is Kamaladevi’s personal correspondence from Japan in the van Kleeck collection that offers the most exciting insight. Dating from May through September 1941, four long, hand-written letters sent to her “dear Friends,” could be considered a more spontaneous voice than previously heard. An historical analysis based on these and other diverse sources, adds to a radical Hindu woman’s biography, and also highlights the discourses of war and peace, sex and gender, the colonizer and the colonized through which Kamaladevi negotiated at the beginning of World War II.7

6 For further critiques see Antoinette Burton, “The Personal is the Political,” review of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography, by Reena Nanda, Biblio, Sept-Oct 2002, 20-21; and Geraldine Forbes, “Review of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography,” review of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography, by Reena Nanda, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4:1 (2003) (accessed online 1/30/2008). 7 Boulter, 183. Kamaladevi’s biographies in chronological order are: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: Portrait of a Rebel (1976) by Brijbhushan; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: The Romantic Rebel (1999) by Narasimhan; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography (2002) by Nanda; and Kamaladevi Chattopahdyay (2007) by Jasleen Dhamija. Sources cited hereafter from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

4 The reasons Kamaladevi gave in her memoirs for leaving India in June 1939 were two-fold; both were accurate although incomplete. First, her son Rama had completed secondary school and wanted to study communication engineering. To find such a program he needed to go abroad, a situation that frustrated his mother but was typical at the time. Often separated because of her and imprisonments, the mother and her son planned to travel together before he enrolled in a yet to be determined English university. Second, the looming world war combined with on-going disputes over tactics had brought Indian National Congress activities to a virtual standstill. Notwithstanding the dedicated of millions of Indians, the dream of independence had not come true at the end of the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930-34), and the younger, more radical left within the Indian National Congress was anxious to keep pressure on the British, despite the conservatives’ caution. The first clashes between these factions occurred at the 1934 Bombay session and continued to escalate throughout the decade. The culmination came in Tripura in 1939. Subhas Bose, the Socialists’ pick, was re- elected Congress president over Gandhi’s prompting the entire Congress Working Committee (CWC), and subsequently Bose, to resign. As Congress Socialist Party floor whip, Kamaladevi observed the events at Tripura first hand and knew the extent of the stalemate.8 Yet Kamaladevi’s “lack of purposeful activity” in 1939 went beyond the general state of Congress politics. With her impressive résumé, ties to leading political figures, and leadership within women’s organizations and the Socialist Party, she expected to be at the center of Congress leadership in the mid-1930s. As often happens in politics, however, access to positions of power is never as simple as a list of accomplishments, especially for female candidates. Nehru, re-elected Congress president in 1936 at Faizpur, had been sympathetic to the Socialists’ agenda and found himself caught in the middle of the debate. Pressured to appoint a socialist and a woman to the CWC, he proposed Kamaladevi who would fulfill both requirements. However, Gandhi had secretly blocked the appointment, writing to Nehru, “I used to like her, her ability is unquestioned but I have known things which have worried me about her.” Gandhi had revealed his decision to Kamaladevi in 1937. Though she later claimed she did not care about political positions, it is difficult to imagine that she was not disheartened knowing that Gandhi’s disapproval essentially ended her future in Congress. Perhaps she felt that she could achieve more for the Indian cause outside of the country. So she left in 1939.9

Reena Nanda argues that Gandhi perceived Kamaladevi “as a woman of aggressive speech who was openly censorious of Congress policies,” whereas Kamaladevi considered the ability to speak her mind a question of freedom and personal expression. In a July 1941 letter from Tokyo, Kamaladevi would write to Mary van Kleeck about an encounter with Japanese officials. She had been denied a visa into

(NMML), the All Indian Women’s Conference files, and the Margaret Sanger Papers (MS Papers) were obtained by me from Dr. Barbara Ramusack’s personal research. I have cited their original location according the reference on Ramusack’s notes. Copies of the cited research exist in both my possession and hers. 8 Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 217; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 210-211. The clashes continued into 1940 and were reported in United States newspapers. See for example “Gandhi Defeats Move to Speed Freedom Drive: Blocks Rival Demands for Civil Disobedience,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 19, 1940. 9 Nanda, 82; Ibid., 84-85.

5 China because during an interview she voiced her intention to travel to Chunkiang (Chongqing). “Maybe I should have been less frank and direct and more politic,” she mused. “[But] I am not a politician and no good at such games. My frankness usually costs me a lot.” Perhaps Kamaladevi believed her frankness had cost her in India as well. In the July 1941 letter, she also described her Japanese hosts’ unwillingness to convey their own ideas because of suppressed vision and inferior intellect. “We [Indians] love discussions, debates,” she observed. “It is almost the bane of our life, so it seems at times. That is why we don’t hesitate to differ even with such a leader as Mr. Gandhi.” Indeed, she had differed publicly with Gandhi on numerous occasions. In both a 1967 oral interview and her memoirs, she attributed Gandhi’s 1936 decision against her in large part to a 1931 incident wherein she publicly reproached Congress president Vallabhai Patel for attacking the Bombay Youth League. “[He] had been made to understand I would not be a very disciplined and manageable person,” she told her interviewers. “But I had no regret for what I had written and I meant to make that clear,” she wrote in her memoirs. She angered Gandhi again in 1935 when she spoke against Congress’s policy of non-interference in the Princely States at the Madras All Indian Congress Committee (AICC) meeting. In 1938, she pushed through a resolution calling for inclusion of the Princely States in the freedom struggle. It passed despite Gandhi’s opposition, and he berated Nehru for “letting” the motion pass. Kamaladevi linked this to the political conflict rather than her personal involvement: “To us, the younger line of workers, the States were one of the bulwarks of , an unholy alliance between these Indian rulers and our British masters which to me needed to be broken.”10 Kamaladevi’s situation in the late 1930s goes beyond her frankness, however. It illuminates an important point of conflict between an emerging Indian women’s political discourse and that of the traditional male anticolonial nationalists. In the nineteenth century, woman had become a key site for Indian modernity. Nineteenth- century imperialists’ encouraged indigenous reformers to attend to the “backward” nature of Indian women’s social condition before demanding political reform. Emerging elite male nationalists, in adjusting to the political and economic structures that brought them into contact with the (male) , also focused class and caste reform on women. Rather than subjects or objects of reform, indigenous women, “were merely the ground on which British officials, missionaries, indigenous social reformers, and their opponents elaborated competing interpretations of culture and traditions.” Women were thus removed from the state, identified as social, not political, subjects. This (male) discourse supported the restoration of a glorious past where Indians ruled themselves, and superficially raised women’s status while maintaining central nationalist concerns. The ideal Indian ‘woman,’ based largely on traditional Hindu imagery, retained its strength and became central to the twentieth-century liberation movement, which, like colonialist justifications, invoked concepts of motherhood and femininity to construct ‘women’ useful to specific political ends. Gandhi successfully negotiated between political necessity and cultural tradition, by supporting “women’s involvement in the public arena of politics at the same time that he defended their traditional roles as mothers and wives

10 Nanda, 83-84; Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, July 7, 1941, Mary van Kleeck Papers (hereafter cited as MVK), Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (hereafter cited as SSC); Ibid.; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Oral History Interview, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter cited as NMML); Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 166; Nanda, 86-87; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 205.

6 who were expected to work within the confines of the home.” Gandhi’s non-violent direct action movement, , then, was not a threat to Indian or British patriarchy because it upheld gender ideals common to both traditions, and assured that women would return to the home after the nationalist cause was won.11 This was not, however, the interpretation satyagrahis such as Kamaladevi took away from Gandhi’s rhetoric. She had regularly challenged the ideal of the devoted, reverential, and self-sacrificing female figure so often called upon within the Indian liberation movement. Kamaladevi had come of age politically during the transnational controversy surrounding Katherine Mayo’s 1927 piece of imperialist propaganda, Mother India, which argued that Indians were so socially backward that they were unqualified for self-government. The vehement, international response to Mayo’s thesis ultimately altered Indian women’s previous relationship to the state. Motivated by the debates surrounding Mayo’s book, the Indian National Assembly passed the Child Marriage Restraint Act (popularly know as the Sarda Act) of 1929, which for the first time interceded in communal tradition by creating a law regarding marriage that applied to all communities equally. Though Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement of the early 1920s had involved women in unprecedented numbers, it was not until the introduction of the Sarda Act that women utilized lobbying techniques and the rhetoric of universal human rights to assert themselves as a legitimate constituency. For the first time, the social, usually confined to women, became the political.12 Kamaladevi had played a central role in this construction of a universal Indian ‘woman’ based on gender and the transformation of women’s roles, a unique period in the history of Indian politics in the wake of the Mayo controversy. She attended the Fortieth Annual National Social Conference in Madras in December 1927, which took a stance against child marriage and protested Mother India. In 1929 the AIWC, originally focused solely on women’s education, expanded to address social welfare largely because of a proposal Kamaladevi moved at their third annual meeting at Patna. She continued to play a central role in the months leading up to the Sarda Act’s passage that same year. V. P. Patel, the Speaker of the Assembly, offered her a corner of his office from which to direct her lobbying efforts. She remembers approaching Motlital Nehru, patriarch of India’s most powerful political family and Assembly leader, to gain his support for the bill. When he perceived her as pushing too hard, he boomed, “Are you trying to instruct me and my colleagues how to vote, you chit of a girl?” To which she characteristically replied, “If your objection is to my age, I will bring a batch of old women to seek your

11 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 42-43; Ibid., 43; Gail Pearson, “Tradition, Law and the Female Suffrage Movement in India,” in Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy, ed. Louise Edwards and Mina Roces (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 207; Suresht R. Bald, “The Politics of Gandhi’s ‘Feminism’: Constructing ‘Sitas’ for , in Women, States, and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation?, ed. Sita Ranchod-Nilsson and Mary Ann Tétreault (New York: Routledge, 2000), 82; Ketu H. Katrak, “, Gandhian ‘Satyagraha,’ and Representations of Female Sexuality,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaegar (New York: Routledge, 1992), 399-400. The focus on woman and woman-as-symbol was replicated by colonial powers throughout the world. See Chapter 1 of Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For more on India’s situation in particular see Suruchi Thapar, “Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement,” Feminist Review 44 (1993): 81-96. 12 Sinha, Mother India, 5.

7 vote,” before rushing from the room to his loud laughter. Frankness indeed. Thanks in part to Kamaladevi’s efforts, a watered down Child Marriage Restraint Act did pass after much debate. However, her devotion to women’s inclusion in the rhetoric of universal human rights won out for only a brief moment on a national scale. Shortly after the Sarda Act passed, official debates over woman suffrage and the Act of 1935 again separated what was considered the social and the political. The male political elite again subsumed women’s autonomy as equal citizens within communal patriarchies.13 Kamaladevi’s actions after this shift in national politics were the first demonstration that she would assert her understanding of the role of women in the Indian social and political experience. Her famous plea to gain Gandhi’s permission for women to participate actively in the Satyagraha at the beginning of Civil Disobedience (1930) is illustrative of this and could have been interpreted as another example of her aggressive behavior. It also highlights the competition between the discourses of the nationalist movement and women’s activists, of which these two were apt representatives of their respective positions. When she approached Gandhi on the Dandi (March 12-April 6), he first told her that the “tasks reserved for [women] are a tribute to the high qualities they possess, such as Swadeshi [homespun] [and] picketting [sic]. The call for them was not for slogan shouting or marches, but utter dedication, which was a natural quality in women.” However, according to her friend and biographer Jamila Brijbhushan, Kamaladevi believed that “if the women could participate wholeheartedly in the movement, this would be a short-cut to their own emancipation.” In order to convince Gandhi she turned his language back on itself in order to gain her point about women’s proper roles. She argued, “The significance of a non-violent struggle is that the weakest can take an equal part with the strongest and share in the triumph as you have yourself said. This struggle is ideally suited for them.” Once she convinced him of her perspective, she also requested that he make his decision public. She explained that as women they had “been in their four walls. This is their one chance to emerge out and to realise their strength.” Ultimately, she helped lead the Bombay march on April 7 and became the first female political prisoner of the movement on May 16, 1930.14 Kamaladevi was more radical than other prominent women in Congress on issues that posed direct challenges to Gandhi’s notion of the ideal Indian woman. For example, she publicly supported birth control as a woman’s right over her own body. Other Indian social reformers who advocated birth control “did not explicitly espouse the orientation of the birth controllers in the United States, who initially wanted to enable women to control their reproductive functions in order to gain personal autonomy and improved economic conditions.” wrote to Margaret Sanger in May 1936 that Kamaladevi was “paying for her championship of Birth Control and other Social Reforms by being denied inclusion in the Working Committee of the Congress. I am not surprised at the Old Guard,” she continued, “but I am deeply disappointed at Jawaharlal and the young Socialists.” For in Gandhi’s concept of the ideal Hindu woman, the wife naturally had more self-control than her husband had and should therefore protect her health and reduce pregnancies by denying her husband’s sexual demands. This perspective did not sway Kamaladevi. While in the U.S. she toured birth control clinics, and visited Sanger

13 Sinha, Mother India, 61; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 117; Sinha, Mother India, 197-222. 14 Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 150; Brijbhushan, 62-63; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 150; Ibid.

8 in Tucson, Arizona, who in turn introduced her to a Japanese birth control advocate also visiting the States.15 Kamaladevi’s advocacy for women’s rights included radical ideas on marriage rights that also worried Gandhi. Though several U.S. newspapers spoke of Kamaladevi as if she were still married, in truth she had obtained a legal divorce from her second husband, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, six years earlier. Because they had insisted on a civil ceremony rather than a religious one, divorce was not difficult to obtain. By 1933, Kamaladevi and her dashing, brilliant, yet emotionally unstable husband had not lived together since at least 1927. He had had an affair with Rama’s nanny in the 1920s and subsequently left India for three years. When Kamaladevi emerged from prison in 1933, she discovered that he had a child with another woman and was living with her at an . By all accounts the two remained in contact throughout their lives and shared a platonic friendship based on the passion of their first years together. Gandhi, however, accepted their divorce only reluctantly. In line with his political philosophy for modernization, Gandhi advocated widow remarriage as a sign of India’s progress, but he worried that appointing Kamaladevi to the CWC would imply agreement his own agreement with the concept of divorce. He believed that a woman in her position did not need to seek legal redress, but should choose to live separately from her husband and remain sexually abstinent. In October 1933, Gandhi had met with her to convey his concerns about the situation, fueled at least in part by her sister-in-law Sarojini Naidu’s strong disapproval. He had also questioned her role as a mother, concerned about the impact her risky political behavior had had on her son. In her memoirs, Kamaladevi recalls Gandhi’s admonition to her: “I want you to realise that if you can’t have a grip on your own life and shape it, how do you think you can break our country’s bondage?” A sentiment that eerily echoes the imperialists’ demands on their Indian colonial subjects to put their house in order before assuming political rights.16

Without a clear political role inside India, Kamaladevi decided to leave the country in 1939 in hopes of forwarding the Indian cause abroad. Though Rama accompanied his mother for several months, Kamaladevi traveled alone throughout much of 1939 to 1941. To facilitate her travels, a broad network of women helped sustain Kamaladevi personally and financially as she toured the world. At her first stop in Egypt at the invitation of the nationalist Wafd party, she stayed with Madame Charaoui Pasha, whom Kamaladevi described as “a renowned pioneer who had led the women to throw off their veil and assert their rights to equality in every sphere.” When the AIWC found out that Kamaladevi was going abroad, they asked her to be the Indian delegate at both the International Woman’s Conference in Stockholm and the Women’s International Alliance for Suffrage in Copenhagen later that summer. Agatha Harrison, a Quaker and unofficial diplomat who had close ties to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, helped Kamaladevi and Rama acquire travel visas and passage from London to the United States. Once in North America, they obtained extended visas with the help of

15 Barbara N. Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates: The Debate over Birth Control in India, 1920-1940." Journal of Women's History 1: 2 (1989): 54; Ibid., 35; Margaret Cousins to Margaret Sanger, 15 May 1936, MSP, SSC, Box 48, Folder 426; Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates,” 54-55; Ibid., 50-51. 16 Nanda, x; Sinha, Mother India, 193; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 181-182.

9 Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins. A significant portion of Kamaladevi’s activities both political and otherwise in the United States involved the work of other women including birth control, social reform, and women’s rights. In Hong Kong, Madame Sun Yat-sen helped Kamaladevi find lodgings and contact the appropriate officials to gain access to the mainland. And on mainland China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek introduced her to women involved in the war effort, industry, education, and handicrafts.17 These encounters with women around the world were not without their tensions, however. While in Washington, D.C. in late January 1940, Kamaladevi attended the Fifteenth National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCW). Carrie Chapman Catt first organized the conference in 1925 as “an umbrella organization for the peace activities of other women’s groups such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women.” The NCCCW was a moderate organization, far from neutral on U.S. involvement in the war by 1940 as it evolved to accurately represent its large constituency. Highlighted as one of the few prominent international attendees in newspaper articles throughout the country, Kamaladevi nevertheless must have found herself far from the Conference’s overall stance. Catt, though, did have a history of public support for the women of India. In 1919, as president of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, she had called on Indian men to support Indian women’s suffrage in a broadly published appeal. When interviewed about the NCCCW, Kamaladevi emphasized that the AIWC was not connected to any international peace organizations, but that the NCCCW’s platform for peace was embodied by the AIWC as well. As representative of the AIWC, she could approach the NCCCW as a sister organization. Publicly distancing herself from an affiliation with international peace organizations reflected past tensions with international women’s organizations when the interests of the colonized, or “Oriental,” woman clashed with those of the “Occidental” woman on the international stage.18 In the inter-war period when Kamaladevi and other Indian woman leaders encountered European and North American women in the politics of international women’s organizations, they fought to be recognized as a valid representative of their cause, performing a balancing act between nationalist solidarity and international women’s issues from a uniquely “Eastern” perspective. Of the three major international women’s organizations active in the 1930s, the International Council of Women (ICW or Council) was the most conservative, made up of mostly aristocratic, wealthy women from Europe and the United States. The more moderate International Alliance of Women (IAW or Alliance) spun-off from the Council when the suffrage issue and questions of caused dissention in the inter-war period. India’s national section of the

17 Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 219. 18 Carrie A. Foster, The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1946 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 4; Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 258; Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 140. Just two years later, after the U.S. entered the war, the NCCW became the Women’s Action Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace (Alonso 125); Sinha, Mother India, 52; Elizabeth La Hines, “India Advanced in Equal Rights: Mrs. Kamaladevi, Visiting Here, Tells How Men and Women Cooperate,” November 26, 1939, Proquest Historical Newspapers: , 1851-2003. Kamaladevi utilized the words ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental,’ ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ frequently in her writing.

10 Alliance was established in 1923 and a national section of the Council started in 1925. The most radical of three, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF or League), had a history of encouraging transnational inclusion, but there does not seem to have been an Indian section of the League prior to 1945. Along with internal political conflicts, these international bodies struggled through political upheavals and also had difficulty balancing nationalism with internationalism throughout the interwar period. A “feminist orientalist” worldview held by many European and North American members encompassed an “imperialist rhetoric [that] assumed that Western women needed to take care of indigenous women in the colonized countries,” the same theme that pervaded Mother India.19 Kamaladevi had already confronted the ramifications of feminist orientalist rhetoric at the 1929 IAW conference in Berlin as part of Indian women’s efforts to gain international recognition as legitimate political subjects. The exclusion of the small contingency of Indian women, including Kamaladevi and Sarojini Naidu, as equal participants had been justified by their status as colonized peoples. For example, when the Indian delegation noticed there was no Indian flag displayed—the organizers did not know that the nationalist movement had its own flag—Kamaladevi and her colleagues created a makeshift flag from their saris for the opening gala. “No one grudged tearing up their fineries.” Kamaladevi remembered. “In fact, we felt free and liberated at the gala opening function watching our flag fluttering proudly amidst others.” The material representations that visually demarcated Indian womanhood from western women became symbols of their solidarity with national liberation. Kamaladevi had discovered that women’s organizations were not the only ones who failed to include Indian representatives as equals. In a short piece in the November 1929, The Modern Review, the premier magazine published for the Indian nationalist intelligentsia, about her experiences at an education conference in Elsinore during the same trip to Europe, she pointed out the lack of Eastern representation. The editors quoted her, “It is in such gatherings that our humiliating position is brought home to us more poignantly than ever. It is time indeed that Indian women realized their responsibility in the political struggle of the country. We waste so much of our time and energy on petty reforms and let it run into non-essential channels that we but ruffle the sandy surface leaving the hard rock beneath untouched and in fact allow it to harden more and more with the flying years.”20 However, it was also at the 1929 IAW conference that Kamaladevi had had her first contact with prominent North American Progressive Era women representatives, with whom she seemed to find broader common ground. Molly Ray Carroll, a specialist in labor law working for the U.S. Federal Department of Labor, invited her to attend the transnational, secular humanist WILPF conference at Prague later that summer. Developed by Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, Mary Church Terrell and others in 1915, the WILPF reached its peak in 1939 with over 13,000 members “dedicated to eradicating the underlying causes of violence—political, economic, and social inequalities of all kinds.” The WILPF had a commitment to cultural pluralism guided by “a vision: that a few basic moral principles could guide people into a world where

19 Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 75, 151. 20 Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 126; Brijbhushan, 43-44; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 126; The Modern Review, Vol. 46, No. 5 (Nov 1929): 580.

11 difference was tolerated, even valued; where arbitrary divisions based on color or sex faded before the realization of a common humanity; where honest labor was valued honestly; where all people could live at peace and free from want.” At the 1929 conference, Carroll had introduced Kamaladevi to Addams, her colleague in the Settlement House movement. Addams and Kamaladevi had much in common, including their dedication to social service, work on behalf of women’s rights, and a commitment to non-violence. “[A]s we kept meeting I came to feel that she was someone I had known a long time and inspite a difference [sic] of 50 years between us, she accepted me as a comrade,” Kamaladevi wrote in her memoirs. But she also recognized a significant difference between Addams’ work and her own (Western vs. Eastern), a theme that Kamaladevi and other Indian women continued to highlight for the next several decades. “I realised that hers had been a long and lonely battle, so different from our own struggle where millions stood shoulder to shoulder as one.” Though Addams died in 1935, Kamaladevi kept in touch with Carroll, who hosted her in Washington, D.C. several times between 1939 and 1941.21 Differences between Eastern and Western women on the international stage erupted again at the outset of Kamaladevi’s 1939 trip when at the July IAW conference in Copenhagen. In a scathing report to the AIWC, Kamaladevi and Dr. Malini Sukthankar, Vice President and Honorary Secretary of the AIWC respectively, wrote about the “superficial character” and narrow vision of the “majority of the women [delegates] obsessed by their own problems” who “could not think of Eastern people except as primitive and backward needing the protective wing of some European power or other.” As in 1929, only India and Egypt represented the East, too small a contingent to influence debate when the delegates harshly attacked fascism but drew a tight curtain “over imperialism, as colonial problems were treated as ‘internal matters of the ruling country.’” They urged the AIWC to disaffiliate from the Alliance and suggested that India should form a closer link “with the Eastern countries… and thus be able to form a solid block to be able to make its impact felt on the Alliance.” After receiving their report, AIWC president Rani Lakshmibai Rajwade sent a harshly worded letter to the IAW President Mrs. Corbett Ashby pointing out the hypocrisy of emphasizing “such differences as Eastern and Western or Asian and European in a body which claims to be a world organisation.” Never one to back down from principle, when Kamaladevi returned to India in 1942 she passed a motion for the AIWC to withdraw from the IAW until colonized countries had gained their independence and could therefore have more influence in international affairs. Then, perhaps as an object lesson, she invited the Alliance to send a delegation to the 1945 AIWC conference over which she presided. The Indian body only rejoined the Alliance in 1966, again at Kamaladevi’s initiative, when a woman from Sri Lanka was elected president.22

21 Foster, 6; Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 5-6; Ibid., 9-10; Alonso, 128; Schott, 156; Brijbhushan, 45; Ibid., 45-46; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 128. See also La Hines. 22 Kamaladevi and Dr. Malini Sukthankar, “The International Women’s Congress at Copenhagen. Our Impressions,” 18 July 1939, All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) files; Ibid.; Chattopadhyaya, Inner Recesses, 230; Kamaladevi and Sukthankar; Rani Lashmibi Rajwade to Mrs. Corbett Ashby, 21 September 1939, AIWC files; Agatha Harrison to Horace Alexander, 7 June 1945, Alexander Collection, NMML; Brijbhushan, 86.

12 These categories of Western and Eastern, Orient and Occident, long-established, held enormous rhetorical power, as is evident in several of Kamaladevi’s encounters outside international organizations during her time in the U.S. The images of India as socially backward and morally corrupt had spread like a virus in the wake of Mother India. Since U.S. federal law had stringently prohibited Asian immigration since 1921, no more than six thousand Indians lived in the U.S. in 1939. The average North American was ignorant about India, and Kamaladevi, dressed in traditional sari, bangles, and bindi (a typically red, round mark worn on the forehead to show that a woman is married), became increasingly annoyed when people on the street asked her about snakes or mistook her for a palm-reader. A journalist at the Charlotte News, in what must have been a slightly humorous and very uncomfortable interview, described Kamaladevi in April 1941 “as colorful as her name and as intelligent as any woman in this country,” who “scoffed at the idea of girl babies being thrown in the river.” In the conclusion to her 1942 article in Asia, Hilda Wierum Boulter reaffirmed the prevalence of these categories at the same time she attempted to exclude Kamaladevi from them, “She is not at all the shy, modest, demure Hindu woman of tradition.”23 Kamaladevi was determined to destroy these stereotypes of the Indian woman as a “timid, helpless bundle of nerves,” and redefine the debate between Eastern and Western women while outside of India. In writings and interviews she sought to educate the West on the history of racism and imperialism in the daily lives of Indian women, and describe the differences of the organizations and communities of which she was a part. In the months before her departure from India in 1939, she had contributed two essays to the book The Awakening of Indian Women. The book aimed to educate the “men and women in the continent of Europe and the United States [on] the aims and ambitions of the women of India,” though because it was published in India it is unlikely audiences outside the subcontinent had access to its message. Kamaladevi’s socialist-feminist analysis of the economic basis of the relationship between men and women rejected the western notion of a feminist movement based on sex antagonism. “Sex attitudes,” she wrote, “are not independent of social and economic milieu but are shaped by the controls instituted by the classes that are dominant in society.” She offered other solutions to eradicate women’s subordinate status in India such as full enfranchisement, an end to child marriage, and maternity benefits for women workers.24 Kamaladevi reiterated her stance on women’s status immediately upon landing in New York City. In a New York Times article written shortly after her arrival in November 1939, Kamaladevi, whom the journalist described as middle-aged, dynamic, and in “her native dress at all times,” argued that “sex antagonism in political and economic life is unknown in India.” She elaborated further on this theme in a much

23 Harold A. Gould, Sikhs, Swamis, Students, and Spies: The India Lobby in the United States, 1900-1946 (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 39-41; Brijbhushan, 96; Annie Mae Brown, “Gandhi’s Country: Tells of Life in India,” Charlotte News, April 8, 1941, Rose Florence Papers, SSC; Boulter, 184. 24 Chattopadhyaya, “Women Reform India,” The Living Age (January 1940), 418; These categories integrate Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s descriptions of third world women’s writings in “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). (See especially page 10); Chattopadhyaya and others, The Awakening of Indian Women, publisher’s note; Chattopadhyaya, “Man and Woman,” in The Awakening of Indian Women, 2.

13 longer article she authored, titled “Women Reform India,” in the January 1940 issue of The Living Age, a monthly magazine on world topics. Ostensibly written to prove that “passive resistance is a powerful weapon when used with skill,” Kamaladevi did not simply describe the various successes of Gandhian non-violent direct action. Instead, as she did with Gandhi in 1930, she directly engaged debate by using gendered Western feminist language against itself to challenge the western perception of the Indian woman as inferior to Indian men. She wrote that the Indian woman “has been more than a ‘better half’—she has been the equal and the comrade of man…The Indian Women’s Movement is not a sex war. There has never been any clash of interests between men and women.” Utilizing both socialist and nationalist rhetoric, she argued that subordination to Indian men, unlike the Occidental feminist perception, did not cause Indian women’s lack of education, subjection to obsolete customs, poverty, and et cetera; on the contrary, it arose from the deleterious impact of colonialism.25 Though more explicitly delineated in The Awakening of Indian Women, Kamaladevi’s brief references to the Hindu tradition of female strength and power in the Living Age article reveal the overlap between socialist-feminist and nationalist discourses in her rhetoric. One aspect of the nineteenth-century Indian nationalist response to escalating British colonialism had been to construct/recover an ideal Vedic period (c. 1700 BCE) when women enjoyed equal spiritual and intellectual equality with men. Thus, colonized women lost their former status and power to “the patriarchal rule of colonists.” Throughout her narration of the ways in which Indian women utilized effective non-violent direct action—picketing, mass demonstrations, underground organizations, sit-ins, jail terms—Kamaladevi underscored the obstacles put in place by the ‘foreign’ government. “Those who rail against Indian society for certain of its unpleasant aspects,” she admonished, “ignore the reason for them: that the Government tries to torpedo every fundamental social reform.” Intent on demonstrating the determination of Indian women, Kamaladevi described the many successes of the women’s movement in spite of British inspired interference. Unjust taxes were repealed; prohibition was introduced in several provinces; the import of foreign cloth slowed to a trickle; and the “right to make salt was restored.” Women’s unwillingness to back down, even in the face of police assaults and rifle fire, led “the authorities in India…to fear women far more than men, for their ranks cannot be disrupted nor their morale corrupted.” She offered example after example of the ways in which Indian women actively took back the status and power denied to them by the foreign Government.26 These articles and statements speak to both Kamaladevi’s concerns as an anticolonialist within the Indian liberation movement and an Oriental woman’s response to criticism from the Occident. But she faced unusually similar issues as she continued her travels to Japan. Writing from Tokyo to van Kleeck and Fledderus in a July 7, 1941 letter, Kamaladevi described several instances of Japanese men’s volatile reactions to her

25 La Hines; Chattopadhyaya, “Women Reform India.” The term ‘non-violent direct action,’ borrowed from ’s, War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), more accurately represents the Indian’s perspective of actions taken by Gandhi’s followers than the more common term ‘passive resistance’ used by the American editors here. 26 Chilla Bulbeck, Reorienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21; Ibid., 19; Chattopadhyaya, “Women Reform India”; Ibid.; Ibid.

14 controversial public comments. Unsatisfied with the responses to her questions about Japanese women’s rights, she purposefully challenged a dinner of intellectuals: “supposing the women took the men’s argument literally and abandoned their newly acquired profession and went back to the kitchens, how would Japan keep going? This nearly caused an explosion.” The men who reacted so strongly to her criticisms, she believed, were “not used to ‘Oriental’ women arguing like them. We are the meek and mild lambs.” With her usual brand of sarcastic humor she added, “According to them it is only Western women, especially the American, that are indiscreet.”27 During this period abroad, Kamaladevi also looked past Indian independence to the solutions a sovereign Indian government would have to implement to address the myriad of problems on the subcontinent including women’s health, population, caste divisions, and religious tolerance. Aware of her privileged socio-economic standing in a country plagued with illiteracy and inequality, and inspired by the work of her mother’s heroes such as , , Ramabai Ranade, and Margaret Cousins, she had committed herself to social welfare at a young age. Like the legacy of education and activism she inherited in India from her mother’s generation, Kamaladevi benefited from the previous generation of nineteenth-century women activists in the U.S. who created professional outlets for their volunteer work. Beginning with the settlement house movement in the late 1880s through the 1930s, these women, including Jane Addams, Frances Perkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt, had professionalized social service and became convinced of the federal government’s essential role in social reform. The evolution of settlement work into reform reflected these women’s efforts “to fulfill existing social expectations for self-sacrificing female service while at the same time satisfying their need for public recognition, authority, and independence.” After , women from this network legitimated their efforts through the creation of social service schools that differentiated from sociology through textbooks, professional journals, research, and curriculum, in parallel to the Social Work program Kamaladevi had attended in London in 1921. And like her U.S. counterparts who moved from social research, economics, and sociology to national politics in their efforts to reform social welfare legislation, criminal justice, and labor law, Kamaladevi had worked tirelessly to expand the AIWC efforts on issues such as birth control, child marriage, purdah, and suffrage through political reform. So despite her arguments with western feminism and the stereotype of the Hindu woman, Kamaladevi came away from her 1939-41 tour of North America with a deep respect for woman activists in the U.S.28 Initially, Kamaladevi had considered leaving the United States after only two months, spent mostly in New York City where Rama had enrolled in an electrical engineering program at the Institute of the Radio Corporation of America. But during her first visit to Washington D.C. and a meeting with President Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins on December 1 (coordinated by van Kleeck), Kamaladevi obtained an extended visa, renewable every six months. With entrée into what historian Robyn Muncy calls the “female dominion,” at its peak in FDR’s government, Kamaladevi had the opportunity to observe social welfare programs, birth control clinics,

27 Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, July 7, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC; Ibid. 28 Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30.

15 and the inner mechanisms of the Federal Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau and Children’s Bureau in a liberal democracy.29 Kamaladevi’s correspondence collected in the Mary van Kleeck papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College illuminates how she was given access to this network during her time in the United States. Van Kleeck seems to have been the new contact. By 1939, van Kleeck, a leader in , national planning, and the interfaith social justice movement, had been in charge of the ’s (RSF) Department of Industrial Studies (part of the Committee on Women’s Work) for thirty years. Started by Olivia Sage in 1907 with some of the millions left to her by her husband, the RSF augmented the work of women reformers on behalf of workers and their families. It provided money to create programs outside the limits of the state and academia. Based in New York City, the center of the women’s reform network in the 1920s, Sage philanthropy had helped develop welfare thought, create social work as a profession, and fund reform in areas such as housing, public health, and industrial relations. Between 1910 and 1930, van Kleeck was a leading intellectual and moral force as the RSF studied labor and the economy. A Christian radical who graduated from Smith College in 1904, van Kleeck had become head of the Labor Department’s Woman in Industry Service during World War I and the first chief of the U.S. Federal Women’s Bureau in 1919. She and her life-long partner, Mary “Mikie” Fledderus, had also created the International Industrial Relations Institute (IRI), “a Euro- American association of women personnel managers, progressive employers, Catholic socialists, modernist architects, Theosophists, Communists and Taylorites committed to international .”30 Kamaladevi met van Kleeck through the influential U.S. theoretician of , Richard B. Gregg, who had spent time studying Gandhi’s movement in India in the 1920s. On November 2, 1939 Gregg wrote a letter of introduction to van Kleeck on Kamaladevi’s behalf. He knew that van Kleeck wanted “to make closer connections with Indian leaders,” and thought Kamaladevi “would be of great use…in this matter.” Through Kamaladevi, van Kleeck hoped to expand the IRI beyond Europe and North America. To promote this international cooperation, Kamaladevi penned letters of introduction on behalf of van Kleeck and the IRI to the Servants of India Society and Nehru for information on Indian industry, labor, and national planning. For her part, within days of this introduction and throughout the rest of Kamaladevi’s time in North America, van Kleeck supported Kamaladevi’s efforts through her extensive influence. She wrote letters of introduction to journalists, women in the Roosevelt administration including Francis Perkins, the New York Welfare Council, settlement house workers, the Worker’s University of Mexico, the Women’s Bureau, Vassar College, two former Supreme Court Justices, and the Council on African Affairs. She also worked behind the scenes to get Kamaladevi time with the Roosevelts between

29 Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 232-240. 30 Guy Alchon, “The ‘Self-Applauding Sincerity’ of Overreaching Theory, Biography as Ethical Practice, and the Case of Mary van Kleeck,” in Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years, edited by Helene Silverberg, 293-325 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 309; Ruth Crocker, Mrs. Russell Sage: Women’s Activism and Philanthropy in Guilded Age and Progressive Era America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 235; See Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Crocker, 6; Alchon, 297; Ibid., 309.

16 November and December 1939 despite official concerns that meeting with a leading Indian liberation activist would harm diplomatic relationships with Britain.31 Kamaladevi had determined to see the entire country, meet diverse peoples, and learn as much as she could about business, government, politics, and social reform, and with the help of people like van Kleeck she was quite successful. For example, she had several more discussions with Eleanor Roosevelt, visited Margaret Sanger in Arizona, learned about native art and dance from the Taos Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, stayed with sharecroppers in the South, gave a lecture at the University of Kansas on “India and the War,” met with members of dozens of political organizations regarding issues ranging from world peace to home economics, and attended FDR’s 1941 Inauguration. She also traveled to numerous parts of the United States to observe race relations and social programs in rural areas. Near the end of her visit Kamaladevi flew from Seattle into British Columbia where, stymied again by British efforts to limit her travels despite her British citizenship, she spent one day in silent on a bench in the Vancouver immigration office before the mayor and representatives from the city’s Indian community came to collect her. As was true of her pattern throughout her life, these months were exhaustive and exhilarating, instructive and productive.32

Though Kamaladevi quickly made important contacts with women in the U.S., the first group that offered her financial and logistical support was the mostly male India lobby, whose members would have been in contact with London’s Krishna Menon and Agatha Harrison. Within this loosely organized group, Kamaladevi confronted echoes of the male anticolonialist rhetoric that had played a part in Gandhi’s move to block her ascent to the Congress Working Committee. Originally made up of Sikhs in Canada and on the West Coast of the U.S. advocating military revolution for Punjabi independence (the Ghadr movement), the India lobby had existed in the U.S. since the early twentieth century. By 1939 the lobby had expanded to address all-Indian liberation and included a broader spectrum of Indian leaders. It had also spread across the country with new power centers in New York City and Washington, D.C., and established ties to the federal government, the peace movement, and other radical organizations. The India League of America, the National Committee on Indian Independence, and the American League for India’s Freedom, among others, were experienced in supporting visitors such as Kamaladevi. The lobby helped arrange speaking tours for a variety of individuals from the U.S. and abroad to argue for Indian liberation and counteract pro-colonist British propaganda. For example, in the wake of the Mother India controversy in 1929, Sarojini

31 Gregg to Van Kleeck, November 2, 1939, MVK Papers, SSC. Gregg published his classic The Power of Nonviolence in 1934, one of five books Martin Luther King, Jr. cited as most influential to his thinking. See Joseph Kip Kosek, “Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence,” Journal of American History 91:4 (2005): 1318-1348; Gregg to Van Kleeck, Nov 2, 1939, MVK Papers, SSC; Ibid. Though Kamaladevi remembers in her memoirs that she met Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House on several occasions, from the MVK papers it seems at least initially that they met in Hyde Park where ER could speak Kamaladevi in her “personal capacity.” In a quick series of letters between MVK and Mary LaDame, Frances Perkins’s secretary, it seems that though ER was willing to meet with Kamaladevi, a “question has been raised with respect to diplomatic proprieties.” Letters between MVK and LaDame, Nov 21-24, 1939, MVK Papers, SSC. 32 Thank you to Barry Bunch, Assistant Archivist at the University of Kansas, who was intrigued enough by my inquiries to page through the 1940 campus newspaper, the University Daily Campus, and came upon this reference to Kamaladevi.

17 Naidu, Margaret Cousins, and British supporter C. F. Andrews all toured North America with support from the lobby to neutralize the impact of Mayo’s book on the U.S. public.33 During Kamaladevi’s first two and a half months in North America, she participated in events organized by members of the India lobby, and could have used the lobby’s resources to obtain brochures, communicate with the media, and make contacts with people sympathetic to the Indian cause. In her 1942 article, Boulter, who was Anup Singh’s lover, described a small but enthusiastic group of “compatriots and American friends” who greeted Kamaladevi and Rama on their first day in New York in early November 1939. Within a few weeks she met at least three of the five key interwar leaders of the India lobby in the U.S.: Krishnalal Shridharani, Anup Singh, and Sirdar Jag Jit Singh (J.J.). Newspaper accounts and some personal correspondence track Kamaladevi’s subsequent involvement with the lobby between November 1939 and January 1940. On November 21, Kamaladevi was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by the India Community of Greater New York. Shridharani, J.J. and Anup Singh attended the dinner as did van Kleeck and the Unitarian minister and theologian Charles Francis Potter. In mid-December, Potter introduced her at Town Hall for a talk entitled, “India, the British Empire and the War.” Once again turning her opponents’ logic on its head, she argued “The people of India must free themselves from the ‘imperialistic’ rule imposed by Britain before they can consider taking any part in the present war for ‘world freedom.’” Indian elites, she argued, especially the “feudal” princes, were complicit in the British suppression of civil liberties and the destruction of the Indian economy. She spoke again about “India and the War” at the New History Society on January 7, the same topic Anup Singh had addressed there one month earlier. On January 26, she attended the India League’s celebration of India’s Declaration of Independence. After this January event Kamaladevi’s activities diversified as she began to venture away from the center of the lobbyists’ influence in New York City and Washington, D.C. and address more varied topics.34 Kamaladevi and the lobby seem to have been mutually suspicious of one another, based at least in part on her sex and the nationalist movement’s expectations of her. Comparable to one source of conflict in the All India National Congress, the majority of the Indian lobbyists in the U.S. were at least one generation older than Kamaladevi and generally less radical. They had emigrated to the U.S. for educational opportunities in previous decades, obtained advanced degrees from prestigious universities, and subsequently chose not to return to India. As a result, many had a different perspective on the Indian liberation movement and the role of women in it. So far removed temporally and spatially from the inner-workings of Congress, they probably did not know the extent of the personal turn politics had taken for Kamaladevi in India.

33 Gould, 299. 34 Boulter, 180; Ibid., 294. Brijbhushan also mentions another key interwar leader, Haridas Mazumdar, who would bring the total to four, but it is unclear from the section in her biography whether Mazumdar actually met Kamaladevi or simply identified her as a one-time visitor to the States (Brijbhushan, 89); “Events Today,” Nov 21, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, 1851-2003. A Baptist turned humanist, Potter advised Clarence Darrow on the bible during the 1925 Scopes Trial; “Britain is Assailed For Plight Of India: Member of National Congress Urges End of Feudalism,” Dec 18, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, 1851-2003; “Events Scheduled Today,” Jan 7, 1940, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, 1851-2003; and “Classified Ad 22—No Title,” Dec 16, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, 1851-2003.

18 However, Boulter did describe Kamaladevi as a maverick more radical than most of her peers. She emphasized Kamaladevi’s socialist stance on “economic and social reforms,” her interest “in all legislation affecting the status of women, birth control clinics, revisions of marriage acts and so on,” as well as Kamaladevi’s international perspective. Kamaladevi “considers India’s struggle a part of the world struggle,” Boulter observed.35 Kamaladevi’s association with the India lobby was discussed in at least two male lobbyists’ letters to Jawaharlal Nehru. Roger N. Baldwin, one-time head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and member of the Friends for the Freedom of India (FFI) executive board in 1919, had been a long-time supporter of India. A decade earlier Baldwin had participated in the U.S. debates over Mother India. Historians have identified him as the probable author of an editorial published in the New York Times where he outlined Mayo’s pro-imperialist and anti-immigrant positions, key connections to unravel Mayo’s real purpose. Describing the January 26 celebration in a fairly innocuous letter to Nehru, Baldwin praised Kamaladevi for her ability to win over her audiences “at once.” But he also observed that she had not done as much speaking as another Indian woman lecturer visiting the U.S., Bhicoo Batliwala. Were there other instances when the lobby had assumed she would speak on their behalf and she refused to comply?36 In March, Gobind Behari Lal, Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and leading Indian activist, wrote a much more critical letter to Nehru. From the tone of Lal’s letter it seems he had little patience with “native” Hindus, especially women. He assured Nehru that Kamaladevi “has worked hard enough, and has received most generous support from her few compatriots here.” Mirroring a request Baldwin made in his letter, Lal emphasized the need for a designated Congress representative in the U.S. rather than itinerant visitors such as Kamaladevi and Batliwala, perhaps someone comparable to Krishna Menon in London. Unlike Baldwin, though, Lal, emphasizing his point with bold underlines, wrote that despite the efforts of these female activists, he hoped that “a man” would be sent to the U.S. one day. “Not only a man,” he went on stridently, but “a man of the world, with good presence and courtly manners. Even the cause of the innovators is aided by the personal art of gracious sociability, in which somehow we Hindus seem deficient,” he concluded with condescension.37 For his part, Nehru made no reference to Baldwin or Lal’s letters in his correspondence with Kamaladevi. In a September 25, 1940 letter he told her he had been following her travels from her letters “and other accounts…with great interest, you have had an extraordinarily interesting time in America.” He expressed his wish that circumstances would allow him to visit the United States some day, but he could not “leave India at this stage”; they lived “in a state of permanent crisis.” In fact, Nehru was arrested just one month later and held until December 1941. Because of British

35 Boulter, 183. 36 Gould, 245. Incidentally, Agnes Smedley, whom Kamaladevi met when Smedley was living with Harindranath’s brother, Virendranath, in Berlin in 1929, founded the FFI. Margaret Sanger also sat on the Executive Board in 1919. There were several U.S. women who dedicated their lives to the Indian cause and were linked intimately to Indian men, Smedley and Boulter among them; Sinha, Mother India, 107. 37 Roger N. Baldwin to Jawarhalal Nehru, January 1940, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers (hereafter cited as JN Papers), Part I, Vol. VI, No. 502, NMML; Gobind Behari Lal to Nehru, March 9, 1940, JN Papers, Part I, Vol. 29, No. 178, NMML. Lal’s emphases. When Lal first came to the U.S., he participated in the revolutionary Ghadr movement. He entered journalism in the 1920s.

19 censorship letters took an average of three months to travel between the United States and India. Therefore, Kamaladevi would have been kept appraised of the situation in India largely through the media. In March 1940 the political conflict in nationalist politics had reached another turning point at the annual Congress session at Ramghar. Led by Bose, the left wing demanded resumption of civil disobedience or they would create a separate resistance movement. At a meeting of the Keep America Out of War Congress in Chicago, Kamaladevi told the audience that what happened in Ramghar was “the most important point in the world for both the immediate and future destiny of human affairs.” Had she been in India, Kamaladevi would have been involved in both the on-going internal Congress debates as well as the agitation that led to Nehru and other nationalist leaders’ arrests in the coming months. Before leaving India, Kamaladevi remembers in her memoirs, Bose had admonished her for going out of the country when they “would soon be facing critical challenges,” but she wrote, “I had other problems to face and solve.”38 Kamaladevi was beholden to the lobby for more than introductions. She relied at least in part on lecture fees to support her North American tour, and the lobby had the resources to help her schedule appearances. One indication of her financial backing appears in another letter to Nehru. James M. Williams, Professor of Sociology at Hobart College in Geneva, New York wrote to Nehru in March 1940 about a sponsored lecture she gave at the college. Five organizations including the League of Women Voters and the Public School Teachers’ Association pooled their resources to bring her to Geneva. Williams does not mention how he contacted Kamaladevi or who he went through to make arrangements.39 In Kamaladevi’s memoirs, however, she admitted, that while in the United States she “had an aversion to talking to light ‘club groups,’ so I declined to take on any lecture contracts, decided to be selective.” A letter-sized, four-page brochure from a company called the Forum Lecture Bureau in the van Kleeck papers contradicts that statement. Produced sometime in the winter of 1939-40, the professional brochure must have been expensive, and it is unclear what part the lobby took in its creation. Assuming Kamaladevi had a large hand its content, aside from the financial investment, the brochure reveals how she positioned herself politically in relation to both the All India National Congress and the U.S. India lobby during her time abroad. Presented as “Mme. Kamaladevi,” the subtitle describes her as “The only person at present in America who can speak on India as one who comes from the Inner Circle of the India National Movement.” Background information inside the brochure affirms Kamaladevi as a legitimate political subject uniquely positioned to offer valuable insight into Indian politics at home and abroad. Her experiences in Indian politics are highlighted alongside her international credentials. The brochure also includes “testimonials” from prominent U.S. and international figures attesting to Kamaladevi’s qualifications on the lecture circuit that gave her legitimacy as a Congress insider, tied her to British anticolonialist groups and the U.S. India lobby, and voiced support from the interfaith social justice movement and international women’s organizations. The brochure’s last page describes

38 Jawaharlal Nehru to Kamaladevi, September 25, 1940, JN Papers, Part I, Vol 38, NMML; Rev. John Evans, “Called Key to Future,” Mar 19, 1940, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Daily Tribune, 1849-1985; Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 212. 39 James M. Williams to Jawaharlal Nehru, 6 March 1940, JN Papers, Vol. 103, No. 6121, NMML.

20 the five subjects Kamaladevi was available to lecture on ranging from Nehru and the Indian National Congress to women’s issues and Indian art and literature.40 Kamaladevi thus astutely incorporated a broad selection of voices and topics to garner attention for her tour of North America. She gave a nod to support from her fellow Indian nationalists while at the same time setting herself apart as uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of the Indian cause. Language from the brochure appeared in numerous newspaper articles. For example, press releases for the January 1940 NCCCW conference referred to Kamaladevi as “one of the foremost women political leaders in India.” Washington Post articles varied their description, calling her “one of the country’s leading women political leaders” and “distinguished Indian woman leader.” Successful publicity such as this must have played a part in her ability to remain in North America for such an extended period.41

In the spring of 1941, Kamaladevi’s circumstances led her to begin her journey back to India. Her memoirs were as ambiguous about this decision as they were on her original reasons for leaving India. For one, her third six-month visa was set to expire. Also, Rama was enrolled in school and had started a weekly radio show and music troupe highlighting traditional Indian music. In addition, during her visits to Washington, D.C. Kamaladevi had met with Hu Shih, Chinese Ambassador to the United States, and through him obtained a formal invitation from Generalissmo and Madame Chiang Kai Shek. With invitations to visit Japan as well, Kamaladevi scheduled a late April departure out of San Francisco. Her initially professional relationship with van Kleeck and Fledderus had shifted to warm friendship over the course of her stay in the United States. Kamaladevi and Rama sent them postcards from their travels to the Southwest, California, Florida, and Kamaladevi had dined at their home whenever she stopped through New York City. The couple also had offered to help Rama in any way they could when his mother returned to India. As Kamaladevi prepared to leave the country, van Kleeck solicited two hundred sixty dollars from sympathetic friends and organizations “ for [Kamaladevi] to take home conveying American goodwill in India’s struggle for independence.” Van Kleeck surprised Kamaladevi with the gift at a

40 Chattopadhyaya, Memoirs, 237; Forum Lecture Bureau Presents Mme. Kamaladevi, four-page brochure, date unknown (hereafter cited as Lecture Bureau brochure), MVK Papers, SSC. The only reference to the Forum Lecture Bureau comes in a letter van Kleeck wrote to President Henry Nobel MacCracken of Vassar College encouraging him to take up the Bureau’s recommendation for Kamaladevi to speak there (Mary van Kleeck to Henry Noble MacCracken, July 24, 1940, MVK Papers, SSC). 41 Arndt, Jessie Ash, “India to Avoid War, Says Woman Leader: Mrs. Kamaladevi, Vice President of Feminine Conference, Says Country Can’t Fight Without Independence,” Nov 29, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post, 1877-1990; and Hope Ridings Miller, “Social Calendar Filled by Topflight Visitors: Many Noted Women Coming Here For Women’s National Press Club Party; Before and After Events Arranged,” Mar 19, 1940, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post, 1877-1990. Later that year a Los Angeles reporter highlighted an appropriately Hollywood-like detail mentioned in the brochure: in the 1920s Kamaladevi had acted on stage and had been one of the first Brahmin women to act in a film as well. “Woman Tells India’s Hopes: Independence Problems Pictured by Visiting Political Leader,” Sept 11, 1940, Los Angeles Times; “Women Discuss How to Bring Peace to a War-Torn World,” January 22, 1940, Christian Science Monitor; and Betty Browning, “Conferences in Limelight of Club Circles,” Jan 21, 1940, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Chicago Daily Tribune, 1849-1985.

21 combined birthday/going-away party held in her honor on April 3. Kamaladevi was in San Francisco by April 16, and left for Japan via Hawaii shortly thereafter.42 In letters from Japan and Hong Kong between May and September 1941, Kamaladevi wrote surprisingly personal letters to van Kleeck and Fledderus. This correspondence offers a rare glimpse into her personal experiences abroad. She documented comic interludes to her rather tedious boat journey from San Francisco to Kobe. The only “American” woman on the boat was one half of an odd missionary couple who used “swear words—as a mark of their matrimonial affection.” And one night a group of drunken young sailors burst into her cabin twice, one of whom asked her why her eyes looked so sad, another who told her he could not sleep because “the Americans were very funny.” Upon landing in Japan, a crowd of over five thousand greeted her. She experienced an amusing experience during her introductions: “Each speaker kept bowing after every few sentences so I had to bow and they bowed in return, then I bowed again and so it went on.”43 At various points in Kamaladevi’s letters from Asia, she communicated the difficulties of traveling alone among strangers and revealed her close connection to the friends she had made in the U.S. Apologizing for such long letters, she explained that she felt she could pour out all of her experiences to her “dear friends.” “I feel very lonely here and miss the U.S.A. and friends,” she wrote. “I keep missing you all an awful lot. I am just so home-sick for America.” In July she ended another letter with these words: “I feel so alone and solitary here. Wish you folks were somewhere around.” Overwhelmed by the rigidity of the culture, she perceived Japan as “a new and different world to anything I have known.” Above all, she felt “blind and dumb,” dependent for the first time on an interpreter because she did not speak Japanese.44 The bulk of the letters Kamaladevi sent from Asia, though, described the political statements she had made at various public events. When she spoke out about the “Sino- Japanese conflict” at one press conference she got a “mixed response.” On another occasion she criticized Japan’s desire to create a “family of nations. I said this had a very familiar ring for us because it is the very argument used by British imperialists.” With regret for the current state of affairs, she argued that instead of fighting one another, the Asian powers of Egypt, China, Japan, and India should instead “cooperate and form a strong block not only against British Imperialism but also check Nazi expansion.” Disappointed in the (male) Japanese leadership, the women of Japan, she assured her friends, were nevertheless intelligent, capable, efficient and persevering despite considerable burdens. The last letter, sent from the S. S. President Garfield in September, summarized her extraordinary experiences in Hong Kong and Mainland China—events later highlighted by her biographers. With the support of the sympathetic British ambassador in Hong Kong, Kamaladevi avoided arrest, met with Madame Sun Yat Sen,

42 Brijbhushan, 92-93; Western Union telegram, MVK to Henry Sigerist and others, March 31, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC. $260 in 1939 was the equivalent of almost $3800 in 2007. 43 Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, May 22, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC. 44 Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, May 24, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC; Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, July 7, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC; Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, May 24, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC.

22 and traveled into what she called “war-torn” China to meet with Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai Shek.45 Delayed in Hong Kong for at least one month as a result of British interference, Kamaladevi finally arrived in Bombay in late October 1941 to discover that nationalist politics had caught up with her more radical position on independence. In August 1942 she was jailed for the fifth and final time along with hundreds of other Congress leaders throughout the country just two days after Gandhi gave a speech introducing the . Kamaladevi remained remarkably active throughout her imprisonment, and utilized her global experiences between 1939 and 1941 and her abilities as a writer to re-establish her leadership among the younger Congress members and the Congress Socialist Party. Between 1942 and 1944, she wrote about her experiences for the Current Topics Series, edited by Yusuf Meherally, a fellow freedom fighter, socialist leader, and mentor. The series was designed to demonstrate young leaders’ expertise on current events and educate the public on a variety of topics with an eye on the implications for Indian independence. Kamaladevi’s contributions—In War-Torn China (1942), Japan: Its Weakness and Strength (1943), and Uncle Sam’s Empire (1944)—directly reflected the personal and political implications of her travels.46 Part travelogue, part political commentary, the first “little book,” In War-Torn China, urged international support for China’s plight and emphasized that country’s efforts toward socialist economies. Also, she drew an implicit parallel between Indian and Chinese women “engaged in a struggle for the larger human rights,” and again deflected western attitudes toward the stereotypical “down-trodden oriental” woman. Her criticism of imperialism in all its forms was the focus of Uncle Sam’s Empire wherein she offered her readers a sophisticated analysis of the historical development of U.S. imperialism with a summary of western influence in the Americas beginning with Columbus’s voyages. Whereas the U.S. War for Independence against Britain inspired “West Indian” colonies to rebel as well, she argued, the States ultimately replicated British imperialism by turning its Caribbean territories into “American states.” U.S. military dominance in the Caribbean in the wake of World War I had allowed them to control the entire western hemisphere through “dollar diplomacy.” “The penetration of U.S. power into the southern continent has not basically differed from European penetration in Asia and Africa,” she concluded, “except that coming at a later stage of imperialistic development, the emphasis has been more on finance capital than on

45 Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, May 22, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC; Ibid.; Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, May 24, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC; Kamaladevi to My dear Friends, September 5, 1941, MVK Papers, SSC. 46 Kamaladevi’s imprisonment merited mention in the United States. See “Indian Woman Leader Who Toured U.S. Jailed,” September 8, 1942, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Chicago Daily Tribune, 1849-1985. (Coincidentally, the short article below this one announced that Hu Shih was being moved from his position in Washington, D.C. to a top Cabinet position in China.) Kamaladevi was released in 1944 due to ill health, but remained active in national politics. She attended the in June 1945 (the unsuccessful effort to address Indian national leadership issues and prevent Partition) and presided over the All India Women’s Conference in 1945 and 1946. Nehru eventually did appoint her to the Working Committee in 1946, though she claims in her memoirs that she was no longer “an important enough political entity to add weight” to the national executive, and initially turned down the position. (Memoirs 299; Brijbhushan 53)

23 colonial settlement…creating business and reaping profits abroad backed by marines and troops.”47 Kamaladevi’s much longer analysis of the United States in her book, America: The Land of Superlatives (1945), possibly written after her release from prison in 1944 as a result of illness, represents an accumulation of her impressions from her eighteen months in North America. Drawing on her in-depth study of U.S. history and current events, as well as her experiences throughout the country speaking with officials and laypeople alike, Kamaladevi presented a complex interpretation of the States to an educated Indian audience in part to dispel superficial Indian “enchantment” with “America.” “India is sometimes given to looking at the United States with almost an awe,” she wrote in the Author’s Note. But she hoped to present a more realistic picture of the States’ strengths and weaknesses. “We have as much to absorb from it as to discard.” The book has a professional tone, and includes significantly more economic analyses and statistics than her later personal reflections. Her socialist beliefs are apparent, though it does not contain doctrinaire Marxist rhetoric. Like the Current Topics Series, America reflects Kamaladevi’s concern with post-independence India. Therefore, a number of chapters focus on a wide variety of programs and businesses ranging from agricultural practices and Home Economics programs to prison reform and labor standards. She described the successes and failures of the New Deal in detailed paragraphs packed with statistics.48 Roughly the second half of America focuses on different groups Kamaladevi sought out during her eighteen months in the U.S.: blacks, Native Americans, women. The chapters offered a brief history, a description of current status, and outlines of those organizations and government programs closely involved with each particular group. She described the situation of blacks in the inner city and in the rural South, and criticized the lack of equal access to health care, education, and employment. In a uniquely poetic chapter, “The Disinherited,” Kamaladevi provided a romantic description of the culture and heritage of Native Americans and called on the U.S. to preserve and support these communities. Her chapter on women reveals her admiration for those she met during her stay, though she did not describe her meeting with any one person. “The American woman commands our admiration because of her self reliance and resourcefulness. Her freedom is of a real and vital character…She aims at an independent entity and personality.”49 From several overt references in the text, Kamaladevi apparently wrote the last section of America after the war in the Pacific had ended. As such, she used the current situation to emphasize the opportunity for the U.S., now “the strongest single power,” to “play a beneficent role in world affairs” rather than replicate British imperialism. The East, she warned, “is as apprehensive of the post-war Anglo-American dominance as it was hitherto of the fascist powers.” At the end of World War II, Kamaladevi believed of course that “India remains the Crux of the problem,” the biggest factor in the end of

47 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, In War-Torn China, Current Topics Series No. 1 (Bombay: Padma Publications Ltd., 1942), 44; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Uncle Sam’s Empire, Current Topics Series No. 13 (Bombay: Padma Publications Ltd., 1944), 6-7; Ibid., 84. 48 Chattopadhyaya, America: The Land of Superlatives (Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1946), v. 49 Chattopadhyaya, America, 323.

24 British imperialism. She asked the people of the U.S. and “all the United Nations” to consider in their post-war planning: What about India?50

The analysis of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya’s travels between 1939 and 1941 forces reanalysis of the historiography of the twentieth century in new and challenging ways. First, Kamaladevi’s experience within the Indian National Congress throughout the 1930s and 1940s demonstrates the importance of gender in Indian nationalist politics. It is significant that a woman who was so prominent throughout the country in the All India Women’s Conference, Civil Disobedience, and Quit India had no role in the newly independent government. Rather than protest, however, in the wake of Partition (August 1947) and Gandhi’s death (January 1948), Kamaladevi uncharacteristically stepped away from national party politics. She focused the rest of her life on rehabilitation, education, and the preservation of handicrafts. Second, her critique of Western “international” women’s organizations must be acknowledged as a precursor to the politics of modern third world feminism. Though willing to participate within international organizations, Kamaladevi and her comrades consistently challenged the hypocrisy they encountered in regard to colonialism and women’s rights. Like many of her South Asian contemporaries, Kamaladevi rejected the term ‘feminism’ throughout her life, choosing to speak of the Indian women’s movement rather than associate with a word first developed and utilized by Western women. Her feelings about this term and the weight it held for South Asian women in the early twentieth century predates late twentieth century scholars and activists who seek to expand ‘feminism’ beyond what they see as gender essentialism. However, though refusing the designation of ‘feminist,’ in her political memoir, Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom, published at age eighty, Kamaladevi was quick to respond to women’s rights activists questioning her generation’s contributions to the movement.51 And finally, Kamaladevi is one of the twentieth century’s truly global historical agents. As she traveled around the world speaking on behalf of Indian independence and aspects of women’s rights, she both contributed to those cultures and learned a great deal about how to improve post-independence India. Her status as a satyagraha, and close connection to Nehru in particular, lent weight to her involvement with international movements for peace, particularly as the world edged toward war. Also, her experience working on behalf of social reform through the All India Women’s Conference tied her to increasingly professionalized international social welfare activists who collectively worked to incorporate their ideals into government. Even more broadly, Kamaladevi’s leadership on issues including suffrage, women’s education, marriage rights, and birth control placed her at the forefront of the twentieth century movement for women’s human rights. Overall, Kamaladevi’s life and writings pose new questions that cross national boundaries and go beyond traditional chronologies at this pivotal point in history.

50 Chattopadhyaya, America, 359-362. 51 In an introduction to Neera Desai’s 1957 book, Woman in Modern India, Kamaladevi unequivocally rejected feminism as applicable to the history of Indian women because feminism connoted a sexual antagonism that did not exist in India. For more on modern third world feminist theory see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991).

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