The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India

Historian Slate (Brothers) offers a propulsive and searching biography of Indian anticolonial activist and women’s advocate Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988). Among Chattopadhyay’s accomplishments, Slate highlights her insistence that women be involved in nonviolent protests against British colonialism; her establishment of a socialist wing of the Indian National Congress; and her solidarity with oppressed people elsewhere (she stood against American segregation and Japanese imperialism). Slate positions Chattopadhyay as a thinker ahead of her time, whose ideas presage today’s “intersectionality.” This effort falters in places (for example, Chattopadhyay, like many birth control advocates of the time, superficially endorsed “eugenicist thinking,” making her seem very much of her era), but mostly it provides valuable insight, as when Slate illustrates how Chattopadhyay came to view her advocacy for women’s rights as incompatible with Western feminism, which promoted racist stereotypes. Slate’s most fascinating narrative threads excavate tension between Chattopadhyay’s personal struggles and her activism: she was widowed young at a time when widows were expected to recede from society, but rarely mentioned that particular injustice in the course of her activism; and despite advocating for divorce, she suffered guilt over ending her second marriage—she confessed to feeling that due to “some flaw in me... our family was not able to run normally.” This brings a humanizing vulnerability to a lionized figure in Indian politics. (June)