As Karnataka prepares to celebrate its unification on November 1, the date that marks the historic day in 1956 when all Kannada-speaking regions were merged to form the modern Mysore State, it is only fitting that we remember one of its most remarkable daughters — Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Though her legacy has radiated far beyond the borders of her native land, her connection to Karnataka, both by birth and by spirit, remains profound.

Kamaladevi, born in 1903 in Mangalore to a Chitrapur Saraswat family, was a woman far ahead of her time — fearless, idealistic, and unapologetically modern. She embodied the rare synthesis of political courage and cultural vision. Yet, despite her towering achievements in shaping India’s social, political, and artistic life, she remains curiously underrecognized in her home state — a collective amnesia that does little justice to her immense contributions to the nation’s intellectual and cultural renaissance.

Her life was one of many firsts and countless defiance of convention. Widowed at the age of fourteen, Kamaladevi’s early life might have mirrored the quiet tragedy of countless child brides of her time. Instead, it became the crucible in which her radical independence was forged. Defying every social expectation, she remarried at the age of twenty — a scandalous act in early 20th-century India — to the poet, playwright, and musician Harindranath Chattopadhyay, brother of the celebrated freedom fighter and poet Sarojini Naidu. The marriage, marked by intellectual companionship but marred by Harindranath’s infidelity, ended in divorce a decade later — the first court-granted legal divorce in Indian history.

By her early twenties, Kamaladevi was already charting her own path in public life. At twenty-three, she made history as the first Indian woman to contest a legislative seat, inspired by the Irish-Indian suffragette Margaret Cousins, founder of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC). Though she lost that election, it marked her entry into the nationalist and feminist movements that would define her life. Incidentally, Margaret Cousins’ husband, James Cousins — a poet and theosophist — played his own quiet role in Kannada literary history by persuading Kuvempu, who would later become Karnataka’s poet laureate, to write in his mother tongue rather than in English.

At twenty-four, Kamaladevi was elected to the All-India Congress Committee, joining the frontlines of India’s freedom struggle. A few years later, in 1930, she demonstrated her characteristic audacity during the Salt Satyagraha. When Mahatma Gandhi initially resisted the idea of women joining the movement, Kamaladevi confronted him on the route to Dandi and refused to step aside. Her persistence paid off — she became one of the first women to join the Salt March, forever transforming the role of women in India’s nationalist politics.

Her pioneering spirit was not confined to politics. At twenty-eight, she made her mark on India’s emerging cultural landscape, starring opposite Kannada playwright T. P. Kailasam in Mrchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart), a silent film produced in 1931 and considered the first-ever film of the Kannada industry. The role was more than artistic — it reflected her belief that art, theatre, and cinema were potent vehicles for social transformation.

During the Second World War, Kamaladevi’s activism went global. She travelled extensively across Britain, Egypt, America, Japan, and China, raising international awareness about India’s struggle for independence. Her speeches denounced both British and Japanese imperialism with equal conviction, while in the United States she publicly resisted racial segregation under the Jim Crow system. Her activism thus transcended nationalism — she became a cosmopolitan champion of justice, gender equality, and cultural dignity.

When India achieved independence in 1947, Kamaladevi was offered several prestigious diplomatic assignments in recognition of her experience and global standing. Yet, true to her nature, she declined. “I have decided,” she wrote, “to leave the highway of politics to step into the side lane of constructive work.” That choice would define the second, equally revolutionary half of her life.

Recognizing that political freedom was incomplete without cultural and economic emancipation, Kamaladevi turned her energy toward reviving India’s traditional arts, crafts, and performance heritage — sectors that had suffered neglect and devaluation under colonial rule. Her visionary leadership reshaped India’s cultural institutions in the decades after independence.

She was the driving force behind the founding of the National School of Drama (1944), which nurtured generations of actors, playwrights, and directors; the Central Cottage Industries Emporium (1948), which promoted Indian handicrafts globally; the Sangeet Natak Akademi (1952), India’s national academy for music, dance, and drama; and the Crafts Council of India (1964), which continues to protect and promote artisanal traditions.

Her contributions were not limited to art and culture. In the aftermath of Partition, when millions were displaced and left destitute, Kamaladevi played a central role in rehabilitating refugees. She established the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU), which spearheaded the development of Faridabad, a new township on the outskirts of Delhi created to provide housing, livelihood, and dignity to displaced families. She collaborated with Otto Koenigsberger, a German architect and town planner who had served as Government Architect of Mysore since 1939 and designed several iconic buildings in Bengaluru, including the Indian Institute of Science structures, the Krishna Rao Pavilion in Basavanagudi, and the Bal Bhavan in Cubbon Park.

Kamaladevi’s influence continued to ripple through the cultural sphere for decades. In 1964, she co-founded a cultural institute in Delhi with the eminent Kathak dancer Guru Maya Rao. When the institute relocated to Bengaluru in 1987, a year before her death, it was renamed the Natya Institute of Kathak & Choreography. Situated on 17th Cross, Malleswaram, it continues to thrive today as a vibrant center for dance education, research, and performance — a living embodiment of her vision for art as a democratic, community-based practice.

Even as her work took her across continents, Kamaladevi remained deeply rooted in the Indian ethos. Her writings and speeches reveal an expansive worldview that fused Gandhian ideals of self-reliance with feminist and socialist thought. She championed the economic empowerment of women through cooperative enterprises and handicrafts, long before these ideas became fashionable in development discourse. She also believed that India’s future lay in embracing its diverse traditions rather than erasing them in the pursuit of modernity.

By the time of her death on October 29, 1988, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay had not only transformed the status of women in Indian society but had also left an indelible mark on the nation’s cultural and institutional landscape. Raja Rao, the celebrated novelist from Hassan, described her in the preface to her 1986 memoir as “perhaps the most august woman on the Indian scene today.” Decades later, American historian Nico Slate would call her “the most important woman of the 20th century.”

Yet, despite such accolades, Kamaladevi’s legacy remains strangely underappreciated in the land of her birth. Karnataka, which rightly celebrates the genius of poets, philosophers, and reformers, has yet to fully embrace the legacy of this visionary woman who bridged politics and culture, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, activism and aesthetics.

As the state celebrates its unification day, remembering Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay is both a tribute and a reminder — that progress, for her, was never merely about political independence or economic growth, but about reclaiming the soul of a civilization through its arts, its people, and its conscience.

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