Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Romantic Rebel

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About the Book:

One of the most outstanding women of modern India, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay put her name down in Indian history as an intrepid freedom fighter and a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as a crusader or women's rights, and as the rejuvenator of indigenous arts and crafts that had languished under colonial rule. She also set up India's first industrial township at Faridabad to rehabilitate tens of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of the partition of the country in 1947.

For half a century, from the '30s to the time of her death in 1988, she strode the national scene like a colossus, but spurned high office and political rewards. She could be fearlessly rebellious when the occasion demanded, and also supremely romantic and compassionate at the same time.

She was honoured with the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay International Award for her contribution to community work, the UNESCO award for crafts promotion, and the Padma Vibhushan - the second highest civilian award of the Government of India - for her writings. "An institution in herself" this "glamorously beautiful rebel" was also known as "the culture queen of India". she was among the chosen few national leaders who had the privilege of signing the new Constitution of India document after Independence.

This biography of Kamaladevi chronicles the details of her extraordinary life during a period in the history of the country that saw far more exciting socio - political changes than in the previous few centuries.

Sakuntala Narasimhan is a well - known columnist-writer with nine books to her credit. She won the Chameli Devi Award of the Media Foundation for Outstanding Woman Journalist of the Year in 1983, and the K. S. Iyer Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on Socially Relevant Issues in 1992.

Her fortnightly column on women's issues in the Deccan Herald has been widely acclaimed and compiled in a book for women's studies courses. She has been commissioned to write for international publications and has had her writings translated into Russian, Swedish, Japanese and Spanish, besides Indian Languages (Tamil, Kannada, Hindi and Malayalam). Her published work includes translations of feminist fiction from Tamil into English.

She has a Ph. D. in Sociology and taught a course on women and development at Virginia State University, USA, on a Fulbright assignment in 1990. She has also served as resource person for seminars and workshops on media, gender and development issues. She was appointed as a fellow of the Salzburg Seminar in 1998, and was invited to the Asian Regional Conference of the International Women's Media Foundation held in Manila the same year.

Her other interests are classical music (in which she has won ten gold medals), and consumer protection (for which she received a Government of India National Award in 1994). Dr. Narasimhan lives in Bangalore and has two children.