- Lived:
- 13 February 1879, Hyderabad – 2 March 1949, Lucknow; the life ran through Madras, London and Cambridge, then wherever the freedom movement needed a voice — Bombay, Kanpur, the Dharasana salt-pans, London again, a prison-palace in Pune — and ended in office in the governor’s house of the United Provinces
- Field:
- poetry and the freedom movement — the “Nightingale of India,” first Indian woman president of the Congress, commander of the Dharasana salt raid, first woman governor of an Indian state
- The Big Idea:
- A poet gave up poetry for politics — and produced her masterpiece anyway: 2,500 volunteers walking unresisting into police clubs at Dharasana under her command, the performance of disciplined nonviolence that turned the world’s press against the Raj.
- In their words:
- “You will be beaten, but you must not resist” — her order to the Dharasana marchers, 21 May 1930, as the reporter Webb Miller recorded it
- If you remember one thing:
- The verse that earned her the nightingale title has faded; the work that lasts was performed, not written — and the morning she directed it, a woman poet held the discipline of thousands while an empire beat them, and lost.