New Delhi: Google doodled, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, India’s first women satyagrahi and a writer and freedom fighter, on her 117th birth anniversary on Monday.
“In 1923, Chauhan’s unyielding activism led her to become the first woman satyagrahi, a member of the Indian collective of nonviolent anti-colonialists to be arrested in the struggle for national liberation. She continued to make revolutionary statements in the fight for freedom both on and off the page into the 1940s, publishing a total of 88 poems and 46 short stories,” Chauhan’s poem ‘Jansi ki Rani”, described the life of Rani Laxmi Bai, one of the most recites and sung poems in Hindi literature.
She was born in a Rajput family in Uttaepradesh’s Nihalpur village in 1904. She passed the middle school examination from Crosthwaite Girl’s School in Prayagraj in 1919.
After she got married to Thakur Lakshman Singh Chauhan of Khandwa joined Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-cooperation Movement against the British and became the first woman satyagrahi of the country. She got jailed twice for her involvement in the protests against British rule in 1923 and 1942.
She has started writing from an early age. Her first poem was published when she was just nine-year-old.
As a participant of the Indian National Movement, she used her influential writing and poems as the weapon to motivate others. Her pieces depicted the hardships and challenges faced by Indian women at the time of freedom movement of India.
Chauhan wrote in the Khariboli dialect of Hindi. She wrote down poem for children and some short stories based on the life of the middle-class of the society.
Chauhan died on February 15 in 1948. An Indian Coast Guard ship was named after her, in honour of her exemplary work. The government of Madhya Pradesh placed a statue of hers before the Municipal Corporation office of Jabalpur.
