Kamala Nehru - Almost Overlooked

Although she was from one of India’s most prominent families, Kamala Nehru was that quiet fighter whose presence and contribution can easily go unnoticed. Born in 1899 into a Kashmiri Pandit family, Kamala was just a teenager when her marriage was arranged to Jawaharlal Nehru. She quickly threw herself into the Freedom Struggle, tenaciously taking on the fight against British rule. She even converted a section of her house in Allahabad into a dispensary for wounded fighters (later renamed Kamala Nehru Memorial Hospital). At the forefront of the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921, Kamala’s popularity among local women helped her launch a strong protest against shops that sold British liquor and cloth in Allahabad. Realising that she was fast becoming a threat, the British arrested her on two occasions. Frail and ailing for years, she spent much of her time between hospitals and sanatoriums, only to succumb to tuberculosis at the age of 36 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her family was by her side. As the quiet wife of Jawaharlal and the mother of Indira, Kamala Nehru’s desperately failing health meant that she remained heavily overshadowed. Even her husband admits in his autobiography, “I almost overlooked her”. He did however recount being devastated at her death, and the signature red rose pinned on his person for his remaining years, was in memory of her. A deeply inspired Gandhian, a diminutive yet forceful woman, Kamala Nehru’s legacy as an incredibly brave woman who gave herself wholly to India’s Freedom Struggle, perhaps lives on in the multiple modern institutions (and a road in Karachi) named after her.