A woman for all seasons

Bake iographies and autobiographies are, for the most part, engaging commentaries on a country's life.

- MALAVIKA KARLEKAR

They bring an intimacy, an engagement, a "this is how it happened" twist to people, occasions and incidents. This remarkable life story of one of India's most courageous and multi-talented women does just that. A part of the Indian Lives series edited by Ramachandra Guha, the volume represents years of prodigious research by Nico Slate of Carnegie Mellon University.

That the typewriter was almost a prosthesis on Kamaladevi's many travels helped record her point of view on an extraordinary range of issues, controversial and mundane. Clearly, "her main art form was the written word", and she not only wrote several books, but also essays and articles on the entire gamut of her interests and commitments, be it political involvement, working for refugee rehabilitation, handloom and handicrafts or institution-building.