Google Doodle has illustrated India’s first woman freedom fighter and satyagrahi Subhadra Kumari Chauhan on her 117th birth anniversary. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan is known for her epic poem “Jhansi ki Rani”.
The Google doodle today shows Chauhan in a white sari with a brown stripe at the edges sitting with a pen and paper in a contemplative pose. Chauhan took to poetry at an early age, publishing her first one at the age of just 9. Google, in a statement, called her a “trailblazing writer and freedom fighter”. Chauhan became a prominent poet and freedom fighter in an age that was dominated by males, it added. While Chauhan used her poetry to boost the morale of the countrymen in their fight for freedom, she also highlighted the hardships faced by Indian women including “gender and caste discrimination”.
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan was born on August 16, 1904, in Nihalpur village, Prayagraj where she attended the Crosthwaite Girls’ School and passed middle-school in 1919 when she married Thakur Laxman Singh Chauhan of Khandwa at the age of just 16. They had 5 children.
Both Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and her husband became a part of Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-cooperation movement in 1921. During the struggle, she became the first woman satyagrahi to court arrest and was subsequently jailed in Nagpur.
