Lakshmi Sahgal

Lakshmi Swaminadhan was born on October 24, 1914 in Madras, now Chennai, into a prosperous and politically engaged Tamil family ^[1]. Her father, S. Swaminadhan, practiced criminal law at the Madras High Court. Her mother, A.V. Ammukutty, better known as Ammu Swaminadhan, came from a prominent Nair family of Kerala and became a social activist and later a member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted India's constitution ^[2].

The household exposed her early to the nationalist movement. As a girl she watched her mother respond to Mahatma Gandhi's call to boycott foreign goods, and family lore records the young Lakshmi giving up her foreign-made clothes and toys during the swadeshi campaigns ^[2]. The family's relative openness also shaped her: caste restrictions were treated with skepticism at home, and she grew up questioning the social hierarchies that governed much of South Indian life at the time.

She chose medicine as her profession, studying at Madras Medical College and receiving her MBBS in 1938. A year later she earned a diploma in gynecology and obstetrics, and she began working at the Government Kasturba Gandhi Hospital in the Triplicane neighborhood of Madras ^[1]. A brief early marriage to a pilot, P.K.N. Rao, did not last, and in 1940 she left India for Singapore, where a large Indian community offered scope for a young doctor to build a practice ^[3].

In Singapore, Sahgal established a clinic that served poor Indian migrant laborers alongside wealthier patients ^[3]. The city fell to Japanese forces in February 1942, an event that upended the lives of its large Indian population and created the conditions for an armed nationalist movement among Indian expatriates and captured soldiers of the British Indian Army. She worked with wounded prisoners of war, many of whom were being drawn into the idea of an Indian National Army (INA) that would fight for independence rather than for Britain ^[4].

The decisive moment came in July 1943, when Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Singapore to take command of the movement. Bose had long argued that women must take part in the independence struggle on equal terms, and he announced his intention to raise a women's combat regiment. Lakshmi asked to meet him, and after a long interview she accepted the task of organizing the unit ^[4]. The formation was named the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, after Lakshmibai, the queen who fought the British in the rebellion of 1857.

Anyone tracing who was Lakshmi Sahgal in the record of the 1940s finds her from this point known as Captain Lakshmi, the name that stayed with her for the rest of her life even as she held higher rank. Recruits came from Indian families across Malaya, Singapore and Burma, many of them daughters of plantation laborers who had never handled a weapon. The regiment trained in drill, weapons handling and jungle marches, and Sahgal combined command duties with medical work ^[5]. In October 1943 Bose proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind), and she was named Minister in Charge of Women's Affairs, one of the few women anywhere at that time to hold a cabinet post in any government, provisional or otherwise ^[4].

The INA moved toward the Burma front in 1944 in support of the Japanese offensive against British India. Sahgal traveled to Burma with the regiment, though the Rani of Jhansi units were employed mainly in nursing and support roles as the campaign faltered at Imphal and Kohima and turned into a long retreat ^[5]. The collapse of the Japanese position in Burma through 1945 left the INA scattered and starving. During the retreat she remained behind to care for the wounded.

British forces took her into custody in Burma in May 1945. She was held there for close to a year while the British government decided what to do with the captured INA leadership ^[4]. The public trials of INA officers at the Red Fort in Delhi in late 1945 set off demonstrations across India, and the popular slogan of the day paired her name with those of the accused men. Sensing that prosecuting a woman doctor who had led other women in the cause of independence would inflame opinion further, the authorities sent her back to India in March 1946, where crowds received her as a heroine ^[6].

In 1947, on the eve of independence, she married Colonel Prem Kumar Sahgal, a fellow INA officer who had been among the three defendants in the first Red Fort trial. The couple settled in Kanpur, the industrial city on the Ganges in the United Provinces, soon Uttar Pradesh, and she resumed the medical career that would occupy the rest of her life ^[1].

Kanpur in 1947 was filling with refugees uprooted by the Partition of India, and Sahgal threw herself into treating them regardless of religion at a time of communal killing ^[6]. Over the following decades she built a practice centered on the city's poor, particularly its women. Patients and colleagues later recalled that she kept fees minimal and continued seeing patients at her clinic into her nineties ^[3].

Her formal political affiliation came relatively late. In 1971 she joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist), drawn by its positions on labor and inequality in a city dominated by textile mills ^[1]. That year she traveled to Calcutta to organize medical relief for refugees pouring in from Bangladesh during the war of liberation, and she later worked in medical camps during other emergencies, including relief work following the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 ^[6].

She represented the party in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, and in 1981 she was among the founders of the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), which grew into one of the country's largest women's organizations ^[7]. Through AIDWA she campaigned against dowry, against the practice of sex-selective abortion, and for equal wages, pairing agitation with the practical medical service she had provided all along. During episodes of communal violence in Kanpur, including the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, she was known to go into tense neighborhoods to calm crowds and treat the injured ^[6].

In 2002 four left parties nominated Sahgal, then 87, as their joint candidate for President of India against A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the missile scientist backed by the governing coalition and the main opposition ^[8]. She had no realistic chance in the electoral college and said so plainly, describing her candidacy as a chance to put an alternative set of ideas before the country. Kalam won by a wide margin, but her campaign made her the sole opponent of one of the most popular presidential candidates in Indian history, and it returned her story to national attention ^[8].

Honors accumulated in her final decades. In 1998 the President of India, K.R. Narayanan, conferred on her the Padma Vibhushan, the country's second highest civilian award ^[1]. She continued to see patients at her Kanpur clinic well past her ninetieth year, a fact that journalists profiling her never failed to record with some astonishment ^[3].

She suffered a cardiac arrest on July 19, 2012 and died in a Kanpur hospital on July 23, 2012, at the age of 97. True to her convictions and her profession, she had willed her body to the city's medical college for research ^[6]. Tributes came from across the political spectrum, and Parliament paid homage to her as a freedom fighter.

Lakshmi and Prem Sahgal had two daughters. The elder, Subhashini Ali, named in honor of Subhas Chandra Bose, became a communist politician and trade unionist and served as a member of the Lok Sabha from Kanpur ^[7]. The younger, Anisa Puri, pursued a life outside politics. Through Subhashini's marriage to the filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, Lakshmi was the grandmother of the fashion designer Shaad Ali's family circle in the arts. Her sister, Mrinalini Sarabhai, was one of India's most celebrated classical dancers, which made the scientist Vikram Sarabhai, founder of India's space program, her brother-in-law ^[2].

Prem Sahgal, who managed a textile mill in Kanpur after independence, died in 1992. Those who knew Lakshmi Sahgal described a woman of brisk habits and little sentimentality about her own fame. She gave interviews readily about the INA years but insisted that her daily clinic work mattered as much as anything she had done in uniform ^[3].

Any honest account of Lakshmi Sahgal achievements has to hold two careers together: the soldier of 1943 to 1945 and the doctor of the following six decades. The Rani of Jhansi Regiment she commanded was a rare experiment in placing women in a fighting force, and historians of the INA treat it as an important episode in the history of Indian women's participation in public life ^[5]. Her ministerial post in the Azad Hind government gave her a claim to being among the first Indian women to hold cabinet rank.

The basic Lakshmi Sahgal facts, birth in Madras in 1914, command of a women's regiment, the Padma Vibhushan, a presidential campaign at 87, only sketch the outline. Writers of every Lakshmi Sahgal biography have noted the consistency beneath the varied roles: a belief that independence had to mean material improvement in ordinary lives, especially for women and the poor, and a refusal to retire from that work ^[6]. Her memoir, published as A Revolutionary Life, and the accounts of Rani of Jhansi veterans collected by later researchers keep the primary record available ^[9].

In Kanpur her name remains attached to the clinic she ran and to the memory of a doctor who charged what patients could pay. Nationally she is recalled every year on the anniversaries of the INA campaigns, and her image, in uniform beside Bose, appears in museums and school textbooks devoted to the independence movement ^[4].