Sarla Thakral

Sarla Thakral was born in 1914 in Delhi, then the newly designated capital of British India ^[1]. She grew up in a period when public life for Indian women was tightly circumscribed, and when aviation itself was barely two decades old anywhere in the world. Details of her childhood are sparse in the published record, but accounts of her life agree that she was raised in an urban, educated milieu that would later prove receptive, in an unusual way, to her ambitions in the air ^[2].

At the age of sixteen she was married to P. D. Sharma, a young man from a Lahore family with a remarkable connection to flying: the household counted several licensed pilots among its members ^[1]. Sharma himself held an airmail pilot's licence and flew routes between Karachi and Lahore, making him one of the early Indians to carry mail by air ^[3]. Rather than closing off her horizons, the marriage opened them. Her husband and her father-in-law encouraged her to train as a pilot at a time when the idea of an Indian woman at the controls of an aircraft struck most observers as unthinkable ^[2].

The family's support mattered in practical terms as well as emotional ones. Flying lessons were expensive, flying clubs were social institutions dominated by British officers and wealthy Indian men, and a young married woman needed sponsors inside that world. The Sharma family provided them, and Sarla began instruction at the Lahore Flying Club in the mid 1930s ^[1].

In 1936, at 21 years of age, Sarla Thakral flew solo in a de Havilland Gypsy Moth, a two-seat biplane widely used for training across the British Empire ^[1]. With that flight she earned her initial aviation licence and became the first Indian woman to pilot an aircraft ^[2]. Photographs from the period show her seated in the open cockpit dressed in a sari, an image that later became one of the most recognisable pictures in the history of Indian aviation ^[3].

The flight was more than a personal milestone. Indian civil aviation was still in its infancy: J. R. D. Tata had flown the country's first commercial airmail service only four years earlier, in 1932, and the flying clubs of Karachi, Lahore, Delhi, and Bombay were the entire training infrastructure of the subcontinent ^[4]. Within that small world, a woman qualifying as a pilot was national news, and her achievement was reported and remembered as a first for Indian women rather than merely a club record ^[2].

By this time she was also a mother, having had a daughter before she qualified, which made the accomplishment all the more striking to contemporaries ^[3]. She continued to fly after gaining her licence, building up her hours with the aim of advancing further in a field that had never before admitted an Indian woman at any level.

Among the most frequently cited Sarla Thakral facts is that she went on to accumulate roughly one thousand hours of flying time, on the strength of which she obtained her A licence, the standard private pilot qualification of the era ^[1]. She was the first Indian woman to hold it ^[2]. Her ambition did not stop there. She began preparing for the B licence, the commercial qualification that would have allowed her to fly professionally, a goal no Indian woman had yet attempted ^[3].

Two events ended that plan. In 1939 her husband P. D. Sharma was killed in an aircraft crash, leaving her a widow at 24 with young children ^[1]. Soon afterward the Second World War broke out, civil flying training across British India was suspended, and the route to a commercial licence closed entirely ^[2]. She reportedly considered other paths connected to aviation, but wartime conditions and her responsibilities as a young widowed mother made continued flying impossible ^[3].

Her record nonetheless stood. Any account of Sarla Thakral achievements begins with the 1936 solo flight and the A licence, but the larger point is what those milestones represented: proof, offered decades before Indian women entered military and commercial cockpits in numbers, that the barrier was social rather than practical. Later generations of Indian women pilots, from the first female commercial captains of the 1980s to the Indian Air Force fighter pilots commissioned in 2016, have regularly been described in the Indian press as her successors ^[4].

Grounded by war and widowhood, Sarla turned to a talent she had carried alongside flying. She enrolled at the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, one of the leading art institutions of undivided India, and earned a diploma in fine arts ^[1]. The training was formal and rigorous, covering drawing and painting, and it gave her a livelihood independent of the aviation world she had been forced to leave ^[2].

The Partition of 1947 uprooted her again. Lahore fell within the new state of Pakistan, and like millions of Punjabi Hindus she moved across the new border, settling in Delhi with her two daughters ^[1]. In 1948 she married R. P. Thakral, taking the surname by which she is remembered ^[3].

In Delhi she built a durable career in the applied arts. She painted, designed costume jewellery, and produced block-printed textiles, and over the following decades her design work found steady commercial demand ^[2]. Friends and family knew her as Mati. The woman who had once been photographed in a biplane cockpit spent the second half of her working life at a workbench and an easel, and by her own account found genuine satisfaction there ^[3].

Sarla Thakral lived in Delhi for the rest of her long life, largely out of the public eye for decades while independent India's aviation industry grew up around her early example ^[1]. From the 1990s onward, as Indian journalism and aviation institutions began recovering the history of the country's flying pioneers, she was interviewed and honoured as the first Indian woman to fly ^[2]. In these late interviews she spoke plainly about her training at Lahore, the loss of her first husband, and the practical decisions that followed, without dramatising any of it ^[3].

She remained active and articulate into her nineties, still associated with her design work and remembered at aviation commemorations. She died in New Delhi on March 15, 2008, at the age of 93 ^[1]. Obituaries in the Indian press recorded her as a pathbreaker whose 1936 flight had opened a door that history then held shut for a generation ^[2].

Interest in Sarla Thakral's biography has grown steadily since her death, driven partly by the visibility of Indian women in aviation today. India now has one of the highest proportions of female airline pilots in the world, a statistic that commentators regularly trace back to the precedent she set in 1936 ^[1]. Her sari-clad cockpit photograph circulates widely in Indian schoolbooks, museum displays, and social media each year on anniversaries connected to her life ^[2].

On August 8, 2021, Google marked her 107th birth anniversary with a commemorative Doodle, introducing her story to a global audience and prompting a fresh wave of profiles in Indian and international outlets ^[3]. The Doodle, illustrated by the Delhi based artist Vrinda Zaveri, depicted her beside a Gypsy Moth in flight ^[3].

Who was Sarla Thakral, finally? A pilot for only a few years, a painter and designer for many more, and for nearly a century a witness to India's transformation. Her importance rests not on the length of her flying career but on its timing: she demonstrated, in colonial India and at 21, that an Indian woman could command an aircraft, and she did so with a matter-of-factness that later pioneers found instructive ^[4]. Her two careers, in the air and in art, together make her one of the more quietly remarkable Indian lives of the twentieth century ^[2].