Usha Mehta

Usha Mehta was born on March 25, 1920, in the village of Saras in the Surat district of Gujarat, then part of the Bombay Presidency of British India ^[1]. Her father, Hariprasad Mehta, served as a judge under the colonial administration, a position that initially made open political activity awkward for the family. Even so, the nationalist ferment of Gujarat in the 1920s reached her early. She saw Mahatma Gandhi for the first time as a small child at his ashram, an encounter she later described as the beginning of a lifelong devotion ^[2].

Her first act of protest came at the age of eight. In 1928 she joined children marching against the Simon Commission, the all-British body sent to review constitutional arrangements in India, shouting the slogan 'Simon Go Back' alongside other young demonstrators in Gujarat ^[1]. She also took part in early morning protest marches and in picketing shops that sold foreign cloth and liquor, activities the Congress movement encouraged even among schoolchildren ^[2].

After her father retired from judicial service around 1930, the family moved to Bombay and the constraint on political involvement eased. Usha continued her education in the city, enrolling at Wilson College, where she completed a degree in philosophy in 1939 with first class results ^[1]. She began studying law, but the events of 1942 interrupted that plan permanently.

By the early 1940s Mehta belonged to a generation of students in Bombay who had grown up inside the national movement and were impatient for its climax. The moment arrived on August 8, 1942, when the All India Congress Committee, meeting at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, passed the Quit India resolution demanding an immediate British withdrawal. Gandhi gave the crowd his famous mantra, 'Do or Die'. Within hours the colonial government arrested Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and virtually the entire Congress leadership ^[3].

With the leaders in prison, censorship tightened over newspapers and the state-controlled radio carried only the official version of events. Mehta and a small circle of associates concluded that the movement needed its own voice, one the government could not easily seize. A transmitter, they reasoned, could reach people across the country in a way that leaflets smuggled past the police never could ^[3].

The group that formed around this idea included Vithalbhai Jhaveri, Chandrakant Jhaveri, and Babubhai Thakkar, with technical equipment supplied by Nanak Motwani of Chicago Radio, a Bombay firm ^[1]. Mehta, then twenty-two, became the organizing centre of the operation and one of its principal announcers. It was this decision, taken by a philosophy graduate with no broadcasting experience, that turned her into a national figure.

The underground station went on air on August 14, 1942, less than a week after the mass arrests ^[1]. Listeners tuning to the shortwave band heard a young woman announce: 'This is the Congress Radio calling on 42.34 meters from somewhere in India.' The deliberately vague sign-off was a taunt to the police as much as a security measure. Broadcasts went out in Hindustani and English, usually in the evening, carrying news of protests, strikes, and government repression that the censored press could not print ^[3].

The station transmitted recorded messages from leaders still at liberty, including material connected with the socialist organizers Ram Manohar Lohia and Achyut Patwardhan, who were coordinating the underground phase of the movement ^[4]. It reported events such as disturbances in different provinces and countered official communiqués with the nationalist account. For listeners in a country where the Congress had been driven from public life overnight, the voice on 42.34 meters was proof that the movement survived ^[3].

Staying on air required constant movement. The operators shifted the transmitter between flats and buildings across Bombay to stay ahead of police direction-finding vans, sometimes relocating within days ^[1]. The improvised network held out for nearly three months. On November 12, 1942, acting on information supplied by a technician who had betrayed the group, police raided the station while it was broadcasting and arrested Mehta and her colleagues ^[4]. The Congress Radio fell silent, but its brief run had already entered the folklore of the freedom struggle. Among the essential Usha Mehta facts, this seventy-odd day broadcast operation remains the defining episode.

After her arrest Mehta faced months of interrogation. She later recalled that the Criminal Investigation Department questioned her at length and offered inducements, including the prospect of study abroad, in exchange for information about her associates; she refused to give evidence against anyone ^[2]. Tried with her fellow organizers, she was sentenced to imprisonment and spent the following years in jail, much of it in Yerwada prison near Poona, where her health suffered badly ^[1].

She was released in March 1946, as the interim arrangements that preceded independence took shape and political prisoners came out of the jails. Her return to Bombay was greeted with public celebration, and Congress leaders acknowledged the radio operation as one of the boldest ventures of the 1942 movement ^[2]. Independence arrived on August 15, 1947, five years almost to the day after her first broadcast.

Unlike many veterans of the struggle, Mehta did not convert her fame into a political career. She declined the path of electoral office and government position that lay open to prominent freedom fighters, choosing instead to return to study. That choice shaped the entire second half of the Usha Mehta biography: the activist became a scholar.

Mehta resumed her education at the University of Bombay, completing a master's degree and then a doctorate. Her PhD examined the social and political thought of Mahatma Gandhi, joining her academic training in philosophy to the cause she had served in the streets ^[1]. She joined the university as a lecturer in civics and politics and rose through the ranks to professor, eventually heading the Department of Civics and Politics before her retirement in 1980 ^[5].

As a teacher she was known for accessibility and for insisting that Gandhian ideas be treated as a living political philosophy rather than a museum piece. She wrote and edited numerous works on Gandhi, on Indian government and politics, and on the position of women, including studies of Gandhi's contribution to women's emancipation ^[5]. Her scholarship kept her in demand at conferences in India and abroad as an authority on nonviolence.

Her institutional commitments matched her writing. She served for decades with the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, the national Gandhi memorial trust, and became president of its Bombay branch, guiding Mani Bhavan, the house in Bombay where Gandhi had stayed during his visits to the city, as a museum and study centre ^[2]. Colleagues noted that she lived with conspicuous simplicity, wearing khadi and keeping few possessions, in line with the discipline she had adopted as a young Gandhian ^[6].

Mehta never married, having resolved early that family life could not be combined with the demands she placed on herself as an activist and teacher ^[6]. She remained publicly active into old age, speaking at commemorations of the freedom movement and pressing younger audiences not to reduce independence to an annual ritual. In interviews given around the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1997, she reflected candidly on both the achievements and the disappointments of the postcolonial decades ^[2].

Recognition came steadily. In 1998 the Government of India conferred on her the Padma Vibhushan, the nation's second highest civilian award, honouring both her role in 1942 and her long service to Gandhian institutions and scholarship ^[7]. Among the Usha Mehta achievements celebrated at the time, the citation of the Congress Radio episode stood first, but her decades of teaching had touched thousands of students in Bombay.

In August 2000 she travelled to New Delhi to take part in a function marking the anniversary of the Quit India Movement, the cause with which her name was permanently linked. She fell ill during the visit and died in New Delhi on August 11, 2000, at the age of eighty ^[6]. Tributes came from across the political spectrum, remembering a woman who had risked her life at twenty-two and asked for nothing afterwards.

Mehta's place in the history of Indian broadcasting is unusual: she is remembered not for building an institution but for defying one. The Congress Radio demonstrated that the airwaves could serve an anticolonial public even under wartime censorship, and historians of the 1942 movement treat the station as a striking example of the underground networks that kept resistance alive after the leadership was jailed ^[4]. Usha Thakkar's book length study of the episode, published in 2021, drew on trial records and interviews to reconstruct the operation in detail ^[1].

Her memory has also reached popular culture. The 2024 Hindi film Ae Watan Mere Watan dramatized the story of the secret radio, introducing her name to audiences born long after independence ^[8]. Mani Bhavan in Mumbai, the Gandhi museum she helped sustain for decades, continues to receive visitors and researchers, and her writings on Gandhian thought remain in use in Indian universities ^[5].

For students who ask what is Usha Mehta famous for, the answer runs in two registers. There is the young woman announcing freedom's news from somewhere in India while police vans hunted the signal. And there is the professor who spent half a century arguing that the ideas behind that broadcast, nonviolence, self-discipline, and service, still had work to do in a free country ^[2].