Perin Naoroji Captain - A Life Dedicated to India's Freedom

Family Background
Perin Naoroji Captain was the granddaughter of the scholar-politician Dadabhai Naoroji, the Grand Old Man of India. He was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, and thrice its president. Naoroji was a British MP as a member of the House of Commons. 

Perin was born at Mandvi in Kutch, Gujarat on 12 October 1888. Her father Ardeshir was a doctor and Dadabhai Naoroji’s son. He died when she was yet five years old. Perin came from a large family of eight children, many of whom took up the nationalist cause. She married the eminent lawyer DS Captain in 1925. The couple did not have children. 

Perin Naoroji Captain

The Beginnings 

As a student at Sorbonne in Paris Perin met the nationalist Bhikaiji Cama who lived there in self-exile, and was a close associate of VD Savarkar. At the time Cama was deeply involved in trying for the release of Savarkar who was in prison at London for defying the British. Perin became a close friend of Kamala Nehru there. 

Later Perin and Savarkar attended the first Egyptian National Congress at Brussels. In London Perin and her sister Gosi worked with Polish organisations against Czarist Russia and learnt from a Polish revolutionary to use firearms and assemble bombs. This activity brought her under surveillance by the British, but that did not deter her. It is interesting that despite this early exposure to how violence was being used in other parts of the world Perin, Gosi and another sister Nurgis (the Captain sisters who married three brothers) turned completely to non-violence as the path to follow under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi.

In 1911 Perin returned to India. She met Mahatma Gandhi in 1915 and became convinced that his approach to securing India’s freedom from British rule was the right one. From 1920 she took to wearing khadi and began working for the nationalist cause in right earnest. In 1921 she was one of a group that established the Rashtriya Stree Sabha, a nationalist wormen’s organisation run on Gandhian principles.  

Public Life

The Civil Disobedience Movement

The Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930 was a watershed moment in the history of the struggle for freedom in India. This movement was the method that the Indian National Congress decided was the means to attain Purna Swaraj (complete independence). The movement spread all over India. In Bengal Matangini Hazra was one of the prominent activists.

Perin Captain’s leadership qualities saw her playing an active role in many other areas, but the Civil Disobedience Movement was a defining episode in her public life.

Perin Captain addressing a political meeting on Chowpatty Beach in Bombay, 1930 Source: Women of India, Tara Ali Baig

Perin had had a long association of social and political work with stalwarts working in the field, well before the call for Civil Disobedience by Gandhi. Although from an influential family and well known to the leading lights of the era, Perin was a Congress worker who served the country by taking part in the big issues of the day. She was a hands-on political worker, did not shy away from the hurly-burly of public engagement and underwent multiple jail terms like most national leaders at the time.

During the Civil Disobedience Movement Perin with several other women under Desh Sevika Sangh played a prominent role in going from shop to shop in Bombay asking the owners not to sell imported cloth. Thus far the colonizers had crippled Indian weavers and the textile segment by exporting raw cotton and importing textiles into India. This boycott of British textiles in India was a direct hit at manufactured goods from Britain. The group also made continuous appeals to shoppers to participate in the Swadeshi movement and not buy imported fabric. In the first ten months of 1930 as many as 17,000 women were convicted for this activity. Closing shops was unlawful, and now shopkeepers were also arrested along with the women for boycott of foreign goods.

Her Arrest and its Aftermath

3rd July 1930 was the fourth day of Boycott Week in Bombay. There were crowds on the streets shouting boycott slogans, lorryloads of volunteers passing around flags and pamphlets to boycott British goods, house to house collection of Swadeshi pledges (2,00,000 pledges had been signed thus far). Mahatma Gandhi sent Perin a cable to “alert Congress to scrupulously avoid all violence, direct indirect passive or active” by any of the picketers. Perin replied that the instruction would be carried out. The Bombay Chronicle of 4 July 1930 reported the arrest of Perin that morning as she was setting out to the Congress office for a day’s work. She ‘cheerfully submitted to the officers’ who came to her home. 

Once the news of her arrest spread, the Municipal Corporation of Bombay adjourned, the Sugar Merchants’ Association passed an unanimous resolution to boycott British refined sugar,  and other merchant associations went with the boycott. 

The Municipal Corporation of Bombay passed a resolution that “Mrs. Captain was an accomplished lady and was a grand-daughter of the late Dadabhai Naoroji popularly known as the Grand Old Man of India. Mrs. Captain was a lady of sound and sober views and took her education in England. It was Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji who first started the idea of swaraj for India and Mrs. Captain took her education in England under the guidance of her revered grandfather. Self sacrifice and service were the mottos of her life and she was acting upto her honest conviction with courage.” 

When Perin and other women activists were released from prison, a mile long chain of about 5,000 women led by Sevikas welcomed them back. There were crowds of women reportedly 10,000 strong at both ends of the parade. Such active participation of women in the freedom struggle was in part possible because of the example and the leadership of Perin and her compatriots.  

The struggle for freedom - The Implications for women

The wholehearted participation of women gave as much a fillip to the women’s emancipation movement as it did to the struggle for freedom. The women volunteers in the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements had a huge impact on the general perception about women’s capabilities. The menfolk were in prison so the women took charge. Women from the most aristocratic and orthodox families to the poorest participated. They took not just the British administration but even their own menfolk by surprise. This participation opened up avenues for social and political rights for women. 

As the Congress party was in the forefront of the struggle, Perin and her sisters were in the thick of all party activities in Bombay (now Mumbai). Perin became the first woman president of the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee in 1932. 

For better clarity of purpose and organisation, many smaller bodies were merged into the Gandhi Seva Sena of which Perin became the Honorary General Secretary, a post she held until her death. The Gandhi Seva Sena promoted khadi by selling rural and khadi products from their stores. One store is still in business in Mumbai selling herbal cosmetics, oil and pulses.

Khadi, also known as khaddar, was originally from Eastern India but eventually was woven by people from all over the country. It is handwoven cloth made of natural fibre, mainly cotton, but also to a lesser degree of silk and wool. It is traditionally woven with the spinning wheel, the charkha. During the freedom movement Khadi became the symbol of India’s resistance to imported cloth and of self-reliance. Today Khadi has had a rejuvenation and is also used by fashion designers in high-end clothing. 

Greater Responsibility

In 1937 the Congress Party came to power in eleven provinces in the provincial elections held under the Government of India Act 1935. These were Madras, The Central Provinces, Sindh, Punjab, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, NWFP, Assam, Bombay Presidency and United Provinces. This development raised expectations of a greater role for the party in the future and the need to prepare for it. The Indian National Congress formed a National Planning Committee with Jawaharlal Nehru as Chairman. Perin was member of the sub-committee ‘Women’s Role in a Planned Economy’ with several others who were active in the freedom movement and in women’s associations. The committee  debated and planned policy for issues such as women’s social, economic and political status, education, marriage, maternity and succession. The committee’s report was absolutely clear that the position of women should be on an equal footing to that of men in the India of the future. 

After India’s Independence

Perin was appointed Chief Commissioner of Bharat Guides and had a hand in voluntary social welfare work among young girls. She was honoured with the Padma Sri in 1954, the first batch of civil awards presented in independent India. 

Perin Naoroji Captain died in Jahangir Nursing Home, Pune in 1958.

Reference 

1. Gandhi, Women and the National Movement 1920-47 - Anup Taneja

2. Women in Satyagraha - Aparna Basu

3. Gandhi’s Passion. The life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi - Stanley Wolpert

4. The Bombay Chronicle, 4 July 1930

5. https://dinyarpatel.com/naoroji/family/