Google marked the 117th birth anniversary of freedom fighter and poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan on Monday with a striking doodle on its homepage.
Illustrated by New Zealand-based artist Prabha Mallya, the doodle shows Chauhan dressed in a saree and sitting with a pen and paper. The background depicts a scene from her poem ‘Jhansi ki Rani’, one of the most iconic poems in Hindi literature, on one side and freedom fighters on the other.
In a statement, Google described Chauhan as a “trailblazing writer and freedom fighter” who “rose to national prominence during a male-dominated era of literature”.
Her evocative nationalist poem “Jhansi ki Rani” is widely regarded as one of the most recited poems in Hindi literature.
On this day in 1904, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan was born in the Indian village of Nihalpur. She was known to write constantly, even in the horse cart on the way to school, and her first poem was published at just nine years old. The call for Indian independence reached its height during her early adulthood. As a participant in the Indian Nationalist Movement, she used her poetry to call others to fight for their nation’s sovereignty.
Chauhan’s poetry and prose primarily centered around the hardships that Indian women overcame, such as gender and caste discrimination. Her poetry remained uniquely underscored by her resolute nationalism. In 1923, Chauhan’s unyielding activism led her to become the first woman satyagrahi, a member of the Indian collective of nonviolent anti-colonialists to be arrested in the struggle for national liberation. She continued to make revolutionary statements in the fight for freedom both on and off the page into the 1940s, publishing a total of 88 poems and 46 short stories.
