Google Doodle on Monday honours freedom fighter and poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan on her 117th birth anniversary. The illustration on the search engine’s homepage is created by New Zealand-based artist Prabha Mallya and 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”.

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“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,” Google said.

Who was Subhadra Kumari Chauhan?

Coming from Uttar Pradesh’s Nihalpur village in Allahabad District, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan was the first woman Satyagrahi to court arrest in Nagpur and was jailed twice for her involvement in protests against the British rule in 1923 and 1942. She married Thakur Lakshman Singh Chauhan of Khandwa in 1919 when she was sixteen with whom she had five children. 

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Subhadra Kumari Chauhan and her husband joined Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921. Chauhan then served as a member of the legislative assembly of the state.

She authored a number of popular works in Hindi poetry. Her poem on Rani Lakshmibai titled ‘Jhansi ki Rani’ is one of the most recited and sung poems in Hindi literature. Her poetry and prose primarily focused on hardships that the Indian women overcame such as gender and caste discrimination.

She died in 1948 in a car accident near Seoni MP on her way back to Jabalpur from Nagpur.

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“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,” Google said.

As part of her contribution to the freedom struggle, Chauhan continued to make revolutionary statements on and off the page and she published a total of 88 poems and 46 short stories.