Madam Bhikaiji Cama

01Plague and exile

Bhikaiji Patel was born in Bombay into a wealthy Parsi family and married the lawyer Rustom Cama in 1885. When bubonic plague struck Bombay in 1896 she worked among the sick and caught it herself. Sent to Europe in 1902 to recover, she was barred from coming home unless she gave up politics, which she would not do. In London she joined Dadabhai Naoroji, and then Shyamji Krishna Varma’s India House circle with Savarkar. From 1909 she lived in Paris, printing the paper Bande Mataram and smuggling it and revolvers into India.

02Stuttgart, 22 August 1907

At the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart she rose to speak of famine and British rule in India and unfurled a flag of three bands, green, saffron and red, with eight lotuses for the provinces, the sun and the crescent moon, and Vande Mataram written across the middle in Devanagari. She asked the delegates to stand and salute it. That flag, carried back to India, is kept at the Kesari Maratha library in Pune. After the First World War the French held her under watch. She came home only in 1935, old and ill, and died in Bombay in 1936.

Place · Old town on the Mula–Mutha; resettled by Shahaji and Jijabai in the 1630s; Peshwa capital from 1730PuneThe town where Shivaji grew up under Jijabai’s eye, and for nearly a century the seat of the Peshwas, from which Maratha armies rode to Attock and Bengal. Later it became the workshop of Tilak, Agarkar and the Deccan Education Society.Read →