Malati Choudhury

Malati Devi Choudhury (née Sen) (26 July 1904– 15 March 1998) was an Indian civil rights and freedom activist and Gandhian.

She was born in 1904 in an upper middle class Brahmo family.

She was the daughter of Barrister Kumud Nath Sen, whom she had lost when she was only two and a half years old, and Snehalata Sen, who brought her up.

Malati's family originally belonged to brahmin family of Kamarakhanda in Bikrampur, Dhaka, (now in Bangladesh), but her family members had settled in Simultala, Bihar.

Her maternal grandfather was Behari Lal Gupta, ICS, who became the Dewan of Baroda.

Her first cousins on her mother's side of the family were Ranajit Gupta, ICS, a former Chief Secretary of West Bengal, and Indrajit Gupta, the famous parliamentarian and former Home Minister of India.

Here eldest brother, P. K. Sen Gupta, a former Income Tax Commissioner, belonged to the Indian Revenue Service, and another brother, K. P. Sen, a former Postmaster General, was from the Indian Postal Service.

Being the youngest child of her parents, she was a darling of all her brothers and sister.

Her mother Snehalata was a writer in her own right, and had translated some works of Tagore, as is seen from her book Jugalanjali.

Malati Choudhury adopted to a completely different life style once she joined Rabindranath Tagore's Vishva-Bharati.

In an article entitled 'Reminiscences of Santiniketan', her mother had written: "Malati was very happy and benefited much from her residence at Viswa-Bharati as a student. The personal influence of Gurudev and his teachings, his patriotism and idealism, have influenced and guided Malati throughout her life."

She was fortunate enough to have been deeply influenced by both Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi.

Malati came to Santiniketan in 1921, when she was only sixteen years old, and lived there for a little more than six years.

In those days Santiniketan was small and beautiful.

There were nine girls of her age living in the hostel called Notun Bari (New House).

They were Manjushree, Surekha (who later on became her sister-in-law), Eva, Satyabati, Latika, Saraju, Tapasi, Amita (mother of Professor Amartya Sen) and herself.

They attended classes in the open under trees, learnt embroidery, handicrafts, music, dancing, painting and gardening.

Leonard Knight Elmhirst, an Englishman, was in charge of the Agricultural Institute at Surul in Sriniketan, and he used to encourage them to learn gardening.

Mr. Pearson, another Englishman, also taught them.

It was he who inspired Malati to work for the tribals.

Gurudev used to take classes on Balaka, when he read poems from his book 'Balaka', and explained the significance of the poems to them.

Miss Stella Kramisch, who came to India on Gurudev's invitation, taught them the principles of Indian Art and dancing.

Malati and her friends spent very happy days at Santiniketan.

As a young student there, she was quite famous for her outgoing personality, taking active part in Gurudev's dance dramas and music sessions, as well as being the source of innocent mischiefs in the community.

At this time, a young man, Nabakrushna Choudhuri, from a well known family of Orissa, came to Santiniketan as a student.

He came from Sabarmati Ashram at the instance of the Mahatma.

He had as batchmates G. Ramachandran, B. Gopala Reddy, and Syed Mujtaba Ali.

Malati got engaged to and later married Nabakrushna Choudhuri, who later became the Chief Minister of Orissa and the two left Santiniketan in 1927.This proved to be a turning point in her life.

After her marriage, Orissa became her home and her area of activities.

The Chaudhuris settled in a small village named Anakhia, now in Jagatsinghpur District of Orissa, where her husband started improved sugarcane cultivation.

Apart from agriculture, establishing rapport with the surrounding villages was their main concern.

In their concept and scheme of rural reconstruction, people are at the center of activities.

Here commitment to the teachings of Tagore was evident in her acceptance speech on receiving the Tagore Literacy Award given by the Indian Adult Education Association in 1995.

She said: "I feel doubly honoured to receive the Award, which is named after Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore, to commemorate his memorable achievements in bringing a synthesis among culture, music and aesthetics in evolving and practising his unique philosophy and principles of education. Like Rousseau, Gurudev did not want purposefulness, belonging to the adult mind, to be forced upon the children in school. He believed that once purposefulness was introduced, it brought torture to the child, as it went against the purpose of nature. According to Tagore, nature was the greatest of all teachers for the child. He had tremendous faith in the educational value of natural objects. Natural events like the beautiful sunrise and sunset, blossoming of flowers and singing of birds are the learning resources for children possessing the natural gift of learning things very easily. He had a great faith in the children’s natural way of learning.

He did not insist on forced mental feeding as a result of which lessons become a form of torture.

Gurudev considered artificial feeding of the mind to be of man’s most cruel and wasteful mistakes.

According to him, the greatest possible gift for children was their own freedom to grow.

Tagore also wanted the children to have another kind of freedom – the freedom of sympathy with all humanity, a freedom from all national and racial prejudices.

Thus, his philosophy of education is based on the ideal of the spiritual unity of all races." She had also said, " Rabindranath was always following the ideal to realize, in and through education, the essential unity of man.

The way in which he achieved that unity gave him a deep insight into the object of education and its problems." It was the former at whose feet she learnt and acquired some rare values and principles of education, development, art and culture, which had been the guiding principles in her life; and it was the latter who cast a magic spell on her and at whose instance she plunged herself into the freedom struggle.