Bhikaiji Cama

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Bhikaiji Cama bigraphy, stories - Indian activist

Bhikaiji Cama : biography

24 September 1861 – 13 August 1936

Bhikaiji Rustom CamaBhikhai– (with aspirated -kh-) is the name as it appears in the biographies. Another common form is Bhikai– (with unaspirated -k-), as it appears on the postage stamp. The name is also frequently misspelled ‘Bhikha-‘ (with missing -i-), which is a male name (unlike the feminine Bhikhai-). (24 September 1861 – 13 August 1936) was a prominent figure in the Indian independence movement.

Early life

Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama was born Bhikai Sorab Patel on 24 September 1861 in Bombay (now Mumbai) into a large, well-off Parsi family. Her parents, Sorabji Framji Patel and Jaijibai Sorabji Patel, were well-known in the city, where her father Sorabji—a lawyer by training and a merchant by profession—was an influential member of the Parsi community.

Like many Parsi girls of the time, Bhikhaiji attended Alexandra Native Girl’s English Institution.. Bhikhaiji was by all accounts a diligent, disciplined child with a flair for languages.

On 3 August 1885, she married Rustom Cama, a wealthy, pro-British lawyer who aspired to enter politics. It was not a happy marriage, and Bhikhaiji spent most of her time and energy in philanthropic activities and social work.

Legacy

Bikhaiji Cama bequeathed most of her personal assets to the Avabai Petit Orphanage for girls, which established a trust in her name. Rs. 54,000 (1936: £39,300; $157,200) to her family’s fire temple, the Framji Nusserwanjee Patel Agiary at Mazgaon, in South Bombay..

Several Indian cities have streets and places named after Bhikhaiji Cama, or Madame Cama as she is also known. On 26 January 1962, India’s 11th Republic Day, the Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department issued a commemorative stamp in her honour.

In 1997, the Indian Coast Guard commissioned a Priyadarshini-class fast patrol vessel ICGS Bikhaiji Cama after Bikhaiji Cama.

Following Cama’s 1907 Stuttgart address, the flag she raised there was smuggled into British India by Idulal Yagnik and is now on display at the Maratha and Kesari Library in Pune. In 2004, politicians of the BJP, India’s Hindu nationalist party, attempted to identify a later design (from the 1920s) as the flag Cama raised in Stuttgart.. The flag Cama raised – misrepresented as "original national Tricolour" – has an (Islamic) crescent and a (Hindu) sun, which the later design does not have.

Bhikaiji Cama is the subject of several biographies:

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Social life

In October 1896, the Bombay Presidency was hit first by famine, and shortly thereafter by bubonic plague. Bhikhaiji joined one of the many teams working out of Grant Medical College (which would subsequently become Haffkine’s plague vaccine research centre), in an effort to provide care for the afflicted, and (later) to inoculate the healthy. Cama subsequently contracted the plague herself, but survived. Severely weakened, she was sent to Britain for medical care in 1901.

She was preparing to return to India in 1908 when she came in contact with Shyamji Krishna Varma, who was well known in London’s Indian community for fiery nationalist speeches he gave in Hyde Park. Through him, she met Dadabhai Naoroji, then president of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, and for whom she came to work as private secretary. Together with Naoroji and Singh Rewabhai Rana, Cama supported the founding of Varma’s Indian Home Rule Society in February 1905. In London, she was told that her return to India would be prevented unless she would sign a statement promising not to participate in nationalist activities. She refused.

That same year Cama relocated to Paris, where—together with Singh Rewabhai Rana and Munchershah Burjorji Godrej—she co-founded the Paris Indian Society. Together with other notable members of the movement for Indian sovereignty living in exile, Cama wrote, published (in Holland and Switzerland) and distributed revolutionary literature for the movement, including Bande Mataram (founded in response to the Crown ban on the poem Vande Mataram) and later Madan’s Talwar (in response to the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra).. These weeklies were smuggled into India through the French colony of Pondichéry on the subcontinent’s south-east coast.