Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

Chattopadhyay was born in Mangalore, in present-day Karnataka, into a Saraswat Brahmin family; her father was a district collector. She studied at Queen Mary's College, Chennai, and later took a diploma in sociology at Bedford College, University of London. In 1923 she married the poet and playwright Harindranath Chattopadhyay; the marriage ended in 1955.

Drawn into the freedom movement by Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement in 1923, Chattopadhyay joined the Seva Dal and went on to lead its women's section. In 1926 she stood for the Madras Provincial Legislative Assembly, becoming the first woman in India to contest a legislative seat, and lost by a narrow margin. She took part in the Salt Satyagraha of 1930. She was the first organising secretary of the All India Women's Conference in 1927.

She acted in the Kannada film Vasantsena (1930) and the Hindi film Tansen (1943), and in 1944 established the Indian National Theatre in Bombay. After Partition she founded the Indian Cooperative Union and helped establish the township of Faridabad, which resettled tens of thousands of refugees.

Chattopadhyay was a founding member and the first chairperson of the All India Handicrafts Board, set up in 1952, and co-founded the World Crafts Council in 1964, serving as the first president of its Asia Pacific region. The Crafts Council of India was created in the same year. She also chaired the National School of Drama and headed the Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Chattopadhyay was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1955 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1987. She received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 1966, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship (Ratna Sadasya) in 1974, a UNESCO award for the promotion of handicrafts in 1977, and the Charles Eames Award in 1988.[2][3][4]