Word: mahatmas
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...movement is the widowed Rani of Jhansi, who joined the 1857-1858 Sepoy Rebellion against British rule. Leading her small personal army, she captured a British fort and defended it until she was cut down in battle by a British hussar. The big change in feminine status came with Mahatma Gandhi, who urged women of every caste to cast aside convention and share equally with men in India's struggle for independence. Thousands heeded his call, and as India won freedom, so did many of its women. A woman served as Shastri's Health Minister, and will probably stay...
...Monkey Brigade. Judged by that criterion, Indira bodes well indeed for India. "My public life," she declares, "began when I was three." Her mother, a frail Kashmiri, was a Congress Party leader in Indira's native city, Allahabad. Father was heir apparent to Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the independence movement. Grandfather was a wealthy lawyer and an early member of the Congress movement. The Nehrus' mansion was a center for illegal Congress Party gatherings. Recalls Indira: "The most important meetings were on our lawn." Reprisals by India's British rulers were harsh, and often Indira watched one or both...
...made for a lonely childhood. "I have no recollection of games or playing with other children," she recalls. "My favorite occupation was to stand on a high table with the servants gathered around me and deliver thunderous political speeches." She taught her dolls to march in Mahatma Gandhi's protest demonstrations. Then other dolls would race up and lead the demonstrators off to jail. One of the callers who sometimes helped the lonely little girl stage the doll demonstrations was a frail Congress Party worker, Lal Bahadur Shastri...
...forced Indira to break off her studies and return home in 1941. She plunged at once into her country's increasingly bloody battle for independence. Showing some independence of her own, she defied her father and married an obscure Parsi lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma). Within a few months Feroze and his bride were both in British prisons on charges of subversion. Much like her dolls, Indira had been arrested while leading a parade of women demonstrators down the main streets of Allahabad...
...arid southwest. The Communists had won elections for state officers and had been in power for 27 months when Indira popped in for a visit in 1959. She was horrified. What seems to have upset her most were new schoolbooks that depicted Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, instead of Mahatma Gandhi, as the true heroes of the oppressed. "Everything the Communists are doing is wrong," she cried as she hurried back to Delhi and forced the hesitant central government to oust Kerala's Red rulers and place the state under federal supervision...