Khurshedben Naoroji: The Soprano Who Took Gandhian Non-violence to Bandits in the North-West Frontier Province

There are women in Indian history who have disappeared without much being written about them. They played a role during India’s freedom movement, yet little is available in the archives. Khurshedben Naoroji (1894–1966), the granddaughter of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), was a trained soprano who left her career and chose a path most were afraid to venture down. She decided to try to persuade bandits to embrace the non-violence movement.Born into the family of Dadabhai, who was the first Asian to be elected to the British Parliament and one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, Khurshedben, also known as Khorshed or Khurshedbanoo, grew up in an elite Parsi household. According to the Menaka Archive website, historian Dinyar Patel has

stated that, “Khurshedben moved to Paris in her early twenties to study European classical music. Trained as a soprano, she attempted to notate traditional Indian music that had been transmitted through an oral tradition. Upon her return to Bombay in 1925, she was intent on opening an academy for Indian music.” She was lovingly called the “bulbul”, referring to a bird known for its cheerful, melodious song.It was during her time travelling through Europe that she came across Eva Palmer Sikelianos, an aristocrat from New York. They bonded over a shared love of music and even established a school of non-Western music in Athens, Greece. Khurshedben would wear saris and teach music. “As Sikelianos’s biographer Artemis Leontis notes, Khurshedben spoke wistfully about India and about joining Mahatma Gandhi’s movement for freedom from British colonial rule. When Sikelianos solicited her help for the first Delphic Festival, Khurshedben turned down the offer, instead returning to Bombay,” wrote Dinyar in an article published for the BBC.Her yearning for India brought her to the Sabarmati Ashram of Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarat. She encouraged the participation of women in the freedom struggle.As Dinyar writes, “For Khurshedben, this work soon shifted to an unusual location: the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP, now in Pakistan and called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). Deeply conservative and beset by tribal skirmishes and banditry, the region was about as distant from her Bombay (Mumbai) as was possible. Perhaps that is what drew her to the place.” She was often arrested by the British colonial authorities.She was given the task of fostering Hindu–Muslim unity in the area, but it proved extremely difficult. Muslim dacoits had terrorised Hindus and would also kidnap them. Even the police were afraid of them.Khurshedben decided to approach the bandits and encourage them to abandon violence and adopt Gandhian non-violence. Nobody could deter her, and she began walking around the NWFP in the late 1940s, speaking to locals. Instead of appealing only to the men, she also involved the women of the households and spoke about the evils of banditry. She was even nearly shot once, but eventually banditry declined.She also decided to go to Waziristan, where few dared to venture, to help secure the release of kidnapped Hindus. However, she was arrested before she could reach Waziristan. She was never allowed to return to the area, and after Partition, it became part of Pakistan.