Meet Khurshedben Naoroji, the remarkable singer who traded in her life as a classic soprano to spread the message of nonviolence to bandits and kidnappers. Her story is one of courage and conviction, yet it remains largely unknown in India, where she hailed from. While in most countries, a woman of her stature would be celebrated as an elite and sophisticated figure, Naoroji's decision to devote her life to preaching nonviolence to those who were deemed as outcasts deserves significant attention. A true trailblazer, her legacy lives on as a testament to the power of compassion and empathy, even in the most dire of circumstances.
The historian dinyar patel relates the story of her forgotten her.
the writer Ramachandra Guha once described the world of Indian biography as "a naked closet". Interestingly, most of India's academics were about life stories.
A new book, with contributions from many of Guha students and colleagues, helps fill these empty shelves with some remarkable characters.
one of them is Khurshedben Naoroji, who was born in 1894 in an elite Parsi family. Ella's grandfather, Dadabhai Naoroji, was the first nationalist leader of India and the first Indian to serve in the British Parliament.
In the youth of it, Khurshedben lived in the most elegant quarters of Bombay (now Mumbai) and became a classic soprano performed. Family and friends of her nicknamed it "Bul" or Nightingale. Image of the first PM Jawaharlal Nehru attended a Khurshedben concert in Bombay (now Mumbai)
At the beginning of the 1920s, he moved to Paris to study Music, but it was culturally drifted in Europe until it crossed roads with another expatriate woman, Eva Palmer Sikelians.
Sikelianos, an aristocrat of New York, had moved to Athens, where he became one of the main architects of a Renaissance of classical Greek culture.
The conversations of it over Greek and Indian musical traditions gave rise to the creation of a non-Western Music School in Athens.
Khurshedben left the classical music behind Paris and flourished in Greece, donating Indian Saris and improvised concerts of Indian music.
Notably, "Greece mother", since she referred to the country, she helped forward her energies to Indian mother. As the biographer of Skelian biographer, Leontis, Khurshedben, spoke with nostalgia about India and by joining the MAHATMA Gandhi movement for the freedom of the British colonial rule. When Sikelians asked her for the help of her for the first Delphic festival, Khurshedben rejected the offer, at the place of her returning to Bombay.
image copyrightkontinos psachos house file, folklimage hellenic captionkhurshedben, center-left in a dark dress, on a function in Germany 1924
Soon, he moved to the ashram of Gandhi Sabarmati in Gujarat, where he encouraged Gandhi to expand the participation of women in nationalist activities. Gandhian's activism, she told a newspaper, allowed "the great awakening of women", and women "are not going to stop their work so well started."
For Khurshedben, this work soon changed to an unusual location: the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP, now in Pakistan and called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). Deeply conservative and harassed by tribal scrimmages and bandidons, the region was so distant from its Bombaya as possible.
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