SOFIA KHAN By Anil Nauriya I was delighted to see that the late Usha Mehta of 1942 fame has

left us an account of Sofia Khan (nee Somji) a prominent and very popular figure in the Indian freedom struggle in Bombay. Almost everyone had seen her or heard of her in the 1930s.In fact she seems to have made quite an impact in Bombay and impressed her contemporaries. But when I tried some years back to collect material on her it was intriguingly hard to come by. Usha Mehta's account has been published earlier this year by the National Book Trust in "Women Pioneers in India's Renaissance" (Ed by Sushila Nayar & Kamla Mankekar). Sofia had become G.O.C. of the Congress Sevika Dal in the nineteen thirties. An early account of Sofia Khan is by the aesthetician G. Venkatachalam. His "Profiles", published by Nalanda Publications from Bombay in 1949, contained some vignettes of Sofia in the 1930s. She was apparently the youngest Congress dictator in the 1930-31 movement. Venkatachalam wrote: "One picture... stands out vividly before my mind's eye, and that is of Sofia Somji, the young Feminist. Place: Azad Maidan in Bombay. Time: Towards evening, the sun still burning bright with noon-day fierceness. A sea of surging humanity, controlled by the officers of the law. A sudden outburst of cheers, and from amidst the coloured crowd rises a saffron-vision of a beautiful girl of sixteen summers, noble, refined delicate, dark-eyed, golden-complexioned, gracious-looking, with sad sweet smiles playing about her full lips, her covered-head slightly bent, her left-hand holding a flag, and her tremulous voice ringing out the words 'Bahiyo, Bhaino' in clear-cut tones vibrating with passion and creating a tense silence.... The spell breaks. The authorities demand the flag from her possesssion and order the crowd to disperse. The young suffragette sticks to her place and refuses to surrender the flag; a tussle follows in which she is overwhelmed by numbers and from sheer exhaustion she gives in and is arrested. The Court is crowded and the magistrate is visibly moved by the charming prisoner before him but soon pulls himself up and lets the law take its own course. The accused receives her sentence unmoved, and the word 'sabash, sabash' is on everybody's lips. Sofia became a national heroine....Miss Somji was the youngest of the dictators and the most energetic of the workers

at that time. A muslim by birth, she comes of a cultured Khoja family living at Bandra, near Bombay....She reminds one of Kamaladevi in her younger days...." Incidentally, the colour saffron had till then not been debased. that the Sofia was active in the forties as well. Usha Mehta tells us Sofia was arrested along with Gandhi, Nehru and others on Ninth of August in the year Nineteen Forty Two.

I knew that Sofia was related to Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Usha Mehta tells us how close the relation was. Sofia married Saadulla Khan, [son of Dr Khan Sahib], and nephew of the Frontier Gandhi. She had two sons, Sham and Anwar. Anwar was, says Usha Mehta, only nine months old when Sofia was arrested. The closing paragraph of Usha Mehta's account is "Sophiaben (This is Ushaji's spelling; I have opted the spelling found in older texts: AN) left or rather leave Bombay, her beloved city, to join her family in where her in laws and children were waiting for her, but back in 1961 and breathed her last on March 26 June 2002 as follows: above for had to Peshawar she came 16, 1961."