My great-grandmother, the politician and social reformer Sheila Kaul, who has died aged 101, was charming but formidable. In her native India, she was active in the campaign for independence and served as an MP, cabinet minister, diplomat and state governor.
Daughter of Rajeshwar Nath Kaul, an Indian Railways officer, and his wife, Saraswati (nee Mushran), Sheila was born in Lucknow. A free spirit, she forged her own path, obtaining degrees in arts from the Lahore College for Women and in education from the Sir Ganga Ram Training College, Lahore. Through much of the 1930s, she was the state badminton champion in pre-partition Punjab.
In 1939, she married the botanist Kailas Nath Kaul and during the second world war years they lived in Ealing, west London, when he was appointed the first assistant for India at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Sheila was evacuated to Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, for the birth of her son, Gautam, and after the arrival of a daughter, Deepa, took both children to Blythburgh, Suffolk, as bombing raids on London continued. The family returned to India in 1944 as part of a convoy of warships, and Kailas later established the National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow.
Kailas had joined Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom movement in 1930 and his family helped organise resistance to British rule. Kailas’s mother, Rajpati, served two jail terms for her part in anti-imperialist protests; his older sister, Kamala, was the wife of Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become the first prime minister of India after independence in 1947.
Sheila’s early forays into politics were as a member of the Lucknow municipal corporation and of the Legislative Council of Uttar Pradesh. Between 1971 and 1991, she was elected five times as an Indian National Congress MP, three times for Lucknow and twice for Raebareli. During her two terms as a cabinet minister (1980-84 and 1991-95), she worked tirelessly in the fields of education, social welfare, culture and urban development.
She represented India at numerous international forums on education, culture, and women’s rights and at the UN general assembly and the European parliament. Her last post in public life was as governor of the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, 1995-96. She was known among her colleagues for her perseverance, astuteness and candour.
Kailas died in 1983. She is survived by her sister, Pratima, her children, Deepa, Gautam and Vikram, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.