Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (18th August, 1900 – 1st December, 1990)

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was born on 18 August, 1900, in Allahabad, North-Western Provinces, British India. Hailing from a prominent political family, her brother Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of independent India, her niece Indira Gandhi the first female Prime Minister of India and her grand-nephew Rajiv Gandhi was the sixth Prime Minister of India. She was the first Indian woman to hold a cabinet post in pre-independent India. In 1937, she was elected to the provincial legislature of the United Provinces and was designated minister of local self-government and public health. In her family’s tradition, she became an active worker in the Indian nationalist movement and was imprisoned three times by the British authorities in India.

She was elected as the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly. In India, she served as Governor of Maharashtra from 1962 to 1964, after which she was elected to the Indian parliament’s lower house, Lok Sabha, from Phulpur. She was the member of Aligarh Muslim University Executive Council. She never received any formal education. In 1979, she was appointed the Indian representative to the UN Human Rights Commission, after which she retired from public life. Her writings include The Evolution of India (1958) and The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (1979). She was an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, where her niece studied Modern History. A portrait of her by Edward Halliday hangs in the Somerville College Library. She died on 1 December, 1990, in Dehradun.