ABSTRACT
In 1954, a young Indian woman returned home to Kenya during a vacation from her university in England. She was horrified by what she saw: a country under colonial Emergency law, an Indian community racked by fears of being attacked by African rebels, and Africans under constant surveillance, with hundreds of thousands of them being detained on the slightest pretext and sent to concentration camps. This young woman was Sheila Didi, a Communist Party and women's activist with the Punjab Istri Sabha, a branch of the National Federation of Indian Women, as well as a prominent lawyer, one of the earliest women to practice in the Punjab High Court. Sheila's personal and political trajectory as it emerges from her conversation resurrects for us the international and inter-racial solidarities, and fractures, of anti-colonial communists as they worked on the ground. There was racial segregation in education and in social life, both official and self-imposed.
