The princess who built India’s healthcare system

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Born into privilege as a princess in the 1900s in India, Amrit Kaur could have led a life of comfort and quiet influence. Instead, she used her station to steer some of independent India’s most vital reforms.

With a Cambridge-educated father and schooling in England’s Sherborne School for Girls and Oxford University, Kaur developed a reformist zeal and a global outlook—along with a deep compassion for the less privileged. In 1950, Time magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most powerful women, noting: “In leaving her life of luxury, Kaur not only helped build lasting democratic institutions, she also inspired generations to fight for the marginalized." It was a rare international acknowledgment of an Indian woman at the time. Read this | The merchant who built Bombay: How David Sassoon shaped a global city Born on 2 February 1889, in Lucknow, Kaur was the youngest of ten children of Raja Harnam Singh, a progressive member of Punjab’s Kapurthala royal family.

Her mother’s early death and her father’s close ties with nationalist leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale shaped her formative years. In what now seems like an early reversal of the modern brain drain, she returned to India in her 20s from England—drawn to a nation in political ferment. A chance meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in Kapurthala in 1919 changed everything.

Inspired by his vision, she became one of his closest associates, and served as his secretary for over a decade. By the 1930s, Kaur had thrown herself into India’s freedom struggle and the fight for women’s rights. She joined the All India Women’s Conference in 1930, serving as its president from 1938 to 1944.