**WINGS OF SWARAJ: The Extraordinary Life of Mrinalini Sen, India’s Flying Pioneer and Rebel for Freedom**

Before India had an aviation industry, before women held the right to vote, and long before the world recognized the power of Indian womanhood, one fearless visionary took to the skies and rewrote history.

Born in colonial Bengal and widowed as a teenager within the cloistered walls of an aristocratic estate, **Mrinalini Sen** refused to accept a life of silent domestic austerity. Transforming personal adversity into an intellectual and social awakening, she defied centuries of orthodox taboo through a pioneering remarriage into the reformist Brahmo Samaj and established herself as one of the most celebrated poets of the Bengal Renaissance.

Then, on a crisp December morning in 1910, she made world history. Boarding a fragile biplane over Calcutta, Mrinalini soared into the clouds to become the **first Indian ever to fly in an airplane**—shattering colonial stereotypes of Indian backwardness in a single, breathtaking ascent.

Yet her true battle was fought on the ground and across continents. As Vice-President of the Bangiya Nari Samaj, she spearheaded the historic campaign that won voting rights for women in Bengal. On factory floors and in coal mines, she investigated the exploitation of female industrial workers, demanding economic justice for the laboring poor. In the heart of London, during the turbulent height of the 1930 Civil Disobedience Movement, she stood before an international audience at Friends’ House to directly denounce British imperial violence and demand the immediate release of Mahatma Gandhi.

**WINGS OF SWARAJ** is the gripping, sweeping, and inspiring biography of an unsung titan of the Indian independence movement. Discover the remarkable story of a poet, suffragist, aviation pioneer, and international anti-imperialist who dared to conquer both the skies above and the tyrannies below to help forge a free, modern India.