Sarla Thakral: The Saree-Clad Pilot Who Broke India's Skies

Sarla Thakral was 21 years old, four hours into a nine-hour flight-training course, when she climbed into the cockpit of a Gypsy Moth biplane at the Lahore Flying Club and took off alone. She was wearing a saree. It was 1936, and no Indian woman had ever flown solo before.

She went on to log 1,000 hours of flying time toward her commercial pilot's license before World War II grounded that ambition for good. What came after — reinvention as a painter, a designer, a businesswoman, twice over — is as much a part of her story as the flight itself.

Timeline

• 1914 — Born August 8 in Delhi, British India.

• 1930 — Married at age 16 to P.D. Sharma, moves to Lahore to join a family of nine pilots.

• 1936 — Earns her aviation pilot's license and flies a Gypsy Moth solo, becoming the first Indian woman to fly an aircraft.

• 1939 — Her husband, P.D. Sharma, dies in a flying accident.

• 1939–1945 — World War II halts civil aviation training; her plan to earn a commercial license is permanently interrupted.

• 1947 — Partition forces her to relocate to Delhi with her two daughters.

• 1948 — Marries R.P. Thakral, later known as Sarla Thakral.

• 2008 — Dies on March 15, at age 93.

Early Life

Sarla was born in 1914 in Delhi. Little is documented about her childhood, but at 16 she was married to P.D. Sharma and moved to his family home in Lahore — a household that, unusually for the era, counted nine pilots among its members. Her husband held the distinction of being one of India's first licensed pilots, flying the airmail route between Karachi and Lahore.

Encouraged by her husband and father-in-law, Sarla enrolled at the Lahore Flying Club. She trained on the Gypsy Moth, a two-seater biplane, at a time when Indian women were rarely seen in public professional spaces, let alone in a cockpit.

Achievements

In 1936, after roughly nine hours of instruction, Sarla flew solo — dressed in a saree, as she would for every flight that followed. She was 21, and already the mother of a young daughter. The flight made her the first Indian woman to pilot an aircraft.

She didn't stop at the milestone. Over the following years she logged 1,000 hours of flying time with the Lahore Flying Club, working toward an 'A' license and, eventually, a commercial pilot's license — a goal that would have made her one of India's first professional female aviators.

When the war made that impossible, she retrained entirely. She earned a diploma in fine arts from Lahore's Mayo School of Art, specializing in Bengali-style painting, and built a business designing and selling costume jewellery and hand-blocked printed sarees — work that supported her and her daughters through Partition and beyond. Later in life she also designed for India's National School of Drama.

Challenges

Sarla trained and flew in a period when Indian women were almost entirely excluded from public professional life, let alone aviation — a field controlled by British colonial authorities and dominated by men. Her husband's death in a flying accident in 1939, followed within a few years by the wartime suspension of civil pilot training, closed off the commercial aviation career she had been building toward. Partition in 1947 uprooted her a second time, forcing her to rebuild a life and a livelihood for her two daughters in a new city.

Legacy

Sarla Thakral's solo flight is now recognised as the starting point of Indian women's presence in aviation — a field where India today has one of the highest shares of women commercial pilots in the world, more than double the global average. In 2021, Google marked what would have been her 107th birthday with a doodle.

Her life resists a single label. She was a pilot for a few short years, then a trained fine artist, then a fashion and jewellery entrepreneur who rebuilt her career twice — after widowhood and after Partition. That pattern of reinvention, as much as the flight itself, is what she left behind.

Sources

Wikipedia: Sarla Thukral. Indian Eagle Travel Blog, "Meet Sarla Thakral, the First Woman Pilot of India." Gulf News, "Face-to-face with Sarla Thukral, India's first woman pilot."

Related Women

Tessy Thomas — India's Missile Woman, who led the Agni ballistic missile programme decades after Sarla broke aviation's gender barrier.

Kadambini Ganguly and Anandibai Joshi — among the first Indian women to earn medical degrees, in the same generation-spanning tradition of women entering fields that excluded them.