Travancore

The procession is led by the head of the former royal family of Travancore, which built the airport in 1932.

Born in 1918 in Travancore, a former princely state that's now part of the southern state of Kerala, Mani is best known for helping India make its own instruments to measure the weather, thereby reducing the newly independent country's reliance on other nations.

The then-president of the state congress committee said women in Travancore were already "empresses of the home" and that politics was not their space.

In 1947, she was elected as a lawmaker in the first free election held in the state of Travancore.

"For more than 15 years she was probably the toughest woman in public politics in Travancore and was at the forefront of the momentous people's struggle in Travancore in the pre-independence era," Kandathil Sebastian, a social scientist based in Delhi, wrote last year.