Cama joined one of the many teams of nurses working out of Grant Medical College (which would subsequently become Haffkine's plague vaccine research centre), in an effort to provide care for the afflicted, and (later) to inoculate the healthy.

[1] She was preparing to return to India in 1904 when she came in contact with Shyamji Krishna Varma, who was well known in London's Indian community for fiery nationalist speeches he gave in Hyde Park.

[11] Together with Naoroji and Singh Rewabhai Rana, Cama supported the founding of Varma's Indian Home Rule Society in February 1905.

[1] Together with other notable members of the movement for Indian sovereignty living in exile, Cama wrote, published (in the Netherlands and Switzerland) and distributed revolutionary literature for the movement,[13] including Bande Mataram (founded in response to the Crown ban on the nationalist poem Vande Mataram)[12] and later Madan's Talwar (in response to the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra).

[14][6] On 22 August 1907, Cama attended the second Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, Germany, where she described the devastating effects of a famine that had struck the Indian subcontinent.

In her appeal for human rights, equality and autonomy from Great Britain, she was the first person to unfurl what she called the "Flag of Indian Independence".

After the second Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, Cama travelled to America to raise awareness of the Indian nationalist campaign and non-cooperation movement.

[17] Influenced by Christabel Pankhurst and the suffragette movement, Cama was vehement in her support for gender equality and she often stressed on the role of Indian women in building the nation.

"[14] Cama's stance with respect to the vote for women was, however, secondary to her position on Indian independence; in 1920, upon meeting Herabai Tata and Mithan Tata, two Parsi women outspoken on the issue of the right to vote, Cama is said to have sadly shaken her head and observed: "'Work for Indian's freedom and [i]ndependence.

Cama continued to maintain active contacts with Indian, Irish, and Egyptian revolutionaries as well as with French Socialists and Russian leadership.

Cama remained in exile in Europe until 1935,[9][11] when, gravely ill and paralyzed by a stroke that she had suffered earlier that year, she petitioned the British government through Sir Cowasji Jehangir to be allowed to return home.

Following Cama's 1907 Stuttgart address, the flag she raised there was smuggled into British India by Indulal Yagnik and is now on display at the Maratha and Kesari Library in Pune, Maharashtra.

In 2004, politicians of the BJP, India's political party, attempted to identify a later design (from the 1920s) as the flag Cama raised in Stuttgart.