As India celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Constitution of India — the longest written Constitution at the time, and now — how much do we know about women members of the Constituent Assembly? Achyut Chetan explains how the contribution of the ‘Founding Mothers’ changed several aspects of the Constitution, making it a more nuanced, inclusive and better document.
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Seventy-five years ago, on the 26th day of November 1949, when ‘We the People of India”, ‘adopted, enacted and gave to ourselves’ the Constitution, they also acted through some women. These women — whose signatures adorn the handwritten, beautifully calligraphed English text of the Constitution that came into force on 26 January 1950 — included Purnima Banerji, Kamala Chaudhry, G. Durgabai (later Durgabai Deshmukh), Amrit Kaur, Sucheta Kripalani, Annie Mascarene, Hansa Mehta, Kudsia Aizaz Rasul, Renuka Ray, Ammu Swaminathan, and Dakshayani Velayudhan (Photo 1).
Six other women were elected to the Constituent Assembly: Malati Choudhury, Sarojini Naidu and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit had resigned for other assignments; Leela Roy, to protest against Partition; and Jahanara Shahnawaz and Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah went on to become members of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. Individually, each of the 17 women was an exceptional leader and had a long career of activism and politics before being elected to the Constituent Assembly. Yet, it is not as individuals but as representatives of a collective that we need to retrieve their voices, as collaborators in a larger project of laying the political and ethical foundation of a nation. Acknowledging their collective role in the framing of the Constitution of India is central to the genealogy of several clauses of the Constitution — including some that pertain to gender justice and others that have implications for the struggle for women’s rights.
The Feminist Prehistory of the Constitution
The history of the Constitution of India is preceded by a history of constitutionalism in India which draws on a heterogeneous discursive field constituted by varied standpoints, ideologies and political interests. Even a random list of documents representing this field would include
- resolutions of the Karachi Congress (1931);
- resolutions and discussions at the Round Table Conferences (1930–31);
- debates on the question of separate electorates (Poona Pact, 1932);
- small movements for personal law reforms and the committees on Hindu Law (1939, 1941, 1945);
- reception of the Government of India Act, 1935;
- legislative programmes of political parties followed by the 1937 elections;
- homework and rigorous social inquiries connected with the many committees of the National Planning Committee (1939);
- dozens of memoranda and petitions submitted by different organisations to the colonial government.
Together they consolidated a conceptual language for constitutional debate in India prior to the Constituent Assembly Debates (1946–50). What is often not remembered is that women’s movements in India also played a significant role in consolidating this language and the moral imaginary constituted by it.
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As early as 1932, speaking in Jalandhar, Amrit Kaur had emphatically declared that the moral imagination of Indian women was not to be subjected to ‘standards, whether local, political or ethical, which have been set for them by the male conscience of the community’. In the coming years, women’s organisations were to challenge these standards at all levels. Leaders of these organisations, particularly the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC, founded 1927), like Amrit Kaur, Hansa Mehta, Renuka Ray, and Qudsia Aizaz Rasul would later become the most active members of the Constituent Assembly. They had already reimagined women’s position in all spheres of society. They had demanded a comprehensive reform of laws related to family, marriage, adoption and inheritance of property based on an understanding of women as equal rights-bearing citizens. While fighting for property rights for women, they also demanded that the economic worth of the homemakers’ labour be recognised. At numerous platforms, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO), they fought for the implementation of equal pay for equal work for men and women alike.
The nation itself was imagined as a ‘planned economy’ with equal contributions of women who must be given equal opportunity to work in all fields of employment. The moral vision developed by feminist leaders envisaged the individual as the fundamental unit of society — a point that Hansa Mehta repeatedly asserted as a member of the Commission on Human Rights during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Since ‘family’ was mostly under the jurisdiction of religious personal laws, this moral imagination introduced sound, gendered arguments in the conceptual terrain of secularism; and since the ‘individual’ was recognised as afflicted with disabilities and vulnerabilities by social structures like gender and caste, it reconfigured the idea of citizenship even before the Constitution institutionalised it. Through rigorous social surveys of women’s socio-economic status, feminist leaders had established that women constituted a collective of ‘disabled’ individuals and, thus, ‘the largest minority’, to use Amrit Kaur’s phrase.
The semantic potential of several words also expanded with women’s active participation in constitutional politics in the decades prior to the making of the Constitution. Words like ‘minority’, ‘disability’, ‘sex’, ‘law’, ‘custom’, ‘code’, ‘home’, ‘individual’ and ‘citizen’ acquired increasingly greater significance and were charged with feminist connotations through the persistent practice of drafting reports, memoranda, questionnaires, and petitions by women’s organisations.
In 1945, when Hansa Mehta and her colleagues at the AIWC drafted the ‘Indian Women’s Charter of Rights and Duties’, it was seen as the ‘crystallisation of the women’s rights demands made in the past decades’. The Charter was presented to several important bodies including the UN Sub-Commission on the Status of Women (1946) and later to the Commission on Human Rights. It was like a Working Paper for women’s rights that anchored women’s participation in the Constituent Assembly of India. With its long lists of demands of equality — in education, health, employment, labour rights, domestic sphere, property rights, and political representation — it did not claim to be an exhaustive charter and asserted that ‘changing circumstances and conditions might necessitate corresponding changes’. This Charter, along with numerous other documents produced by the Indian women’s movement, belong to the feminist prehistory of the Constitution of India and reminds us that women members introduced a consolidated feminist vision to the process of Constitution-making later on.
The Founding Mothers
Women members had not gained an easy entry to the Constituent Assembly — of the more than two dozen women for whom the AIWC had campaigned, only a few were elected. There were attempts to scuttle the election of several women members. For instance, the election of Dakshayani Velayudhan (the sole Dalit candidate) from the Madras Legislative Assembly was heavily contested by men of all ideological groups: Dalit male groups opposed because she had not toed the line of the Scheduled Caste Federation of India; local leaders from Madras (in Tamil Nadu) objected because she was Malayali (from Kerala); and Congress leaders because she had been critical of stalwarts like Sardar Patel and C. Rajagopalachari.
Just as it was not easy for women to get elected to the Assembly, it was equally difficult for them to make a significant impact on its proceedings. For a woman to participate was to perform against the grain, walking through its long corridors from the backbenches to the podium in the front, navigating the dynamics of male gaze, formal and informal relations of control, speaking for and against, cutting through the inherent sexism of the language used by the majority of its male speakers and — with all these achieved — to introduce ideas of gender equality into the drafting of the Articles of the Constitution. And yet, the truth is that with their sensitive and strategic planning and deep conviction in their ideas, women members made a fundamental difference to the framing of the Constitution.
Women members ensured that their lack in numbers did not become a handicap by strategically gaining membership of the various Committees and Sub-committees of the Assembly that prepared the policies and recommendations for the Drafting Committee. Since the recommendations of the Committees became the Working Document for discussions in the wider platform of the Assembly, women’s contributions to these Committees assumed fundamental importance. One such instance is their Note of Dissent that prevented — in spite of insistence of those like Patel and Ambedkar — the Constituent Assembly from making military conscription a compulsory component of Fundamental Rights.
The most significant Note of Dissent written by women members was regarding the nature of constitutional rights. For women, a right that could not be implemented was no right at all. Hence they were opposed to the categorisation of rights into justiciable and non-justiciable classes, later to be adopted as Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles in the Constitution of India. However, when Amrit Kaur and Hansa Mehta realised that their opposition to this conceptualisation had failed and most of their demands were being relegated to the non-justiciable rights (perhaps as a form of concession), they wrote a Note of Dissent urging that the non-enforceable rights must be considered fundamental to the governance of the country. This Note of Dissent, originally written for the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, became the foundation of Article 37 of the Constitution of India that states that the Directive Principles are ‘fundamental to governance and the state must apply them when making laws’ and subsequently led to the ascendancy of the Directive Principles in Indian juridical discourse.
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The many Notes of Dissent written by women members in these Committees are easily forgotten due to excessive attention on the loquacious debates published in the multi-volume Constituent Assembly Debates. And yet, it is through these dissenting notes that a complete reconstruction of the will, intention and value of the Founding Mothers can be achieved.
The Note of Dissent written before the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee referred to above expressed their objection to the fundamental right to ‘free practice’ of religion. Free practice of religion, they feared, might undo many of the gains of the women’s movement in marriage law reforms, property rights and women’s education. In parallel sessions of the Constituent Assembly when it served as a provisional Parliament, during the debates on the Hindu Code Bill, women members argued for a progressive secularisation of personal laws. Thus, when Hansa Mehta said that laws for adoption should make no distinction between the adoption of a daughter and a son, she was also questioning the religious purpose behind the adoption of a male child. Read together, these interventions present the most compelling and comprehensive articulation of a feminist understanding of secular values in the founding moment of India as a nation.
Women members made many demands in the provisional Parliament. Dakshayani Velayudhan regularly demanded special provisions for education, scholarships and employment for women; Annie Mascarene asked for special coaches for women travellers in Indian trains; Aizaz Rasul asked for recruitment of women to the military. They demanded special crèches for children of working mothers, mental health care for refugee women and many specific provisions for women.
Scholars have rather hastily taken note of their opposition to women’s reservation without considering the larger politics that is illustrated by multiple such examples that provide an accurate expression of women’s position on affirmative action. The thrust of the women’s movement both outside and inside the Constituent Assembly was to secure conditions that resulted in substantial social and economic equality of the sexes. Thus, their agreement to what became Article 15 (3) of the Constitution, allowing the state to make special provisions for women and children, was not a compromise within a post-colonial sexual contract as some scholars have argued; it represented their attempt to go beyond the promise of mere formal equality and secure substantive equality in a world of systemic disparities.
Conclusion
A list of all interventions by women members and their profound impact would be very long. In lieu of such a list, I would like to note two remarkable aspects of women’s participation in the Constituent Assembly. First, women did not limit their interventions to what is defined as the ‘woman’s question’ only. They took serious interest in issues of liberty and preventive detention, prison reforms, independence of the judiciary, national language, and labour laws. Second, their feminism was not just intersectional, i.e., one that saw women as disenfranchised by many factors but was also inclusive and collaborative in its methods, thus making it possible for women to speak for one another — Muslim women for Hindu women, lower caste women for upper caste women, and vice versa.
Moreover, their strategy was to work with men (B R Ambedkar, Minoo Masani, B N Rau, to name just a few allies in the Constituent Assembly), enlist their support for their feminist project, and create a democratic force that could negotiate with the state. This led to occasional differences among women members themselves but it never failed to introduce a gendered perspective to all debates. Take, for instance, the debate regarding the relation between women’s freedom and the right to livelihood that were raised by women members during a debate on the Factory Bill in the Constituent Assembly (Legislative). While Renuka Ray argued that women’s employability must be expanded and there should be no restrictions of work shifts for women, Dakshayani Velayudhan argued that such an expansion would be counterproductive unless there is a guarantee of safety for women (including Dalit women) who worked night shifts!
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Once the role of the ‘founding mothers’ is recognised for what it was — a well-defined, rigorously argued, and historically grounded feminist intervention in the drafting of the founding document of India — it will be impossible not to read the Articles and Clauses of the Constitution of India from a fresh, feminist perspective. To remember their contribution is to reclaim the Constitution as a springboard for a programme of gender justice; to not do so is to fail the Constitution and its Founding Mothers.
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