Introduction: Towards a Feminist Reading of the Making of the Constitution

Summary

The original Indian Constitution, handwritten in brilliant calligraphy and adorned with motifs and sketches on the margins of the pages by the great artist Nandalal Bose and his students, was finally self-dedicated by representatives of ‘We, the people’ on 24 January 1950. The signatories on this much-adorned document that day, one discovers, included 11 women. They were: G. Durgabai, Ammu Swaminathan, Amrit Kaur, Dakshayani Velayudhan, Hansa Mehta, Renuka Ray, Sucheta Kripalani, Purnima Banerji, Begum Qudsiya Aizaz Rasul, Kamala Chaudhri, and Annie Mascarene. More than their signatures on the adorned version, it is their presence on the Constitutional text – traces of their valuable interventions in the writing of the Constitution – that I seek to recover in this book. Historical records and the official documents of the Constituent Assembly show that women's presence in this momentous process was indeed an act of will, a comprehensive act of commitment to principles and ideals that they articulated through the text that was enacted to inaugurate the republic.

Though they were only a few in number, we need to re-turn to these forgotten women and re-member them as integral to the Constituent Assembly as its ‘missing mothers’. In so doing, I address, among other issues, the politics of their erasure, and then attempt a revisionary account of their significant contributions to the making of the Constitution. These contributions we ‘woman question’ but extended, among others, to debating on and shaping the very fundamental principles that constitute the ideals of Indian democracy. An account of their participation can neither be a footnote to the narrative of constitution-making in India nor to the history of Indian feminism.

The Constituent Assembly first met on 11 December 1946 and had 169 sessions before its members finally put their signatures on the document on 24 January 1950. Its members met on an equal number of occasions in sessions when it performed the role of a legislature – the Constituent Assembly (Legislative) – from 15 August 1947 to the day of the adoption of the Constitution. Its career, thus, spanned a period of more than three years. In the course of the framing of the Constitution, thousands of documents, including questionnaires, status reports, memoranda, and amendments, were produced by the Assembly and its numerous committees.