Her voice in the republic

Achyut Chetan's Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic critically reclaims the overlooked contributions of women in framing India's Constitution, illuminating their intersectional struggles, dissent, and transformative feminist vision amidst patriarchal resistance

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

This is a long overdue review – for while I had the occasion to listen in, and discuss the main arguments in this scholarly tome ‘Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution’ by Achyut Chetan at several discussion forums, only last week, I delved into a deeper reading of this text.

The work has been extensively quoted in Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride, which recently won the VOW English non-fiction award for the current year, and extracts from Chapter V ‘Writing the Rights: Inscribing Constitutional Morality’ were part of the reading material at a workshop organized by the Centre for Gender and Child Rights at the LBSNAA.

The context for the work is set in the Preface, when after explaining the distinction between ‘will’ and ‘consent’, Chetan writes: ‘Women’s engagement in the three-year-long framing process, in times of great turbulence that generated compelling ethical questions, can only be understood if sufficient attention is paid to the specific context in which they made their enunciations during the making of the Constitution.

It is through the dynamics of will, consent, and frequently enough, dissent that women members carried the feminist movement through and beyond the Constituent Assembly. However, the fact is that most commentators on the Constitution – from Granville Austin to Subhas Kashyap, Fali Nariman, and Uday Singh Mehta – have not given much agency to the founding ‘mothers’, for the discourse is all about the founding fathers.

Asks Chetan: ‘Is it because of an a priori understanding that their roles were negligible and hence unworthy of attention? Was it understood that these token women had managed to gain membership of the Constituent Assembly, not by virtue of their ability, but solely because of the benevolence of powerful patriarchs?’