Among the defining images captured by Margaret Bourke-White, intrepid documenter of the sub-continent’s partition and India’s birth, were those of women. Exhausted women holding skeletal babies to their breasts, frail old women carried in slings, sari-clad women keeping brisk pace with Mahatma Gandhi. They flowed facelessly into the great melting pot of a new nation.

India at that stage had very few ideas about how it was to ensure justice and status to a category of citizens that had been invisibilised by its history and society but, fortunately, among these ideas was the concept of a substantive, not just formal, equality between men and women. It is difficult today to imagine where the country would have been today if women had not been guaranteed full and equal rights in the Indian Constitution. We should, of course, be grateful to our founding fathers for this, but we must also not overlook the role of our founding mothers in realising this equality in more concrete terms. Renuka Ray, a Gandhian, a representative of the All India Women’s Conference in the Central Assembly and a Parliamentarian herself, termed them “a band of women members’’ in her reminiscences. She went on to name them: Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Hansa Mehta, Durgabai Deshmukh, Ammu Swaminathan, Sucheta Kriplani and Begum Aizaz Kasul.

This band of women set to work assiduously on reforming Hindu personal laws. By 1956, when the law minister, H.V. Pataskar, finally piloted the Hindu Code Bill into the statute books after years of bitter parliamentary wrangling — there was, at one point, an unprecedented stand-off between President Rajendra Prasad and Prime Minister Nehru over it — it had been considerably watered down. But it represented, nevertheless, a turning point in the way post-Independent India viewed women citizens.

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