'The Fifteen': Lives and times of 15 remarkable women

'The Fifteen', written by Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali, brings the stories Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Hansa Mehta and Durgabai Deshmukh, who were among the 15 women who were elected to the Constituent Assembly.

New Delhi: A Muslim royal, the Nightingale of India, a Tamil socialite and a Latin Christian woman from Travancore, and several others were among the fifteen women who were part of the Constituent Assembly – the body of elected representatives who were tasked with drafting the Constitution for Independent India. A new book now seeks to celebrate their lives and their achievements.

The Fifteen, written by Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali, has brought out the stories of each of these 15 trailblazers. Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Hansa Mehta, and Durgabai Deshmukh were among the 15 women who were elected to the Constituent Assembly. The 15 women made up for a mere 5 per cent of the 299 members in the Assembly, but have left a legacy that will inspire for years to come.

Among them was Ammu Swaminathan, mother to Captain Lakshmi Sehgal of the famed Rani Jhansi Regiment of Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army and danseuse Mrinalini Sarabhai, and grandmother to CPI(M) Politburo member Subhashini Ali.

Ammu, a Nair woman married to a Brahmin man, was known as one of the first women in (then) Madras to drive. With other luminaries like Annie Besant and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, she formed the Women’s Indian Association in 1917. A Congress MP in the first Lok Sabha from Tamil nadu’s Dindigul, Ammu

The only MP from Thiruvananthapuram, Annie Mascarene, who hailed from the marginalised Latin Christian community from Kerala is another woman among the fifteen. Annie was selected as a member of the Constituent Assembly as she was one of the three women elected to the Travancore Assembly. A strong advocate of prison rights, who stressed strongly against the Preventive Detention in the Parliament, Annie also had strained relations with Mahatma Gandhi and her forthrightness led to the dissolution of the Congress government in Travancore.

Annie also stressed on the need for a strong central government and suggested Constitutional amendments if the Centre ever got too powerful.

A Muslim woman, born to a royal family, too, was among the fifteen women. Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul, born to Nawab Sir Zulfikar Ali Khan of the royal family of Malerkota in Punjab, was the representative of the Muslim League in the Constituent Assembly, yet, she stood against the League’s demand that only Muslims will represent Muslims in political platforms. Qudsia gave up the purdah and had to face conservatives – in 1936 when she won the United Provinces assembly elections as an independent candidate – conservative religious leaders issued a fatwa against her. She went on to serve as the leader of the Opposition as well as the Deputy Speaker of the United Provinces Council.

The only Muslim woman in the Constituent Assembly, Qudsia had extended her support for the birth of Pakistan but stayed in India and went on to join the Congress later. In the Constituent Assembly, she advocated for fundamental rights.

The book also mentions Purnima Banerji, a vocal member of the Constituent Assembly who was a close associate of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and sister of freedom fighter Aruna Asaf Ali. Banerji’s name is rarely mentioned in historical recountings of the Indian Independence movement. A regular visitor at the Nehru-Gandhi’s Allahabad home, Anand Bhawan, Banerji was also tasked to take care of his ailing wife by Lal Bahadur Shashtri.

Among her political interventions was one where she moved to reduce the minimum age of qualification to legislative councils from 35 to 30 years, which is now reflected in Article 173 of the Constitution. In the Constituent Assembly, she urged for the Right to Livelihood to be made part of the Directive Principles of State Policy. When the number of women in the Assembly fell from 15 to 11 with the resignations of Leela Roy and Malati Choudhury, the posting of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to the US as Ambassador, and the passing of Sarojini Naidu, she insisted that the vacancies be filled only by women, but it was sadly not implemented.