A feminist inquiry into the framing of the Indian Constitution must retrieve and see the interventions of the women members of the Constituent Assembly for what they historically represent, namely, a feminist authorial voice that was developed over a period of time by the pre-Independence women’s movement in India. For a proper understanding of this voice, we must understand the gendered character of the Constituent Assembly, its architecture, its procedures, the dynamics of the gendered relations among its members, and above all, the performative aspects of the debates. This inquiry must also investigate the language employed by the members and the genealogies––both sexist and subversive––of some of the key terms of the discourse. While correcting the male-centric biases of conventional historiography, this inquiry will open the Constitution to fresh feminist interpretations and set the stage for a conversation between two generations of Indian feminist thought.
Achyut Chetan (Mon,) studied this question.