From Movement to Institution

She spoke in support of the draft article that became Article 32, and answered two technical objections: whether the Supreme Court's power to issue writs displaced that of the High Courts, and whether a refusal by a High Court barred an application to the Supreme Court. She said no to both.

The Assembly was deciding whether the fundamental rights it had just written would be enforceable at all, and by which court. Ambedkar would later call this article the heart and soul of the Constitution.

Her formulation is among the sharpest in the debate: this is “a right which is fundamental to all the fundamental rights guaranteed under this Constitution”, because “a right without an expeditious and effective remedy… is not worth the paper on which it is written”.

She moved an amendment to substitute the words “all classes and sections” for “any class or section” in the clause permitting the State to legislate for social welfare and reform and for throwing open Hindu religious institutions of a public character.

Temple-entry legislation already existed in several provinces, but she argued that distinctions persisted in the other institutions attached to temples and maths — the pathsalas and schools. Her object, in her words, was “to enlarge the scope of the clause”.

The wording finally adopted in Article 25(2)(b) of the Constitution is “all classes and sections of Hindus” — the broader formulation she moved. It is her most direct and checkable mark on the text of the Constitution.

On the article against exploitation she spoke to K. T. Shah's amendment, which would have written the prohibition of dedication as devadasis into the constitutional text. She accepted the object entirely but argued the amendment was unnecessary, since Madras had already prohibited the practice by statute.

She was blunt that the province she represented was the worst affected: “if any province has suffered from this bad practice… it is the province of Madras”. She credited the reformer Muthulakshmi Reddy, by name, for the law that ended it.

It shows her characteristic instinct — she asked what already worked before adding new text — and it shows her crediting another woman reformer on the record rather than claiming the ground herself.

She supported an amendment to add abandoned and exploited children to the Concurrent List, arguing that recognising the principle only among the Directive Principles left it “a pious declaration”, and that without a legislative entry nobody would know whether the Centre or a State was responsible.

Care for destitute children was then overwhelmingly the work of private philanthropy, chronically underfunded. She had seen this at close range: “We know how these associations are struggling for their daily existence…”

This is the clearest early statement of the position that would define her second career: “This is not a matter which could be left to private enterprise, but the State must take direct responsibility.” Four years later she chaired the board that put public money behind voluntary welfare work.

She argued that the national language “should not be and cannot be any other than Hindustani which is Hindi plus Urdu”, accepted Hindi in the Devanagari script as a concession, and set two conditions: that the language be capable of absorbing words already in use from Urdu and the regional languages, and that the status quo be maintained for fifteen years.

She spoke as a southerner who had spent her adolescence propagating Hindi in the South at Gandhi's request, against strong local opposition — which gave her standing to warn about how the campaign was now being conducted. She called the insistence on Hindi numerals “the height… of language tyranny and intolerance”.

The Constitution as adopted gave English a fifteen-year term alongside Hindi for official purposes. Her speech is a first-hand account of why non-Hindi members regarded that period as a condition rather than a courtesy.

In the Assembly's earliest work on the judiciary she spoke on the appointment of judges of provincial High Courts, on establishing High Courts in newly created provinces, and on the requirement that judges be citizens of India.

These were the practical foundations of an independent judiciary: who chooses judges, what protects them from the executive, and what happens to justice in provinces about to be created or redrawn.

Judicial independence is the subject she returned to most often. It is the natural preoccupation of a working advocate, and it is why she is described in accounts of the Assembly as a consistent defender of a free judiciary.

She spoke on the terms of the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction in civil matters as the Assembly settled the shape of the new court.

The Federal Court was becoming the Supreme Court of a republic, and appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London were to end. What replaced them had to be defined precisely.

In her closing speech on the Constitution she returned to this design and singled it out: unlike the American model, India would have a single hierarchy of courts administering both central and state law, headed by one Supreme Court.

She moved an amendment to lower the minimum age for a seat in the Council of States from thirty-five to thirty, on the ground that “wisdom does not depend on age” and that young people should be trained early in the affairs of state.

The Upper House was conceived as a revising chamber of elders. She argued that the assumption behind the age bar belonged to an order that had already been replaced.

The amendment did not carry; the Constitution retained thirty for the Council of States under Article 84. The episode is a useful corrective to accounts that imply everything she proposed was adopted — much of it was not.

She supported appointment over direct election, telling the House frankly that she had once held the opposite view and had changed her mind. Her reason was that a Governor dependent on votes could not be “above party politics”.

The Assembly was deciding whether the head of a State should have an independent electoral mandate — and therefore a rival claim to legitimacy against the elected State government.

The Constitution provides for appointment by the President. Her intervention is also a small piece of evidence about her temperament: she recorded a change of mind in public, which is rarer in the debates than one might expect.

She spoke in support of Ambedkar's motion to pass the Constitution, defending it against critics on the left who wanted a particular ideology written in, and against those who called the fundamental rights worthless because they carried restrictions.

This was the closing debate. Members were summing up three years of work in the knowledge that the document would be adopted two days later, on 26 November 1949.

Her test for the Constitution was functional rather than ideological: does it “establish a machinery to find out the general will of the people and also to give scope for the general will to prevail”? She called it “a people's Constitution”, deliberately left open for the country to make its own experiments.