Join Vidhi for its eleventh Book Adda on  ‘Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution’ by Achyut Chetan.

The Adda will begin at 5:30 PM on April 28, 2023. It is a virtual event held on Zoom and will be live-streamed on Vidhi’s YouTube page.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic begins with the momentous task of demolishing the prejudices attached with the phrase ‘founding fathers’ that has held an immense sway over constitutional interpretation. It shows that women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly had painstakingly co-authored a Constitution that embodied a moral imagination developed by years of feminist politics.

The book traces the genealogies of several constitutional provisions to argue that, without the interventions of these women framers, the Constitution would have been much lesser than the celebrated document of rights and statecraft that it is. Situating these interventions in the larger trajectory of Indian feminism in which they are rooted, in the nationalist discourse with which they perpetually negotiated, and in the larger human rights discourse of the 1940s, it shows that the women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly were much more than the ‘founding mothers’ of a republic.

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN:

• ACHYUT CHETAN,  Author of ‘Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution’ published by Cambridge University Press, Associate Professor of English, St. Xaviers University Kolkata, in conversation with, 
• RITWIKA SHARMA, Senior Resident Fellow and Lead, Charkha, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.