The Nation’s Daughters: Gendered Emancipation and Legal Symbolism in India’s Independence

This presentation explores the legal rationalities that framed women’s mobilisation during India’s struggle for independence, placing it within the wider imperial economy of gendered reform. It argues that the nationalist inclusion of women was neither a rupture with colonial interventionism nor a purely emancipatory turn, but a recalibration of the legal and moral vocabulary through which legitimacy was produced. Nineteenth-century colonial statutes such as the Sati Regulation (1829) and the Age of Consent Act (1891) had constructed women as juridical subjects of protection, grounding imperial authority in the language of moral progress. The nationalist movement inverted, but did not displace, this structure. This trajectory must also be read in relation to the contemporaneous debates in Britain, where the gradual reforms constructed a parallel moral economy of rights that informed the colonial imagination of reform. The first part of this presentation reconstructs this process as a legal transformation. It considers how nationalist discourse translated the colonial “woman question” into a test of India’s capacity for modern governance. Gandhi’s politics of non-violence and Nehru’s constitutional humanism both relied on female visibility to transform ethical virtue into juridical credibility. The mobilisation of women thus operated as a mode of legal performance: it authenticated sovereignty before it expanded rights. The second part turns to the early postcolonial codifications that institutionalised this logic. The Hindu Code Bills (1955–56) converted the symbolic inclusion of women into statutory reform, recasting equality as a marker of civilisation and juridical maturity. Yet the reform’s confinement to Hindu personal law exposed the persistence of colonial techniques of differentiation, revealing that the same structures which once justified empire now sustained national authority. The presentation concludes with the idea that women’s participation in India’s independence movement must be understood as part of a continuous legal field in which both empire and nation grounded legitimacy in gendered reform. In tracing this continuity, it highlights the paradox of India’s legal modernity: women were essential to the production of legitimacy yet remained marginal to its authorship. The law’s emancipatory promise emerged not as a rupture with empire but as its nationalist rearticulation.