'I may not have been one of the founding mothers of the Constitution, but I am one of its founding daughters. Founding a nation is a continuous process, one without end. This is where I have lived, loved and worked—and that is where home is. The Constitution of India is not just a text ... [It] is where my home lies.'
Few lawyers have shaped India's constitutional landscape as consistently and fearlessly as Indira Jaising. For over five decades, she has led some of the country's most consequential legal battles, compelling the law to reckon with the realities of gender, inequality, state violence and institutional neglect.
In The Constitution Is My Home, Jaising looks back upon a life spent on the frontlines of law and activism. In conversation with Ritu Menon, she reflects on the cases and causes that have defined her career: Mary Roy and the fight for equal inheritance; Rupan Deol Bajaj and the pursuit of justice in the face of sexual harassment; Olga Tellis, which recognized the right to livelihood for pavement dwellers; Shayara Bano and the challenge to triple talaq; her long advocacy for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy; and the Sabarimala case, where she argued for women's right to worship. She also offers sharp observations on the present, marked as it is by rising Hindu nationalism, a judiciary in retreat and a democracy growing brittle by the day. Through it all, she unfailingly returns to the Constitution--as scripture, argument, shelter and home ground.
Clear, unsparing and deeply political, The Constitution Is My Home is both a vital record of resistance and a call to hold fast to the republic's founding promises by one of the most inspiring legal minds of the country.
INDIRA JAISING is a pioneering lawyer and human rights activist known for her work on gender justice, labour rights and constitutional freedoms in India. A senior advocate at the Supreme Court, she became the first woman to serve as Additional Solicitor General of the country (2009-14). She also served as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (2009-12) and was instrumental in drafting the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
Jaising is a co-founder of the Lawyers Collective, an organization that has played a major role in advancing public interest litigation and rights-based advocacy in India, and a co-founder of The Leaflet, an independent digital platform for critical analysis of legal issues. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2005. In 2018, Fortune magazine named her one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.
RITU MENON is a feminist publisher and writer. She is the co-founder of Kali for Women and the founder of Women Unlimited. Among her published books are Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition; Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal; Zohra!: A Biography in Four Acts; Address Book: A Publishing Memoir in the Time of COVID; Loitering with Intent: Diary of a Happy Traveller; and India on Their Minds: 8 Women, 8 Ideas of India. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011.
