By contrast, Jaising moved through life with a certain defiance of convention and a carefree attitude. She postponed marriage until 36 (initially rejecting it) and chose to remain childless in the 1970s. “My life as a woman is my life in law,” she says. The sentiment runs through her new memoir, The Constitution is My Home, written in conversation with feminist publisher Ritu Menon, and now on stands.
From the start of her career, Jaising’s fight for women to be seen in workplaces and respected in courtrooms went hand in hand. In her 30s, she took on the case of Air India air hostesses who had been denied promotions to supervisory positions. “They were being treated like ornamental figures; their managerial abilities were completely ignored. The injustice was plain. It offended my sense of fairness and moved me to bring a series of constitutional challenges grounded in the right to equality,” she writes in the book.
That fervent ownership applies to every brief she takes on. Whether advocating for women vendors defending their right to sell vegetables or helping educationist Mary Roy (Arundhati Roy’s mother) demand her inheritance, Jaising repeatedly used the law to challenge the ways in which women were denied full personhood.
Writer Githa Hariharan, whose first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the best first novel in 1993, recounts how Jaising stepped in when Hariharan was not considered the “natural guardian” of her own minor son under Indian law. “I went to Indira, and her organisation, the Lawyers Collective, took up the case pro bono in the Supreme Court. We won a landmark judgement in 1999,” says Hariharan. “I helped a little with the research, and it was quite a learning experience for me. We have been good friends since then, and I feel lucky to know such a powerful role model for women, for lawyers, and, indeed, for good citizens.”
And Jaising has been a great role model for renegade women. In the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, a judge once banged a file on the table and declared, “Thank you, Ms. Jaising. We’ve had the pleasure of hearing you.” Jaising reenacts the scene for me in her living room, demonstrating exactly how she fought back against a bench steeped in class privilege and sexism. It was a casual but pointed dismissal of a woman representing the homeless against three legal heavyweights appearing for the builders. Refusing to be silenced, Jaising hitched up her pallu like a Maharashtrian woman preparing for battle and slammed her own file down in mimicry.
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