Indira Jaising is not a woman who asks for permission. For six decades, she has walked into India’s highest courts carrying the Constitution as both weapon and shield. Now, at the end of that long march, she sits down with publisher and writer Ritu Menon to tell us what it cost.
The book is unusual in structure. It is not a memoir in the conventional sense. No chapters were mapped in advance. Menon asked the questions. Jaising answered. What has emerged is something closer to a conversation which is both a legal treatise and a personal reckoning.
Begin with her opening declaration: she chose not to marry, at least not until she was 36, and then only on her own terms. This was not a small thing in the Bombay of the 1960s. She watched her mother’s world shrink under the weight of a joint family’s expectations. She watched cousins educated as doctors and dentists set aside serious work after marriage. She concluded, early and firmly, that marriage was a structure designed for the sacrifice of personal freedom. That conclusion shaped everything that followed.
From Mulla and Mulla, the old Bombay corporate firm where both she and I apprenticed, years apart from each other, she gravitated toward the courts. She went to London on a fellowship in 1969 and came back inflamed, not by ideology but by contact. She had marched alongside Indian and Pakistani migrants against racism.
She had seen law centres offering free advice to those who needed it most. She returned to Bombay determined to build something similar. In 1980, she co-founded the Lawyers Collective. It ran on a cross-subsidy model: those who could pay made it possible to represent those who could not.
The cases she chose were never easy or fashionable. She represented pavement dwellers facing eviction by the Bombay Municipal Corporation, flying the 6 am flight to Delhi to secure a stay, returning the same evening. She fought for Air India air-hostesses who were being denied promotion because the airline treated them as ornaments. She stood beside Rupan Deol Bajaj when an entire country dismissed her complaint against KPS Gill — a police chief celebrated as a hero — with the question: what’s a pat on the back? Jaising’s reply in court remains characteristic. “Try it,” she told Gill’s lawyer, “and see what you get from me.”
Her chapters on personal law and secularism are the intellectual heart of the book. She argues with precision that uncodified religious laws, the real terrain where women lose their rights, exist in a constitutional no-man’s land. The 1951 Narasu Appa Mali decision created that shelter. Both judges held, for different reasons, that personal laws lay outside the reach of Article 13. The result was that the courts ceded their powers to priests and the ulama. Jaising finds this intolerable.
Her argument in the Shayara Bano triple talaq case was not that Islam could be interpreted to favour women. She refused that ground entirely. Her argument was simpler and more radical: the court itself, by recognising the practice, had made it law. And the court was the State. The State cannot make discriminatory laws.
She is equally unsparing about Sabarimala. Sex-based exclusion, she insists, is caste-based exclusion wearing a different garment. Both rest on the idea of the outcast. Until the Constitution reaches into the domain of personal laws without flinching, its guarantee of equality is hollow.
What makes this book worth reading, beyond the legal arguments, is Jaising’s refusal to sentimentalise her own journey. She does not write as a martyr. She acknowledges the men who treated her as a professional equal, the trade union lawyer KT Sule, past 60, who laughed with her over briefs. She is honest about the male chauvinism she encountered in a Delhi chamber whose politics were avowedly progressive. She notes, without self-pity, that when she moved to Delhi in 1989 with no position and no anchor, she simply worked alone.
The book was completed on January 26, 2026, Republic Day. The date was not accidental. The Constitution came into existence nine years after Jaising’s birth. She has spent her adult life insisting that it apply to the people it promised to protect. That insistence has not always been rewarded. On the evidence of this book, her enthusiasm for the Constitution has not been diminished by a single degree.
— The reviewer is a senior advocate
