Ammu Swaminathan was born in Palakkad district of present day Kerala in 1894. Her ideas reflected a feministic outlook from a very young age and this continued to manifest in her activities as a social reformer and politician. Her career both before and after Independence shows qualities of resilience and fortitude as she bravely stood up against the injustice around her and actively worked to bring about structural change as well.
What I will talk about here is an incident from 1943 that happened in the Vellore jail. Ammu Swaminathan had been arrested and jailed after she participated in the Quit India movement in 1942. “One of the inmates saw a woman sanitary worker and called out to her as ‘Shudrachi’, making her ‘low caste her identity’. Annoyed, Ammu walked up to her and said, ‘Yes, tell me’. The confused woman said she was calling the sanitary worker, to which Ammu, who was born into a Nair family, but considered them as shudras as well, replied: “I am a shudrachi too. Now say what do you want.” Subhashini Ali, the granddaughter of Ammu, remembers her feisty grandmother with great pride, adding, “She was very conscious of the arrogance of the upper-caste and constantly tried to unsettle them by standing against it”.
Ammukutty, as she was fondly called, was fearless in thought and action, evident in her lifetime as social worker and politician. One of the most recollected stories about Ammu’s strong, assertive nature is when she agreed to get married at the age of 13 to Subbarama Swaminathan, a man twenty years her senior. Closely associated with her father P Govinda Menon, Swaminathan came back after his studies in England and asked to marry any of Menon’s daughters. He was informed by Ammu’s mother that Menon had died and all their daughters, except Ammu, “the youngest daughter who was like a tomboy”, had been married off. Swaminathan is said to have proposed marriage to the teenager who replied unhesitatingly that “she did not mind” but had her own conditions. These included a shift to Madras, learning English from an English woman so that she could master the language perfectly and not be asked what time she’d reach home, because “nobody asked her brothers that question”, Subhashini recollects.
Swaminathan agreed to the conditions and the two married in 1907. The Nair Sambandam system—where children did not inherit their father’s property and men were exempted from responsibilities towards their wives and children —was well accepted in the matrilineal Nair families in those days. Swaminathan and Ammu’s family found the practice repugnant and were against it. They had a proper wedding, which was, however, “boycotted” by Swaminathan’s family because he was marrying outside caste. He, therefore, married Ammu again and registered their marriage in England.
It was around 1914, that Ammu became politically active. According to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Women in World History, she formed the Women’s India Association in 1917 in Madras, along with Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, Malathi Patwardhan, Mrs Dadabhoy and Mrs Ambujammal. The WIA addressed the economic issues and problems of women workers. It was one of the first associations to demand adult franchise and constitutional rights for women. She became part of the Constituent Assembly from the Madras Constituency in 1946. While Ammu would go on to vehemently oppose discriminatory caste practices in her personal and political life, her support for “equal status, adult franchise and removal of untouchability” was complete. Having been at the receiving end of the practice of child marriage herself, she fought hard for the Sarda Act or Child Marriage Restraint Act, Age of Consent Act and the various Hindu Code Bills that pushed for a reform in Hindu religious laws.
In 1946, she was elected to the Constituent Assembly from Madras and was one of the very few women involved in the drafting of the Indian Constitution. She spoke on fundamental rights and directive principles. Although she was happy with the final draft that the Assembly passed, she criticised it for going into too many details and becoming a very lengthy volume.
In a speech during the discussion on the motion by Dr B R Ambedkar to pass the draft Constitution on 24 November 1949, an optimistic and confident Ammu said, “People outside have been saying that India did not give equal rights to her women. Now we can say that when the Indian people themselves framed their Constitution; they have given rights to women equal with every other citizen of the country.”
Piece by-
Ishta Kaushal
ishta020@gmail.com
About the Author:
Ishta is currently pursuing her Bachelors in Commerce (Honors) with Minors in English Literature from Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. She comes from the hills of Shimla, which is where she took to reading really early on moulding her into the ardent reader that she is today. According to her it would be quite unfair on her part to call herself a feminist, if she couldn't contribute to a feminist community right in her college i.e. the Women’s Development Cell.
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