The Government of India Act 1935: The Construction of Indian Women as ‘Minority’

Abstract

There are several scholarly works devoted to the Government of India Act 1935, enabling us to identify specific influences behind particular clauses of the aforesaid Act. Unfortunately, there is no scholarly exposure as to what made the British Raj construct Indian women as a ‘special constituency’ and placed them alongside a potpourri of ‘special’ constituencies, designed to balance out antagonistic elements in the Indian body polity. Going by the logic that ‘labour’ counterweighed ‘landholders’, communal constituencies, namely, ‘Muslims’, ‘Scheduled Castes’, ‘Indian Christians’, ‘Anglo Indians’ and ‘Europeans’, counterweighed the Hindu majority, it escapes comprehension why Indian women should be conceptualised as a political counterweight to Indian men. The idea of women as minority was a racist constitutional innovation unknown in the Anglo-American world. This episode has received scant attention from scholars, a lacuna this article hopes to fill by discussing how and why Clause 10(b) or the ‘monogamy clause’ was inserted into the fine print of the Sixth Schedule of the Act by Eleanor Rathbone, Chaim Weizmann’s bosom friend and protégé, setting aside the vehement objections and representations of all Indian delegates present at the Round Table Conference in a case of British Might crushing the colonial Indian’s Rights.