With the demise of professor Vina Mazumdar in the early hours of May 30, an era in the history of women’s movement in India has come to an end. She was 86, and was probably the last of a generation of women’s movement leaders that includes professors Lotika Sarkar (who passed away a few months ago) and Neera Desai (who died in 2009).

Mazumdar was a national research professor at the iconic Centre for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi, of which she was the founder-director. She had, in 1974-75, penned ‘Towards Equality’, the report of the committee on the status of women in India, the first-ever assessment of the condition of women in the country.

How she came to author this landmark report is interesting. In a feature on Mazumdar, the Outlook magazine (read it here) reports that she was asked to take charge of the country report in May 1972 after the original committee members drafted to pen the report for the international women’s decade resigned after wasting two years without writing a word. The government, dreading a loss of face before the United Nations, approached Mazumdar. Though she was beset with worries of her own — “a very small flat, little money, and rebellion from adolescent daughters”, as she told the magazine — Mazumdar accepted the challenge.

Having donned the mantle, she went to the farthest corners of the country to listen to women talk about their lives. She and Sarkar, who was also on the committee, recommended reservation for women in politics. That was a complete about-turn for her, she admitted to the magazine. “We were the first-generation beneficiaries of the equality clause in the Constitution,” she had said.

Mazumdar’s conversations with other women, some from the most marginalised and disenfranchised communities, convinced her that reservation was the only way to safeguard the equality women had been guaranteed.

‘Towards Equality’ set the tone for the later decades of women’s movements, largely focusing on political empowerment.

Pamela Phillipose writes (read it here) of the report’s significance: “There were major silences in the Report and Mazumdar recognises that the Committee did not pay sufficient attention to the issues of rape and dowry. Yet, it is no exaggeration to say the Committee on the Status of Women in India Report, which came out in 1974, changed the way the country regarded its women. It countered assumptions of the millennia, undermined government mindsets, helped unleash innumerable mutinies, and changed policies and laws. In fact, it was revolutionary in its impact, all the more remarkable for having emerged just before one of the darkest periods of recent Indian history - the Emergency. If the Committee, and its Member-Secretary, did not have friends and supporters in the establishment, it may have never seen the light of day. Today, decades later, Mazumdar, recalls with what one would imagine an impish smile, "Before the rest of the government could realise what the Report contained it was placed before Parliament, a report very critical of the Government of India”.”

Often called the ‘grandmother of women’s studies in South Asia’, Vina Mazumdar brought out her memoir, ‘Memories  of a Rolling Stone’, just two years ago, at the age of 84. Educated in Kolkata, Benares Hindu University and Oxford, she had taught at Patna and Berhampur universities. As an academic, she left indelible impressions on some who have shaped various policies of our country — former finance minister Yashwant Sinha and former foreign secretary Muchkund Dubey being just two of them.