Malati Choudhry: A fierce, feminine legacy

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Malati Choudhry: A fierce, feminine legacy

Malati Choudhry was unlike any political leader with regular political aspirations, her life and ambitions were earthy and simple like a commoner. She was a woman whose heart throbbed for the upliftment of the unprivileged. With Tagore’s flame and Gandhi’s neutrality, she lived a life, while making the world a better place for others.

Malati Choudhry in her prime, Source: Google Images

India’s Independence was a phenomenon that can never be ascertained with full comprehension, as it was the result of debatable decisions which lead to destructive outcomes. One thing can be said with utmost certainty that the country’s freedom was equally aspired by all the members. Slogans of nationalism and freedom, a regular chant on the lips of every man and woman alike. India came together as a nation, united to achieve the long-denied freedom, many freedom fighters were martyred in the process but when the country finally saw the sun of freedom, it was the country’s lawmakers and leaders who had the greatest responsibility to make India a great nation it always deserved to be.

For this, the enactment of a constitution was a must, and the greatest responsibility in front of the constituent assembly who were deputed to carry on the respectful and sensitive task to write the Constitution of a country which has gone through many challenges and seen many black days. The Constituent Assembly headed by Dr. B.R Ambedkar, therefore was that team with a mission to write the guidebook of a nation that needed to be built from a piecemeal level, keeping in mind the infinite complexities of diversity.

The members of the Assembly had the prospect of being remembered as heroes if they successfully enacted a Constitution which would equally and rightfully recognize every Indian, respective of their differences. To answer the question of women and their rights, 15 women were appointed to represent their sentiments and needs.

Though the gender ratio was equal by no means, these 15 women were so striking in their prime that they were enough to outshine the men when it came to charisma, courage, and intellectual understanding. Of these women one was Malati Choudhry, a woman not known by the popular, but loved by the people who needed different, that is the masses, all deprived and denied.

Malati was born in 1904 in a Nepalese Brahmo family. The daughter of a prominent lawyer and a writer, Malati’s upbringing was intellectually superior. Though for most of her life, she walked on ideologies, mainly influenced by Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings. At the tender age of sixteen, Malati first visited Tagore’s Shantiniketan and immediately immersed herself in his teachings. Tagore’s ideology was quite different from a common perspective because he called ‘Nationalism a menace’.

His teachings mainly involved the encouragement of education to eradicate the social prejudices from the minds of Indians. It was intellectual freedom that Tagore promoted and soon young Malati was highly influenced by Tagore’s subtle beliefs.

She practiced fine arts like dancing, singing, and drama as well while indulging in Gurudev’s sermons, which greatly refined her personality as a woman who would soon leave a great impact on the lives of the unknown and ignored.

Malati Choudhry nonetheless, was a woman of unclenched determination and so she wrapped up her role as a member of the Constituent Assembly, giving chief priority to women but most of her work was conducted outside the political arena, in the social sphere, addressing the pleas of the masses. She died at the grand and fulfilled age of 93. Those who knew Malati would claim the fact that a strong woman like her was an angel and no one like her ever walked the face of this earth again.

It was in Shantiniketan that she met her future husband, Nabakrushna Choudhry, a fellow Gandhian and Tagore follower and they were engaged. In 1927, they left Shantiniketan as a couple. Her husband would be the future Chief Minister of Orissa while she would undertake various social initiatives on the ground level, a reputation that would earn her a position in the Constituent Assembly.

The most extraordinary quality about Malati Choudhry was her determination to serve those who were point blankly ignored and forgotten during all the fervor of Independence. Oppression of women, female infanticide, and lack of education opportunities, were some of the social issues that existed during the freedom struggle but were nonetheless ignored by leaders who were undividedly focused on India’s Independence. Choudhry worked for these people, addressing their needs at a time when no one even acknowledged their existence, she was always there for the underprivileged masses.

Her working ground was mainly Orissa, the state her husband belonged to, the state she was married into. It also happens to be the state which was one of the most underprivileged states of that time. In 1933, she established ‘Utkal Congress Samajvadi Karni Sangh’, later becoming ‘The Orissa Provincial Branch of the All India Congress Socialist Party’. Through this association, she predominantly worked towards improving agricultural needs like irrigation, share-cropping, etc. Orissa being a highly oppressive state there was a lot of scope for addressing the social as well as economic issues.

So it was quite natural that when Choudhry secured herself a place in the Constituent Assembly on 9th December 1946, she came forward to represent the plights of the marginalized part of the population, that is, the uneducated, the poor, and women. This was the reason which posed a problem for Choudhry because she felt restless and aimless in all the national priorities of the Constituent Assembly. She failed to find a truce with the objectives of the nationalists, so much absorbed, she was in the concern of the local and lonesome.