Fearless advocacy: Indira Jaising on law, feminism, and challenging the status quo

Supreme Court Justice BV Nagarathna recently opined that “fearless advocacy is synonymous with Ms Indira Jaising’s advocacy”.

A first-generation lawyer and India’s first woman Additional Solicitor General, Jaising forged her path through the legal profession armed with extraordinary determination, intellectual rigour, and courage. Over the course of her career, she has shaped some of the most significant rights-based jurisprudence in the country.

She successfully argued one of India’s earliest landmark workplace sexual harassment cases, advocated for the invalidation of the practice of triple talaq, and championed the rights of street vendors by defending the fundamental right of informal workers to earn a livelihood. Jaising also fought for equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala, expanding the promise of equality under the law.

In her personal life, she made choices that defied the expectations placed on women of her generation. She initially rejected the institution of marriage, and later chose not to have children, refusing to measure her life against conventional markers of womanhood. She has always been guided by a determination to live on her own terms rather than by society’s prescriptions.

“What I did not receive was support from male judges. They were often obnoxiously chauvinistic.”

Now 86, she recounts these stories in her memoir, The Constitution Is My Home: Conversations on a Life in Law, co-authored with publisher Ritu Menon.

Instinctively, my first question to her was, where does she draw her courage from?

“I never saw it as courage when it was happening. Only in hindsight—and in today’s climate, where fear has become the norm—does it seem so. At the time, it was simply spontaneity,” she insists. Jaising recalls a few instances. “When I was sexually harassed in the corridors of the Supreme Court, I turned around, grabbed the man by the collar, and asked, ‘What is it that you want?’ He fled, and it never happened again. Likewise, when judges tried to put me down in court, I would stop and ask them what exactly they thought they were doing beyond judging the case,” she shares

The book sets its tone and speaks to you from its very epigraph. “Preparing a case is like a pregnancy—over nine months, the idea takes shape and grows in the mind. That is why I believe only a woman can argue a case well,” says Jaising.

Partly a joke and partly serious, she criticises lawyers who run from court to court chasing work. “How can you do justice to a case if you are handling several matters in a single day?” she asks. “In other constitutional courts, lawyers often take up only one major case every few months—the kind of time needed to prepare properly and do justice to the issue.”

In the memoir, Jaising looks back on what it meant to be in the legal profession at a time when courtrooms, chambers, and corridors of power were overwhelmingly male spaces. As a young, first-generation lawyer trying to establish herself, I often found support from an unexpected quarter. “It was women clients who stood by me,” she reminisces.

Among the cases that would come to define her early career were those involving Air India air hostesses, who challenged discriminatory service conditions that reduced them to objects of appearance rather than recognising them as skilled professionals. Representing these women exposed Jaising to the structural ways in which inequality was embedded in institutions and workplaces. “Those cases shaped me as a democratic lawyer,” she insists.

Jaising says she found appreciation from her male opponents. “What I did not receive was support from male judges. They were often obnoxiously chauvinistic,” she reveals. But she has never hesitated to call out even a whiff of sexism she sensed in a judge’s undertone. She recalls a specific instance when a judge remarked, “We have had the pleasure of hearing you,” even as the matter was being dismissed. As a woman lawyer appearing before an all-male bench, she tells me she found it particularly unsettling. She responded to the judge by saying, “I do not come to court to give anyone pleasure; that is for outside court.” The remark left the judge momentarily taken aback. Judges, she observes, are often unaccustomed to having their language questioned or being told that such expressions are unacceptable.

That’s Indira Jaising for you. Even today, she continues to find joy in appearing before the courts. What sustains her, she says, is the evolving nature of law and the sense that it is never fully settled or complete. She finds particular fulfilment in constructing new arguments for newer challenges, hoping to shape the law in service of marginalised communities.

For her, the most enduring part of her professional career has been the people she has represented over the years. “The legal profession is a fiercely independent and powerful one when it chooses to be. You depend on no one  except those you represent, and they have stood by me through thick and thin.”

Why do you call The Constitution your home, I ask her. “Because my faith in it is akin to having faith in my own body. Just as one trusts the body to sustain life, I believe that if one does not let the Constitution down, it will not let one down,” she says. In the book, Jaising recalls that when she began her career, she had no role models to follow. While the absence of any predecessors made the experience daunting for her, she used it to her greatest advantage, shaping her own identity and practising on her own terms.

Decades later, Jaising has come to embody for many young women the very role model she did not have. The only advice she has for you is to be wholly and unapologetically fearless. That, she says, is the ultimate secret to the lives of all feminists. 

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's June-July 2026 print issue.

Lead image: Courtesy Harper Collins India 

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