Hansa Mehta

Hansa Mehta was born on July 3, 1897 in Surat, a port city in Gujarat then part of the Bombay Presidency of British India ^[1]. Her family belonged to the Nagar Brahmin community, a group long associated with administration and scholarship in western India. Her father, Manubhai Mehta, served as Dewan, the chief minister, of the princely state of Baroda, and her grandfather Nandshankar Mehta wrote Karan Ghelo, widely regarded as the first novel in the Gujarati language ^[1][2].

Growing up in a household that prized books and public service, she received an education unusual for Indian girls of her generation. She studied philosophy and graduated from Baroda College in 1918 ^[2]. The state of Baroda under Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III had invested heavily in schooling, including for girls, and that environment shaped her lifelong conviction that education was the foundation of women's advancement.

After graduation she traveled to England, where she studied journalism and sociology in London ^[1]. The journey abroad widened her circle considerably. In England she met Sarojini Naidu, the poet and nationalist leader, and through Naidu she was later introduced to Mohandas Gandhi, encounters that drew her toward the Indian independence movement ^[2].

On returning to India, Mehta combined writing, teaching, and activism. She produced essays, translations, and stories for children in Gujarati, including adaptations of English classics, continuing a family tradition of literary work ^[2]. In 1926 she was elected to the Bombay Schools Committee, an early step into public administration ^[1].

Her marriage in 1924 to Jivraj Narayan Mehta, a physician who later became the first chief minister of Gujarat, caused a stir because he came from a different caste. The couple faced criticism for the match, but the marriage endured and both partners built prominent public careers ^[2].

The civil disobedience campaigns of the 1930s pulled her fully into nationalist politics. Answering Gandhi's call, she organized picketing of shops selling foreign cloth and liquor in Bombay, and she was arrested and jailed by the British authorities along with her husband ^[1][3]. In 1931, after many Congress leaders were imprisoned, she took on greater organizational responsibility in the Bombay movement. Elected to the Bombay Legislative Council in 1937, she served as parliamentary secretary for education and health, giving her direct experience of lawmaking that she would later apply on a national stage ^[2].

Any account of Hansa Mehta achievements has to begin with two documents: the Constitution of India and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was one of only fifteen women elected to the Constituent Assembly of India, the body that drafted the constitution between 1946 and 1949 ^[3][4]. Within the assembly she served on the Fundamental Rights Sub Committee and the Advisory Committee, arguing consistently for equality of status for women rather than reserved seats or special treatment. On August 14, 1947, on behalf of the women of India, she presented the national flag to the assembly moments before independence ^[3].

Her international work ran in parallel. As India's delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1947 to 1948, she worked alongside Eleanor Roosevelt on the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ^[4]. Mehta objected to the opening of Article 1, which originally declared that "all men are born free and equal". She insisted the wording could be read to exclude women, and pressed until it was changed to "all human beings are born free and equal" ^[4][5]. The United Nations has since credited her by name for this change, which fixed inclusive language into the founding text of the modern human rights system.

She was equally consequential in the women's movement at home. As president of the All India Women's Conference, she used her 1945 to 1946 term to advance a Charter of Rights and Duties for Indian women, and she campaigned for reform of Hindu personal law on marriage, inheritance, and divorce ^[2][3]. These efforts fed into the Hindu Code debates of the 1950s that eventually reshaped family law in India.

Education remained the thread running through her entire career. In 1949 she became vice chancellor of the newly created Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, making her the first woman to head an Indian university ^[1][2]. She held the post until 1958 and oversaw the institution's formative decade, organizing faculties, recruiting scholars, and establishing English as the medium of instruction in a period when many regional universities were moving away from it.

Under her leadership the university developed programs in home science, social work, and fine arts alongside the traditional disciplines. She treated the campus as a proving ground for her belief that women needed professional training, not just literacy, to participate fully in public life ^[2].

Her influence on Indian education extended beyond Baroda. She had earlier served as an executive of SNDT Women's University in Bombay, and she contributed to national deliberations on educational policy, including work connected with the University Education Commission chaired by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan ^[2]. She also represented India on the executive board of UNESCO, carrying her educational concerns into international forums ^[4].

Mehta's partnership with Jivraj Mehta lasted nearly five decades, until his death in 1978. Their marriage across caste lines in 1924 had required the quiet support of reform minded figures in Baroda, and it became an example frequently cited in discussions of social change in Gujarat ^[2]. The couple had two children.

She wrote throughout her life in both Gujarati and English. Her Gujarati output included children's literature, travel writing, and translations, among them a rendering of parts of the Ramayana and adaptations of Shakespeare for young readers ^[2]. In English she published essays on education and the position of women in India, collected in volumes such as Indian Woman ^[2].

Those who worked with her described a reserved, methodical temperament rather than a fiery platform manner. She preferred committee work, drafting, and institution building to mass oratory, and her effectiveness in the Constituent Assembly and at the United Nations owed much to that patient, textual style ^[3].

After stepping down from the Baroda vice chancellorship in 1958, Mehta gradually withdrew from front line politics but remained a respected voice on education and women's questions. In 1959 the Government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan, the country's third highest civilian honor, in recognition of her public service ^[1][3].

She spent her later decades largely in Bombay, following the growth of the institutions she had helped create: the university in Baroda, the All India Women's Conference, and the constitutional framework she had helped write. The legal reforms she had championed in the 1940s, particularly the Hindu marriage and succession acts passed in the mid 1950s, took effect during these years and validated much of her early advocacy ^[2].

Hansa Mehta died on April 4, 1995 in Mumbai at the age of 97 ^[1]. Her death drew tributes recalling her role in the freedom struggle, her university leadership, and her quiet but decisive intervention in the language of international human rights.

Anyone asking who was Hansa Mehta today is most likely to encounter her through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2018, during the declaration's seventieth anniversary, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres publicly credited her with changing Article 1 to read "all human beings", and UN Women has repeatedly highlighted her as one of the women who shaped the document ^[4][5]. That single amendment has been cited for decades as the reason the declaration cannot be read as a charter for men alone.

In India her name is attached to institutions she served. The Hansa Mehta Library at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, one of the larger university libraries in western India, commemorates her vice chancellorship ^[2]. Scholarship on the framing of the Indian constitution has increasingly recovered the contributions of the fifteen women members of the Constituent Assembly, and Mehta features prominently in that literature for her positions on equality, uniform civil law, and fundamental rights ^[3].

Her career offers a compact set of Hansa Mehta facts that still surprise readers: a woman jailed for picketing foreign cloth who later edited the world's central human rights text, a legislator who presented free India its first national flag, and a university head appointed at a time when women rarely ran any public institution. Any full Hansa Mehta biography ends where she began, with education, since she argued to the end that rights on paper meant little without schools that taught women to claim them ^[2][4].