‘I identified instinctively with the working woman’s concerns’: Indira Jaising in a new book
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[Ritu Menon:] Your taking up matters of workers’ rights – trade unionists, air hostesses, even pavement dwellers – was this an accident or a conscious choice?
[Indira Jaising:] I think it had a great deal to do with the fact that I was a woman and a first-generation lawyer. I had no role models to follow. There was no template for the kind of work I wanted to do. In many ways, that was my greatest advantage. I had the freedom to shape my identity, my practice and my choices entirely on my own terms.
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When I began practising, there were no collectives of lawyers working on social and economic rights. There were no NGOs in the sense we know them today, and no meaningful system of legal aid. The legal profession was dominated by traditional, family-run firms focused almost entirely on commercial law. There were individual lawyers who took up public-interest work, but there was no institutional support for the marginalised. The Lawyers’ Collective emerged from the need to collectivise legal services in the public interest and make them accessible to those who needed them most.
The generation of lawyers before me was largely preoccupied with the right to property. At that time, it...