Overlooked No More: Hansa Mehta, Who Fought for Women’s Equality in India and Beyond

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Human rights has long been considered a Western concept, but recent scholarship has been uncovering the influence of women from the global south. Women like Hansa Mehta.

Mehta stood up against the British government during India’s struggle for independence. She campaigned for women’s social and political equality and their right to an education. And she fought for her ideals during the framing of the constitution for a newly independent India.

Mehta with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1949, when they were the only two women named as delegate to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.Credit…Marvin Bolotsky/United Nations

For Mehta, women’s rights were human rights. This conviction was best exemplified at a 1947 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, to which she had been appointed as one of just two women delegates, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt. Mehta boldly objected to the wording of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the commission was tasked with framing.