Abstract
Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, women leaders in the Indian subcontinent placed nation-building at the core of their intellectual and political pursuits. The report of the sub-committee on Women’s Role in Planned Economy (WRPE), a part of the National Planning Committee (NPC), formed in 1938, encapsulates their thought on women’s equal role and status in the emerging post-colonial Indian state. This paper foregrounds the report’s economic thought and socio-political discourse as an attempt to make the nation-building project more gender-just. As a heuristic device, the report enables us to locate the women architects of modern India and gauge the possibilities and limitations of their feminist thinking in the institution-building process. In doing so, the paper draws upon primary sources, including official reports, the personal writings of the women members of the sub-committee, their biographies, hagiographies, and the feminist historiography in general.