What would the Hindu Code Bill have given women?
It would have rewritten the private law that governed Hindu women's lives from birth to death, and it is the most concrete thing Ambedkar ever did for women. Under the old law a woman could be one of several wives, could not divorce, and inherited little or nothing as a daughter. The bill set out to change each of these at once.
What it proposed
- Monogamy — one wife, ending the legal sanction for a man to take several.
- A right of divorce for women, where before marriage had been for practical purposes unbreakable from her side.
- Inheritance for daughters, giving a woman a share in family property rather than leaving her dependent on the men of the household.
- Rights in adoption and in the guardianship of children, recognising the woman as a person in the family's law rather than an appendage to it.
Parliament would not pass it whole. Facing fierce opposition, the government let the comprehensive bill lapse, and Ambedkar resigned over it in 1951. Much of its substance was then enacted piecemeal in the years after 1955, so that the reform he lost his office fighting for largely became law after he had left it. The point to hold onto is the cost: he paid for this reform with his seat in the cabinet.