Hansa mehta biography of mahatma gandhi

In this post, Niraja Gopal Jayal traces the life of one of India’s pioneering feminists Hansa Mehta, whose personal choices as well as contributions to public life – driven as they were by her personal beliefs – blazed a trail for equal rights and opportunities for Indian women in independent India.  

In September , a young Gujarati woman, all of 22, sailed to Britain to study at the London School of Economics. Her name was Hansa Mehta, and she was to become famous as a nationalist leader, an early feminist, and the first woman Vice-Chancellor of a co-educational Indian university.

However, it is in the global history of human rights that Mehta occupies a special place. As India’s delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from –52, she championed the case for a gender-neutral phrasing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Mehta proposed the name of Eleanor Roosevelt as Chair of the committee that founded the Human Rights Commission and undertook the writing of an International Bill of Rights. The initial wording of Article 1 was ‘All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ Roosevelt’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook ( ) writes that Hansa Mehta, the only other woman on the Commission, ‘significantly transformed the document by her insistence that the words “all men” would in much of the world be taken to exclude women. Hansa Mehta influenced ER in many ways. The commission adopted her inclusive formula “all human beings” during its June session, and women’s equality was forevermore affirmed in UN literature.’

Having fought a lonely but eventually successful battle on this issue, Mehta was characteristically impatient with the time spent by the Committee on ‘enunciating high principles and discussing social theories’, as noted in her ‘Report on the work of the first session of the Commission on Human Rights 13 March ’ in the National Archives of India. Being of a

Education:  She received her Education from Baroda University as well as from London.

Biography:  Hansa Mehta Was Born in a Nagar Brahmin Family On 3 July

She was a Daughter of Manubhai Mehta, Dewan of Baroda State, And the Granddaughter of Nandshankar Mehta, The Author of The First Gujarati Novel Karan Ghelo.

She Graduated with Philosophy In She Studied Journalism And Sociology in England. In , She Met Sarojini Naidu And Later Mahatma Gandhi In

She was married to Jivraj Narayan Mehta, An Eminent Physician and Administrator.

She wrote Several Children's Books in Gujarati Including Arunnu Adbhut Swapna (), Bablana Parakramo (), Balvartavali Part (, ).

She translated some Books of Valmiki Ramayana: Aranyakanda, Balakanda and Sundarakanda. She translated many English Stories, Including Gulliver's Travels. She had also Adapted Some Plays of Shakespeare. Her essays were collected and published as Ketlak Lekho ().

Indian activist, educator, and writer (–)

Hansa Jivraj Mehta (3 July – 4 April ) was a reformist, social activist, educator, independence activist, feminist and writer from India. She was one of only two women delegates working alongside Eleanor Roosevelt in the UN Human Rights Commission ensuring the wording "all human beings" instead of "all men" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Early life

Hansa Mehta was born in a Nagar Brahmin family on 3 July in Surat, now Gujarat. She was a daughter of Manubhai Mehta, philosophy professor at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda) and later Dewan of Baroda State, and the granddaughter of Nandshankar Mehta, a headmaster of an English-language school, civil servant, and the author of the first Gujarati novel Karan Ghelo. Her mother was Harshadagauri Mehta.

Mehta studied at an all-girls high school at a time when, she estimated, only 2 percent of Indian women were literate. She graduated with Philosophy in She studied journalism and sociology in England. In , she met Sarojini Naidu during her education in England. Naidu would act as a mentor and brought her to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance conference in Geneva. She met Mahatma Gandhi in while he was in jail in India. In , Mehta came to the United States to visit institutions for higher education where she learned about women's education in America. In , she encountered Gandhi again when he called for women to join the freedom movement.

She was married to Jivraj Narayan Mehta, an eminent physician and administrator who was the first Chief Minister of Gujarat and eventually the Indian high commissioner to the United Kingdom.

She was expelled from the Nagar Brahmin caste

THE first glimpse I had of Gandhiji was in December when he attended the session of the Indian National Congress held in Bombay:' He had returned from South Africa in the beginning of that year, and gave an account of the position of Indians in that country and the battles he had waged to improve it. He was hardly audible. Clad in his Kathiawadi dress he looked unimpressive and out of place in the midst of the frock-coated and top-hatted gentry who formed the bulk of the Congress members in those days.

Years passed. I went" abroad, and as students we discussed the happenings in India. The non-cooperation movement launched by Gandhiji in , came in for, much.' criticism, in particular Gandhiji's appeal to students to leave colleges. Some of the students who had left colleges in India came to England to join the universities there, and we could not understand this action on their part. In , I returned home and landed the very next day after the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, had reached Bombay. At Gandhiji's bidding this visit of the Prince of Wales was to be boycotted. The boycott. resulted in a terrible clash in Bombay 'between the loyalists, mostly Parsis, and the Congress people. The Government of India was very much annoyed with Gandhiji, I,especially as the boycott was a great success., They waited for the Prince Of Wales to leave the shores of India before they arrested Gandhiji. When the news spread about his arrest there was. terrible tension in the country. I remember to have written an article later f-or a paper in England under the caption "Peace of the Grave!" Gandhiji was removed to the Sabarmati Jail, and people from all parts of the country poured in Ahmedabad to have a last darshan of him before he was thrown into prison or transported. I remember to have joined a batch of women from Bombay. We were taken inside the prison walls where Gandhiji was sitting. Shrimati Sarojini Naidu was there and introduced me to Gandhiji