370 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Mr. Chairman : There is no point of order in this, as long as he is a Hindu, he can speak.
- Shri H. V. Kamath : I shall also answer the point of order. Sir, rising, as I do, after two lawyer friends and a woman friend, I fear I am labouring under a handicap. I have neither the legal argument of my honourable friends Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava and Mr. Sarwate, nor the sweet reasonableness of my honourable friend Shrimati Renuka Ray. As far as the lawyers are concerned. I am sure that my honourable friend the Law Minister will take care of them and will reply to the arguments that they have raised in the course of their speeches today. As regards Shrimati Renuka Ray, I am broadly in agreement with her and so there is no need for me to take up any of her arguments with a view to counter them.
My honourable friend Mr. B. Das raised a point of order when I stood up. That very point of order, I think, goes in my favour. I feel that my only claim to speak on this measure before the House is that because I have neither a wife nor children nor property worth the name, I can bring to bear a dispassionate mind to bear on this subject, unswayed by emotions of the heart. Most of the provisions of this Bill relate to marriage and property, adoption and succession, provisions regarding matters which could be summed up in two words of most of our philosophers, namely, kamini and kanchan. Not having been so far encumbered with either, I hope I will have your indulgence and the indulgence of the House in making a few remarks on this Bill in a more or less disinterested manner, not uninterested, but disinterested manner.
This century, the 20th Century after Christ has, as we all know witnessed the emergence of women upon the stage of history, in Asia, as well as in Europe and America. India and our Hindu society have been no exception to this world movement. Fatefully interlocked with all the revolutionary upheavals which in our own time have been ripping open and transforming old societies inherited from the nineteenth century and its long past are the relations between men and women. Our age has been marked by the dynamism of women who, with men, have set the world on fire. ( An honourable Member: “But you are an exception.”) and have also helped to frame plans for the world’s reconstruction. Breathes there, I ask, a man with soul
*C.A. (Leg.) D., Vol. II, Part II, 25th February .1949, pp. 934-36.