Ingenious Women: Democracy, Gender and the IP System in Colonial India (1930-1948)
Assistant Professor Priya Mirza (University of Delhi) and Assistant Professor Tania Sebastian (Vellore Institute of Technology)
Tuesday 16 February 2027 | 6:30 PM (New Delhi, India) | Check your time zone
The correlation between citizenship, patents and democracy is part of the scholarly discourse in many countries. This paper aims to look at the landscape of intellectual property law in colonial India and intertwines it with the awareness of women’s movement in property rights. While the women’s movement in colonial India was marked by a visibility in the public sphere, with challenges to colonial and religious orthodoxy, there were very few women applicants for patents during this period. The paper bridges the parallel but interconnected trajectories of women’s rights to property, and evident patent consciousness in colonial India.
The historical trajectory of the law was as follows: the first statutory law to protect inventions was introduced by the Act VI of 1856, in colonial India. Unsurprisingly, not a single Indian patentee filed a patent application. Revised in 1911, there were several impediments to Indians filing for patents: the English language, education and the underpinning ideas of patentability. While the transfer of technology is often the focus of studies on patent cultures, this paper is a social history of patenting law in colonial India. It resonates with Swanson’s (2022) argument on race and gender in American history, that being inventive was intricately tied into the hierarchy of race and gender. Building on our existing work that Indian patentees in the late colonial period (1911-48) were predominantly men who benefited from an access to bureaucratic positions and technical education in the 1930s (Mirza: 2023), we now turn our attention to women. By braiding the gendered silences and gaps in the archives, this paper intertwines archival material, with women’s corresponding visibility in shaping democratic rights.
Priya Mirza teaches at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Her work is primarily on historicising sovereignty and gender in colonial and postcolonial India, with a focus on the Indian princely states. She is interested in looking at histories of technology, specifically patenting and aviation. She is presently working on her book on civil aviation: Plane Women: A Social History of Indian Air-hostesses (1940s-2010). She has published in journals such as Third World Quarterly and History and Technology.
Tania Sebastian is an Associate Professor of Law at Vellore Institute of Technology, School of Law. She has 17 years of legal experience across academia, research and practice. Previously, she practised before the High Court of Delhi, and worked as a Researcher at the Delhi State Judicial Academy and Indian Social Institute, Delhi before entering academia. Her scholarship is a mix of policy issues concerning access to medicines and its intersection with patent law, and gender studies and IP in the context of the Global South. Her latest works are on issues surrounding AI governance and related challenges in a range of matters: water, environmental challenges, personality rights, deep fakes, bias and copyright. She has received numerous research grants, has published over 20 articles in law reviews and peer-reviews journals and book chapters.