5 min readAug 15, 2026 06:35 AM IST First published on: Aug 15, 2026 at 06:35 AM ISTOn this day in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru promised the country dignity and opportunity, adding that the pledge would be redeemed “not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially”. Seventy-nine years on, it’s worth asking: Which part of that promise did Indian women actually receive?Simone de Beauvoir wrote that one is not born a woman but made one. In Indian households, this translates into daily instructions: Sit properly, do not laugh loudly, that job is not for you, ask permission. NO. Shh.AdvertisementThis year, I didn’t just read that sentence, I lived it. Revathy, a fellow actor, and I resigned from an actors’ association in Kerala we’d belonged to for years. Walking away was self-respect. What lingered was the harder question: What does independence mean if you can enter a room but never get to run it?The issue isn’t only that women don’t get to run the rooms they enter. It’s that we haven’t fully entered most rooms that matter. India produces the world’s highest share of female STEM graduates, yet only 27 per cent reach the STEM workforce. Women hold under 30 per cent of teaching posts in central universities. Among senior advocates, women constitute 3.4 per cent. Women hold just 13 per cent of key department-head roles in entertainment, and at India’s leading newspapers, 87 per cent of editors and proprietors are men.Kerala’s reckoning makes the point better than any statistic: Be it the Hema Committee report or the allegations and cases that continue to surface across universities, the music industry and cultural institutions. Different stages, same script, same silence beforehand.AdvertisementOn the rare occasion a woman reaches the top of her field, another ceiling awaits. An actress can become the biggest star in her industry and still find the door to directing and producing shut, unlike a male co-star with a fraction of her following. A sportswoman can lead her country to a World Cup and still have little say in how her federation is run.Somewhere between being visible and being in charge, female ambition gets relabelled: Difficult, too emotional, not a team player. Expected to absorb it quietly, she gets a word for it when she does: Resilient. We should be less impressed by how well women endure and more curious about why endurance keeps being the job requirement.I read an essay this year by a woman describing the 13 years her assault case was in court, how she was sorted endlessly into victim or liar, fragile or ambitious. A complicated person is harder for the system to process than a label. The recent acquittal in the wrestlers’ harassment case belongs here too: A courtroom decides one man’s guilt, but can’t answer whether an athlete has real recourse when the person she complains about also controls her career.Set against all this is the argument that our laws favour women who pose as victims. Researchers looking for evidence keep finding none. What exists, reliably, is a conviction rate for crimes against women, stuck around one in four, with 19 of 20 cases still in trial. A system rigged in our favour is doing an astonishingly terrible job of it.The label problem got personal for me this year. A daughter arrived and turned one recently, and the news coverage fixated almost entirely and incorrectly on my age. Male actors, on the other hand, become fathers to celebratory headlines, not an audit of their birth certificates. It’s the same old instinct of reducing a woman to a label easiest to print, skipping the part where she’s an actual person.you may likeHere is what freedom should mean this August 15 — walking home at the hour a brother does, without a lecture attached; unpaid work counted as work, not personality; being believed the first time, not the fourth. And for a one-year-old who joined this argument without being consulted, never having to be extraordinary just to receive the dignity that should have arrived with her birth certificate.Beauvoir wrote: “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.” She wrote that in a world still deciding whether women deserved a vote. It does not have to remain true by the time my daughter is old enough to read. That’s the only inheritance worth arguing for this Independence Day.The writer is an actor, producer and co-founder of the Women in Cinema Collective