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Remembering a Pioneer
The Inaugural CB Muthamma Annual Lecture 2023
Speakers
C B Muthamma, born on the 24th of January, 1924, was the first woman to join the Indian foreign service in 1949. She was a noted diplomat in many areas in Asia, Africa and Europe, serving as India’s ambassador to Hungary and to The Hague.
Muthamma was the pioneer in fighting for gender equality in the Indian civil service, which was heavily male-dominated in her time. She went to court challenging discriminatory rules which prevented women from rising to the top of the foreign service, and also had clauses which demanded that women in the foreign service seek special permission before marriage. Her case was upheld in 1979 in a landmark judgement by a three-member bench with the court emphasising the need to overhaul all service rules to remove the stains of sex discrimination.
Since then, women have been able to reach the highest rank, that of foreign secretary, in the Indian foreign service. And to celebrate Muthamma’s life and remarkable, inspiring achievements, the inaugural C B Muthamma lecture is being given by Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao, a scholarly former foreign secretary of India.
Speakers
Nirupama Menon Rao
Nirupama Rao is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. She retired as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, the senior most position in the Foreign Service, being the second woman to occupy the post (2009-2011). She was the first woman spokesperson (2001-02) of the Indian foreign office. She served as India’s first woman High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Sri Lanka (2004-2006) and to the People’s Republic of China (2006-2009). She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. In retirement she has been a Senior Visiting Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University where she has taught an undergraduate seniors course on “India in the World” and George Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Ambassador Rao was a Fellow at the India-China Institute of The New School, New York in 2016 and a Public Policy Fellow at The Wilson Center, Washington D.C. in 2017. She is now a Global Fellow of The Wilson Center. She was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow from 2015-2016 and a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy in 2017. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and a Councillor on the World Refugee and MigrationCouncil. She has an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (2012) from Pondicherry University. . She is a staunch believer in the power of social media as an advocacy platform for policy and currently has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter. In 2016, she received the Vanitha Ratna Award from the Government of Kerala. She also received the Fellowship of Peace Award of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Center in Washington D.C in 2018.
Ambassador Rao is a Founder-Trustee with her husband, Sudhakar, of The South Asian Symphony Foundation a not-for-profit Trust which is dedicated to promoting mutual understanding in South Asia through the creation of a South Asian Symphony Orchestra.
Her most recent book is ‘The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China, 1949 to 1962’, published by Penguin Random House.
