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Feb 23, 2013- Professor Lotika Sarkar  passed away this evening at around 8.30pm at home. The funeral will be held tomorrow, Sunday 24th at 1:00 pm, at the Electric Crematorium, Lodi Road, New Delhi.

She was   India‘s first woman to graduate from Cambridge and a champion of women’s rights,

Professor Lotika Sarkar was widely-known pioneer in the fields of law, women’s studies and human rights. She taught criminal law and conflict of laws at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi and has been an active member of the Indian Law Institute. She was a member of the Government of India‘s Committee on the Status of Women in India and has been a founding member of several institutions—the Indian Association for Women Studies and the Centre for Women‘s Development Studies.

Lotika Sarkar played a crucial role in several path-breaking legislations for gender justice. A Cambridge-educated lawyer by training, she was the first woman teacher of law at the University of Delhi.

Lotika Sarkar, RIP. One of the original Painted and Dented Ladies, she and three other professors of law wrote the landmark Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India in 1979, which sharply criticised the Supreme Court’s judgement in what has come to be known as the Mathura rape case and thereby catalysed the first major campaign for changes in the laws relating to rape back in 1980. It’s so important to remember and honour pioneers like her.

Read here Writing the Women’s Movement: A Reader