Hima Kohli was the first lawyer in a family of businessmen, teachers and homemakers. She would later be the first woman chief justice of Telangana, and one of only 11 women to serve as a judge in the country’s Supreme Court.

“I did not plan on becoming a judge. You cannot plan to become a judge in any case,” she says, smiling. But, she admits, the journey was not an easy one.

Justice Kohli, 65, retired a month ago, after three years on the bench of India’s highest court.

Working with three senior lawyers early in her career, all of whom went on to serve as judges in the Delhi high court, helped give her an early headstart. Justices Sunanda Bhandare, YK Sabharwal (who retired as the 36th chief justice of India), and Vijender Jain served as mentors and guides. They treated her as a person with immense potential, at a time when this was not the way women lawyers were viewed.

Law was seen as a “tide-over” career, something a woman would do for a few years before marriage, Justice Kohli says. As a result, many senior lawyers were not inclined to take on young women law graduates, and when they did, they only entrusted the simplest cases to them.

“I am not blaming the men,” she adds. “They had seen others do the same. Let us not forget that is how our society worked too. That also has a role to play in such things.”

There were so few women advocates in Delhi when she started out, in the 1980s, that there weren’t any women’s toilets at the district court.

She recalls seeing women struggle to explain their career choices, in those “hard first five to seven years, which are the gestation period for a lawyer”. “I am grateful I did not have to run the kitchen fires or contribute financially to my family’s finances,” she says.

She saw women marry, start a family, step away, and return to find all their clients gone. Justice Kohli, who chose to remain single, saw the same women struggle to juggle cases, meetings with clients, and briefings with senior advocates, while being expected to return from work “on time” to take care of the home.

Some prejudices persist, of course, she adds. “When a woman is arguing in court and is interrupted, she may try to speak louder than her male counterpart, to keep from getting drowned out. She is often then called ‘too aggressive’. It is said that she ‘shouts’ in court.”

Even on the bench at the Delhi high court, “it was thought that a woman judge should handle family courts only or juvenile justice courts or child-related issues.” Far from being entrusted with core areas of jurisprudence, even on the administrative side, she recalls being told to fix the menus for a court event.

“When the chief justices, who were always and invariably men, selected judges to head important committees, they would lean by default towards a male judge. It wasn’t done with intention. It just came naturally.” It took years for her to learn to speak up, and figure out what to say. She began to respond to requests such as the one about menus with a simple line about how she could be entrusted with more significant tasks too.

“As you go up the ladder, you gain confidence, and are able to say things and assert yourself,” Justice Kohli says.

But that involves first acknowledging the issue, then facing it.

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By the time she was elevated to the Supreme Court, in 2021, the world had changed many times over. There were far more women lawyers and women’s toilets in every court.

But the trailing impact of decades of sidelining women continues to affect our courts, though, Justice Kohli says.

The average term of a judge in the Indian Supreme Court is five and a half years. Justice Kohli served just over three.

“My coming in as the ninth woman judge in the Supreme Court is all very well. I am grateful for the opportunity. However, my experience could have been tapped far better. The sheer paucity of time meant that the institution didn’t get the opportunity to benefit from my experience, which, in a manner of speaking, they could have, if I was brought in earlier.”

Many of the women who came before her, in this highest court of the land, she adds, were appointed or elevated in gestures that were more symbolic than anything else. Here too, the court and country did not benefit from their experience, as it could have.

“Most of them could not make it even to the Collegium (of five senior Supreme Court judges) that decides on judicial appointments and shoulders administrative functions.”

Institutionally, then, we still do not have a history of women who are seen to be deciding, doing, and effecting change at this level.

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When she looks back, Justice Kohli adds, it is her time as chief justice of the Telangana high court that seems most filled with action.

She was determined to make that bench inclusive and diverse. “Along with my colleagues in the collegium, we were able to find two women practitioners who were picked by us and both are now sitting judges of that court. Further, a woman lawyer was designated as senior advocate, for the first time since the Telangana high court was bifurcated from the Andhra Pradesh high court, in 2019.”

The overall strength of judges nearly doubled, from 23 to 42; pendency was reduced, Justice Kohli adds, and deferrals in court dates were reduced to a minimum rather than treated as the norm.

She served there for just eight months, before the elevation to Supreme Court. Then, just months after her return to Delhi, her mother was diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer.

She and her sister Neelu Kohli, a teacher, had lost their father in 1993. “Neelu was often the only person at home, to tend to our mother,” Justice Kohli recalls. “Working hours are what they are in court, you can’t change them. We had to work around all of it and not let it show in the public domain. The only exception I made was that, in her critical stage, I would keep my phone on my desk in court, at one side, just in case my sister tried to reach me.”

It wasn’t easy, she says. She was losing a parent in the midst of a pandemic. “And you can’t show any of that. You can’t really cut away from the family. But when you go to court, you must be completely there, absorbed in the brief. There cannot be a gap.”

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Looking back, she can’t believe how quickly it has all gone by, Justice Kohli adds.

She remembers, as if it was yesterday, being a young lawyer applying excitedly for a chamber in the Delhi high court, and realising that the wait was so long (at least three years), that she would have to work out of the boot of her car. “By the time I got my chamber, I had been elevated to the bench,” she says, laughing.

Now she intends to indulge her other passions: writing poetry, mentoring young people, and, finally, enjoying uncounted hours with friends and family.

And if a struggling young woman lawyer somewhere can read her story and think — “If that was possible then, maybe I can aim higher than I am aiming” — well, that will be the legacy she hoped for.

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