The day an Indian woman took power by Avani Devi

On January 19, 1966, Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India. It was a political event, of course, but it was also something quieter and more radical: a psychological earthquake. A woman stepped into the highest office of the world’s largest democracy at a time when most Indian women were still being taught to lower their eyes, soften their voices, and shrink their ambitions to fit inside kitchens and courtyards. History records the date. Women felt the tremor.

To understand what that moment meant, you have to imagine the everyday reality of Indian womanhood in the 1960s. Education for girls was growing, but slowly. Employment outside teaching or nursing was rare and often frowned upon. Marriage was destiny, not a choice. Politics belonged to men with starched shirts, thick glasses, and louder opinions than conscience. Power wore a moustache.

Then came Indira Gandhi, slight, unsmiling, draped in cotton saris, her hair streaked with premature gray like a declaration of seriousness. She did not arrive waving the banner of feminism. She did not speak in the language of liberation or sisterhood. In fact, she often resisted being labelled as a “woman leader” at all. She insisted on being judged simply as a leader. That insistence itself was revolutionary.

For many women, her rise did not immediately change laws or wages or social customs. Fathers still controlled daughters. Husbands still controlled wives. Villages still whispered when a woman spoke too boldly. But something subtler shifted. The ceiling, once invisible and unquestioned, suddenly had a crack in it.

Representation is not a small thing when you have been trained to believe you are small.

A woman occupying that chair in Parliament House disrupted the story Indian society had been telling itself for centuries: that authority was masculine by nature. Indira Gandhi’s very presence contradicted the idea that leadership required a deep voice, a heavy fist, or a male lineage. Ironically, she did have a lineage, Nehru’s daughter, born into politics but she also carried the burden of proving she was more than a surname. When critics dismissed her as a “goongi gudiya,” a dumb doll, women across the country recognized the insult. They had heard it all their lives in different forms.

And then they watched her refuse to be one.

She ruled with a firmness that unsettled many men and complicated the feelings of many women. She was not gentle. She was not nurturing in the way society expected women to be. She was commanding, sometimes ruthless, often lonely. And that too was a lesson: power in a woman does not look like softness with better manners. Sometimes it looks like steel wrapped in silk.

For urban women, especially students and professionals just beginning to imagine careers, Indira Gandhi became proof of concept. Proof that ambition was not a moral defect. Proof that authority did not rot a woman’s femininity. Proof that a woman could be feared, respected, criticized, and obeyed on a national scale.

For rural women, her impact was more symbolic than practical, but symbolism travels far in places where opportunity does not. Her photograph in newspapers, her voice on the radio, her face on posters, these were small rebellions pinned to mud walls and tucked into memory. A girl fetching water could now picture a woman commanding generals. A mother bent over a stove could say, even if only once, “Our country is run by one of us.”

That mattered.

Of course, symbolism is not salvation. Indira Gandhi did not dismantle patriarchy. She did not rewrite domestic hierarchies. She did not build a nation where women were suddenly safe, equal, or free. Many women continued to live lives of quiet endurance, limited choices, and inherited silence. Her government did not center women’s rights as its mission.

But history is not only shaped by policies. It is shaped by permission.

Her leadership gave women permission to imagine themselves differently. Permission to speak a little louder in classrooms. Permission to argue with fathers about education. Permission to apply for jobs that once felt absurd. Permission to think of themselves as citizens first, daughters and wives second.

There is something deeply political about imagination. Once a woman can imagine herself in power, she becomes harder to govern through fear alone.

Indira Gandhi’s tenure would later become controversial, stained by authoritarian decisions and the dark chapter of the Emergency. She remains a complex figure, neither saint nor simple villain. But complexity does not cancel significance. Women do not need their icons to be perfect; they need them to be possible.

On that January day in 1966, possibility took human form.

A woman stood at the center of the Indian state and refused to apologize for her authority. She did not represent every woman’s struggle, but she cracked open the door through which millions would eventually walk, some cautiously, some angrily, some running.

And once a door to power is opened by a woman, it never truly closes again.