Professor Werner Menski once shared with me a story associated with Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer—or so it survives in my memory. I cannot establish that conversation through any archival record, and I must not transform memory into evidence. Yet the story deserves to be recorded cautiously—and investigated seriously.
Justice Krishna Iyer remembered a woman called Lalmuniya.
She belonged to that India which entered the Supreme Court before the judges arrived and disappeared before constitutional history began writing its footnotes. She cleaned its premises. Whether she formally occupied a sanitation post in the Supreme Court establishment, worked through a contractor or some other arrangement, or belonged elsewhere in Delhi’s institutional world, I do not yet know. The Court’s service structure historically contained the post of Jamadar (Safaiwala), but I have found no publicly accessible employment record connecting Lalmuniya with it.
In the remembered story, Justice Krishna Iyer discovered that Lalmuniya could perform another valuable service: she could bring him newspapers. He would give her a little extra money and tell her, in substance, not to bring only the newspaper that agreed with him, but to bring the others as well—English, Hindi, Urdu and Tamil newspapers.
Lalmuniya would collect those newspapers and cut out what had been written about the Court, its judges, politics and public affairs. Her scissors travelled across languages that she herself may not have read fluently. Yet that was precisely the beauty of her work: she did not need to understand or agree with every printed word in order to preserve it. She carried disagreement without censoring it.
The story further suggests that Justice Krishna Iyer would sit with those cuttings and, at times, discuss what different newspapers were saying with others in the judicial world around him. Whether every detail occurred exactly in this manner is a question that must remain open until the archives answer it.
That uncertainty produces the most painful truth in Lalmuniya’s story. We can find Justice Krishna Iyer’s judgments. We can find the names of the Chief Justices. We can find newspapers published during that period. We can even find the Supreme Court’s old service rules. But today, I cannot find Lalmuniya.
The woman who spent her working life cutting and preserving the public record of powerful men may have been left almost entirely outside the public record herself.
Perhaps her name is still waiting somewhere in the Supreme Court’s establishment registers. Perhaps it appears in Justice Krishna Iyer’s papers, in Professor Menski’s correspondence, or in the fading memory of someone who once worked in those corridors. Until those sources are examined, intellectual honesty requires us to leave one line of her life blank.
Lalmuniya carried everybody else’s page. We are still searching for hers?
