Her ancestry is integral to her remarkable story, yet we appear reluctant to celebrate it. Must national pride depend on political approval?
Vivek MenezesMumbai Mirror · 25 Oct 2026, 4:00 am IST
She is the first woman of Indian origin to win the Nobel Prize after an extraordinary pioneering career in South Africa followed by the heights of international jurisprudence, but an entire fortnight has passed since the October 9 announcement, and the forthright and luminous 85-year-old Navanethem “Navi” Naidoo Pillay has inexplicably still not received any official congratulations from her ancestral homeland.
This stubborn cold shoulder makes no sense, as the veteran diplomat and former foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao tweeted a few days ago, “Her extraordinary life story belongs to the many-storied, often heroic history of Indian migration: oceans traversed, hardships endured, discrimination confronted and new homelands served with honesty and distinction. She is as much a daughter of India as she is of South Africa. Our national pride should be accommodating enough to embrace her independent conscience.”
In fact, Pillay’s astonishing rise from the Apartheid-era mainly Indian impoverished Durban suburb of Clairwood to the International Criminal Court, and six years of distinguished service as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has everything to do with her family background. She told Democracy Now earlier this week that “we didn’t have money [but] I wanted to do law. I wanted to know what are our rights, because even as children, we experienced discrimination. We couldn’t go to the beach. Our parents said, “No, we can’t take you to that park. You’re not allowed on the swings.” And we would ask, “Why? Why not?” And so, they made it out as if it’s written in stone, things will never change, you are a lesser being because you have a dark skin. That’s what children experience, which got to me. I wanted to know my rights.”
Pillay’s grandparents went from Batlagundu in the foothills of the Western Ghats in what is now Tamil Nadu to South Africa in the 1890s in the great wave of indentured servitude after slavery was abolished in the British Empire, when somewhere between one and two million Indian labourers were shipped across to Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Fiji, Suriname, Malaya, Jamaica, Réunion and Natal. They were extremely poor: her grandfather lost both arms in a mill accident, and her parents were not educated. Narrainsamy (who was a bus driver) and Santhama Naidoo had seven children to look after, but her mother prioritised education, which is how young Navi’s brilliance emerged into view. Eventually, the entire local Indian community cobbled together funds for her to attend The University of Natal.
In an elegant twist of history, Pillay learned about her Nobel while seated in Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice in Germany, the historic cradle of modern international criminal law including the framework against genocide. She told Democracy Now that was “very important” to her “because as an 18-year-old, when I was studying in apartheid South Africa [the] nonwhite students attended the university separately, in separate facilities, which in our case happened to be a potato warehouse, and I found these copies of the Nuremberg judgments. Nobody else had seen them. They were high up. I climbed a ladder, found some of them. And that started my interest in international justice, because in my country the laws were bad. They were immoral. So, I was very interested in us having some access to international justice or a system of laws that had values and principles behind them.”
After that, Pillay has been unstoppable for six decades: the first woman with her own law practice in Natal, the first South African to earn a doctorate from Harvard Law School, the first woman of colour on her country’s High Court (where she was appointed by Nelson Mandela in 1995), and among the most impactful legal minds on crucial questions about genocide and global human rights, cited by the Nobel Committee for being “a driving force in the development of an international system of law and order” and always demonstrating “judicial rigour, personal integrity and considerable courage.” She is one of the great heroes of our times, and as Shashi Tharoor posted on social media with entirely appropriate ire earlier this week, how can it be the land of her ancestors “hasn’t so much as congratulated her?! Shame on the petty men who have made such a deplorable decision.”
