Sacred laws and the secular state: An analytical narrative of the controversy over personal laws in India

Mitra, Subrata Κ.; Fischer, Alexander

doi:10.1080/14736480208404635

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…35-41;Hasan, 2002, p. 386). The reason why the Shah Bano case caused so much protest and communal violence is that, in an effort to justify their rulings in Islamic terms, justices of the Supreme Court, who were all Hindus, had literally engaged in ijtihad (independent legal reasoning) and reinterpreted the Islamic law of maintenance by quoting verses from the English translation of the Quran in their judgment (Mitra & Fischer, 2002). In short, the Hindu justices argued that the Islamic provisions of nafaqa had been wrongly interpreted by the Muslims and, according to their "correct" interpretation, the Holy Quran had enjoined the Muslim men to make additional provision (mata) to their divorced wives.…”

Section: Questioning Indian Secularism In the Aftermath Of The Shah Bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Unification and Nation Building in the Post-colonial World: A Comparison of Israel and India

Sezgin

2009

The Journal of Comparative Asian Development

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How do states consolidate their legal systems? Do all states follow the same trajectory of state-building and legal unification? And, particularly how do post-colonial states respond to legally pluralistic regimes that they inherit at the time of independence? These are some of the questions that this article will attempt to shed light upon by closely analyzing the Israeli and Indian states' responses to polycentric legal systems that they inherited at the time of their independence. Offering an alternative theory of state-building and legal unification, the present study will not only explain how leaders of these two countries responded to the challenges posed by polycentric jurisdictions but also contribute to our understanding of state, nation-building and legal consolidation in the post-colonial world by re-examining some of the theories and approaches that have long come to dominate the literature.

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Section: Questioning Indian Secularism In the Aftermath Of The Shah Bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Unification and Nation Building in the Post-colonial World: A Comparison of Israel and India

Sezgin

2009

The Journal of Comparative Asian Development

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“…After colonization, British laws were introduced to Indian society. Disputes regarding marriage and divorce, inheritance, sex‐based ownership, guardianship, adoption, and alimony, however, remained settled through the distinct religious laws of each community (Ganguly, ; MacKinnon, ; Mitra & Fischer, ; Parashar, ). The application of religious communities' laws to personal matters led to the notion of religious and personal laws as interchangeable (Parashar, ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Mitra and Fischer (), personal laws have persisted in Indian society largely because of the efforts made by those opposed to both the majority Hindu interventionist state and a Uniform Civil Code. Consequently, personal laws continue to govern Indian families.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Religious freedom and gender equality in India

Mehta

2015

Int J Soc Welfare

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After India gained independence in 1947, the country's leaders promised its diverse constituents citizenship rights that extended across religion, gender, and caste. Distinct from its previous British rule, India's constitutional law guarantees citizens the right to religious freedom and associated cultural practices, and prohibits gender and caste‐based discrimination. However, in ensuring freedom of religion, the constitution also effectively affirms gender inequality through patriarchal religious and cultural practices. This article examines how the constitutional rights of religious freedom and gender equality have been negotiated among each other in contemporary Indian society. I draw upon three landmark Indian Supreme Court cases that navigate the terrain of affirming both women's civic rights and religious freedom. Findings suggest that the Supreme Court is working toward a more inclusive definition of citizenship, particularly one which supports women's civic rights within the context of religious personal law.

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“…By one count, over twenty such social reform acts, impinging on both religion and gender, were passed between 1865 and 1939. 11 Thus there was a fairly striking contradiction in the late colonial period between the rhetoric of non-interference and the absence of attention to gender and women's rights in debates over Hindu personal law on the one hand, and the virtual onslaught of (gendered and religious) social reform legislation on the other.…”

Section: The Early 1920s Debates: British Colonial Civilisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The More Things Change: Debating Gender and Religion in India's Hindu Laws, 1920–2006

Williams¹

2013

Gender & History

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Gender historians of South Asia have illuminated the multiple ways in which gender and religion were constitutive of colonial rule in British India. In this article, I argue that this historical legacy has seeped into the present: that gender and religion have constituted postcolonial rule as well, in ways that are both similar to, and different from, the colonial era. To show this, I focus on debates over Hindu religious laws over time. Copious and insightful historical and political analyses have examined religious laws or debates, or single pieces of legislation, generally in one time period. 1 But comparative studies of religious laws in India, comparing either across religions or across time, have been relatively scant in the literature. 2 This study uses temporal comparison to reveal what snapshot analyses cannot, illuminating both what has changed and what has not in the gendered and religious construction of state legitimacy in colonial and postcolonial India. Like the British colonial state, the Indian postcolonial state sought to reform religion (by reforming religious laws) and constructed women as symbols of progress and modernisation, thus underpinning its legitimacy to rule and manifesting its own postcolonial version of the civilising mission.The study shows important changes, as well as continuities, in the debates over time. Two key changes were in the terms of the debates and the participation of women legislators in them. The terms of the debates shifted from a focus on religious textual authenticity to an almost exclusive concern with gender equity and women's rights; and where no women participated in the earliest debates, by 2006 they were the primary participants. The first set of debates took place in the early 1920s and centred on whether codifying the Hindu personal laws would do more to preserve or to undermine their religious textual authenticity. The second major set of debates took place in the 1940s and 1950s, during a transitional period as India approached independence and the colonial state reconfigured itself as a postcolonial state. In this period, the debates showed an inherent tension between a traditional(ising) and a modern(ising) vision of the new Indian nation, while both visions remained fundamentally religious and gendered. Finally, the most recent debates in 2006 were conducted overtly on the basis of gender and women's rights, even as religion recededGender & History to the background. Thus these debates came (back) full circle most explicitly to the historical place they may never have left: the modern refiguring of the post/colonial state's (gendered and religious) civilising/modernising mission. The arc of the debates over time suggests that, where British colonists held that Indians were unfit to govern themselves based on the status of 'their' women, the postcolonial Indian state has sought to prove its fitness to govern by seeking to improve the status of 'its own' women.These changes, in turn, suggest what has not changed over time, and that is the fundamentall...

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Sacred laws and the secular state: An analytical narrative of the controversy over personal laws in India

Cited by 13 publications

References 7 publications

Legal Unification and Nation Building in the Post-colonial World: A Comparison of Israel and India

Legal Unification and Nation Building in the Post-colonial World: A Comparison of Israel and India

Religious freedom and gender equality in India

The More Things Change: Debating Gender and Religion in India's Hindu Laws, 1920–2006

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