Gender Law And Resistance In India

Theft, poisoning, affairs, flights home, refusals to work, eat or have sex, threats to divide the joint household, and sly acts of sabotage are some of the domestic warfare tactics employed by Muslim women attempting to resist patriarchy. Gender, Law, and Resistance in India dramatically illustrates how a patriarchal ideology is upheld and reinforced through male-governed social and legal institutions and how women defy that control. Based on anthropological fieldwork in rural Rajasthan in northern India, Erin Moore's book details the life of an extended Muslim family she has known for twenty years. In many ways the plight of the central character, Hunni, is representative of dilemmas experienced by the majority of north Indian peasant women. Ultimately an account of cultural hegemony and defiance, Gender, Law, and Resistance in India reveals how so-called "modern" state institutions and practices reinforce traditional arrangements, resulting in women being silenced, deprived of equal rights before the law, and returned to their male guardians. Still, women resist in overt and covert ways. The first ethnographic work to focus principally on the law and legal institutions of gender and agency in South Asia, this unique volume examines the interpenetrations of north India's pluralistic legal systems. Moore adeptly connects engrossing case histories to national dialogues over women's rights, discussing these issues in terms of Muslim personal laws, secularism, and communal violence. Gender, Law, and Resistance in India is a rich and truly significant contribution to gender studies, South Asian studies, and sociolegal studies.

Living in pluralist India has had critical consequences for Muslim women who are expected to follow a determined and strict code of conduct. The impact of this contradiction is most evident in the continuing denial of gender equality within the family, as state regulation of gender roles in the private sphere ultimately affects the status of women in the public sphere. Reclaiming the Nation examines the relationship between gender and nation in post-colonial India through the lens of marginalized Muslim women. Drawing on feminist legal theory, postcolonial feminist theory, and critical race theory, Vrinda Narain explores the idea of citizenship as a potential vehicle for the emancipation of Muslim women. Citizenship, Narain argues, opens the possibility for Indian women to reclaim a sense of selfhood free from imposed identities. In promoting the hybridity of culture and the modernity of tradition, Narain shows how oppositional categories such as public versus private, Muslim versus feminist, and Western versus Indian have been used to deny women equal rights. A timely account of the struggle for liberation within a restrictive religious framework, Reclaiming the Nation is an insightful look at gender, nationhood, and the power of self-determination.

Cutting-edge research from India finds bargaining power predicts whether electoral quotas can empower women to upend economic inequality.

Offers a feminist analysis of the legal regulation of women in India, looking at both the limitations and possibilities of the role that law can play in women's struggles for social change. Explores the extent to which assumptions about women's identities as wives and mothers limit the promise of legal equality and discusses issues such as the moral and economic regulation of women, the impact of new economic policies, and the Hindu Right. For those involved in feminist legal studies, sociology, gender studies, law, and postcolonial theory. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book provides an invaluable analysis of the current trends of the debate on Uniform Civil Code located within a highly charged and communally vitiated political scenario. It goes on to expose the communal undertones of some recent well published judicial pronouncements.

‘Rewriting Resistance: Caste and Gender in Indian Literature’ explores the claustrophobic shadow of discrimination hanging over Indian women and lower caste people from ancient times. It examines how different literary figures paint a vivid and descriptive picture of the physical and psychological oppression faced throughout India. The book traces feminist resistance, subaltern resistance, and resistance during the anti-colonial struggle, with the literary outputs discussed working as socio-political activity against dominant ideologies. The volume further talks about the responsibility, not only of those oppressed, but also of us as human beings, to speak out against the violation of human rights and for justice. So, the book focuses on the literary writers who always dream of a better India where all people, regardless of their caste, class and gender, can live and breathe freely. The book is divided into three parts. Part I describes the plight of women, their commodification and the politics around them, and how they fight hard to regain their faded identity. Part II depicts the interesting findings on gender-caste intersections and discrimination. Part III explores the struggle of the low caste, specifically male members of Dalit community, along with their history. It further portrays how orthodoxy in rituals creates the burden of traditional and existential crises. ‘Rewriting Resistance: Caste and Gender in Indian Literature’ re-visits Indian literary texts in terms of what they reveal about the resistance registered through the suffering of human beings (women and Dalits) at the hands of fellow human beings, and further links the discussion to our contemporary situation. The book has a unique quality in that it is not only a detailed study of select Indian English texts, but also delves into an in-depth analysis of texts from Bengali, Urdu, and Hindi literature. The work is likely to affect and appeal to students, scholars and academics, and can be adopted for classroom teaching and research purposes as well.

This book critically examines gender-based violence in India and interrogates the legal and policy discourse surrounding it. It discusses various forms of violence faced by women such as sex selective abortion, trafficking, rape, domestic violence, as well as the violence faced by female sex workers and transgenders in India. It draws on in-depth interviews and case studies to highlight the socio-economic conditions of the survivors who find themselves forced to contend with legal and policy framework that is inadequate to deal with these issues. The author analyses the major laws against violence and the policies introduced to ameliorate the condition of survivors in order to understand the potential and challenges of these initiatives from a postmodern and feminist perspective. The book also addresses the survivors' realisation of agency and resistance which is seen to be expressed both sporadically and on day-to-day basis. An important and timely contribution, this book will be indispensable to students and researchers of gender and sexuality, feminism, minority studies, sociology and social policy, politics, law, human rights and South Asian studies. It will also be of interest to policymakers, government agencies, think tanks and NGOs working in the area.