Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India Read Online Free PDF Page A

legal elites, and bureaucrats led to other family-law reforms in the colonial period; the most important of these set and then increased the minimum marriage age andthe age of consent, and enabled the remarriage of Hindu widows. Moreover, they set the stage for postcolonial debates regarding family law. 19
    B. Indian Nationalism and Legal Reform
    The Indian nationalists who became politically dominant after the First World War varied in their understanding of the nation, their inclination to recognize cultural difference, and the relative emphasis they placed on the revaluation of indigenous traditions and the transformation of these traditions to meet colonial standards of modernity; they engaged to different extents with particular social and religious currents. Despite these differences, the majority of them agreed about certain features of social reform. They aimed for culturally grounded reforms in social practice and personal law that would promote post-Enlightenment ideals such as social equality and individual liberty in certain ways, but did not propose to systematically vet personal law with reference to these ends. Virtually none of them wished to follow the Turkish example of rapid secularization of certain areas of public life, attacks on religious institutions and symbols, and the importation of Western institutions and legal systems in their entirety, although they shared a commitment to build a secular state with Turkish republican leaders.
    Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the most influential modernist nationalist by the 1940s, favored the formation of a centralized state that would foster economic development along the lines followed by industrialized societies during the interwar period, the establishment of parliamentary democracy, the adoption of official multiculturalism and secularism, and the judicious promotion of social equality through measures such as land reform, the provision of preferential policies for the lower castes, the promotion of women’s education and employment, and the enhancement of lower-caste access to public spaces such as places of worship. He considered these the appropriate ways to revive the earlier national glory associated with kingdoms led by Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jains, and to promote interreligious cooperation. While valuing syncretic cultures, Nehru wished to recognize certain distinctive features of group culture. Modernists like him wished to change the personal laws, and initially Hindu law, to promote equality and liberty, but largely based on the relevant group’s legal and normative traditions as they saw them. 20
    The more conservative traditionalist Indian nationalists, such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Madan Mohan Malaviya, viewed the nation as an aggregate of distinct cultural groups with largely static cultural traditions. They resisted efforts to promote caste mobility and reform the personal laws to give women greater rights and extend individuals greater liberties, and were wary of syncretic practices. Such conservatives opposed an increase in the age of consent from ten to twelve in the 1890s, an increase in the minimum age of marriage for women from twelve to fifteen in the 1920s, and efforts to increase Hindu daughters’ inheritance rights and give both Hindu men and women divorce rights in the 1950s. Both their celebration of certain Hindu festivals as Indian nationalist rituals and their efforts to maintain social boundaries enabled them to build alliances with Hindu nationalists, who connected Indian national revival to Hindu political and cultural supremacy, valued the cultures of the upper and upper-middle Hindu castes of northern and western India, and wished to assimilate other groups into many of these groups’ practices. 21 This alliance led the opposition to Hindu law reform in the 1940s and 1950s. While the Hindu nationalists voiced a preference for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) even then, they focused on preventing most proposed reforms