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

in Hindu law or preventing the application of these reforms to their support groups.
    Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi was the most influential among the less conservative traditionalists. He considered precolonial India a collection of static and autarkic villages, wished to revive such a nonindustrial nation, and imagined a national tradition in which castes were interdependent occupational groups of equal status and landlords used land to benefit the entire village. To promote this vision, he organized improvements in the social conditions of the lower castes, tried to reduce untouchability practices in some villages, and supported initiatives to end child marriage and to give the lower castes access to temples. 22 Along with pluralist modernists like Nehru, he valued syncretism while wishing to recognize difference, and took the reform of Hindu society to be the main basis for making the Indian citizen. Moreover, most Indian nationalists, whether traditionalist or modernist, did not engage closely with mobilization among the religious minorities and were unfamiliar with the religious discourses in which these efforts were largely conceived, and so took the norms valued by the more influential minority leaders to represent the cultures of these groups.
    The less conservative traditionalists and modernists were predominant in the leadership of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) of the 1940s, and included the party’s two most popular leaders, Gandhi and Nehru. These informal factions thus had greater influence over early postcolonial policy, especially the initial proposals about personal law. However, conservative traditionalists and Hindu nationalists also accounted for a significant section of the political elite and the first two postcolonial parliaments, and so had a voice in policy making. As the movement to form Pakistan as a separate country for the Muslims of British India grew, certain major Congress Party leaders came to an agreement to continue the recognition of a distinct Muslim law with some Muslim religious elites that preferred to remain a part of India. Their focus on reforming Hindu society and their distance from non-Hindu cultural mobilization made them inclined to reform Hindu law, and to take minority accommodation to require the retention of the minority personal laws in their existing form. This was the case although various Muslim leaders had initiated more changes in Muslim law than had been made in Hindu law in the last colonial decades, and were open to further changes if the majority of Muslim political representatives favored them.
    III. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
    Chapter 2 develops the major arguments of the study by comparing Indian experiences with trends in various other developing societies in which personal laws specific to religious groups, sects, or ethnic groups that were based partly on religious and other cultural norms were recognized in the early twentieth century. It argues that the discourses of community that influence policy makers and popular mobilization interact with certain aspects of the relations between state and society and that these two factors influence approaches to cultural accommodation and personal law. This argument is developed through a critical exploration of the literature on family law and legal change, state formation, nationalism and cultural politics, secularism and public religion, and multiculturalism, with reference to the aforementioned experiences. Chapter 3 examines the formation of the Indian state’s approach to personal law in the first postcolonial decade, the reasons for the focus on changing Hindu law, and the specific changes introduced in Hindu law inthe 1950s. It highlights the introduction of rights to divorce—largely based on spousal fault and granted after a period of judicial separation, to indicate the forms of family life that state elites valued—and the compromise over inheritance rights, which indicated the