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

intention to empower women while partly accommodating conservatives who wished to maintain patrilineal authority over property. Chapter 4 explores the changes that judges and legislators made in Hindu law since the 1960s, especially the increase in divorce rights—based on mutual consent or spousal fault without an intervening phase of judicial separation—and the extension of greater rights to daughters over family property. Chapter 5 discusses the experiences pertaining to the laws governing India’s two largest religious minorities, the Muslims and the Christians. It highlights the reasons why policy makers did not change these laws soon after independence although support for personal-law reform was comparable among Muslims and Hindus. Moreover, it investigates the changes in cultural and legal mobilization, litigation patterns, and policy makers’ knowledge and values that contributed to reforms in the minority laws since the 1970s—notably the extension of alimony rights and restriction of unilateral male repudiation among Muslims, and an increase in divorce rights and the equalization of divorce rights for men and women among Christians. This chapter also identifies certain ways in which policy elites’ majoritarian nationalist visions and limited knowledge of minority traditions and initiatives restricted the accommodation of culturally grounded demands for minority law reform. The Conclusion summarizes the major findings and indicates the likely directions of change in India’s personal laws over the next decade or two. It highlights certain lessons that may be drawn from the study about how multiculturalism and secularism may be revised in India and some other developing countries, and the forms of cultural discourse and political mobilization that would enable such policy changes.

CHAPTER 4
    RECASTING THE NORMATIVE NATIONAL FAMILY
    Changes in Hindu Law and Commonly Applicable Matrimonial Laws Since the 1960s
    MODERNIST POLITICAL ELITES HAD INDICATED the patterns of family life they wished to promote among Indian citizens through the changes they made in Hindu law in the first postcolonial decade. They valued the family as a monogamous nuclear unit, formed and maintained through the autonomous choices of partners, in which women enjoyed a measure of economic independence. This vision was in tension with their wish to encourage the maintenance of nuclear families even in face of serious marital problems, and with the preference of many of them to recognize the patrilineal joint family as a residential unit, basis of family identity, and property-owning entity. Chapter 3 showed that an inclination to consolidate broad social coalitions influenced how modernist policy makers resolved these tensions in the 1950s. The modernists signaled the value of conjugal autonomy by extending divorce rights while limiting the space to dissolve marriages, and expressed their commitment towomen’s economic independence by giving them rights to inherit separate intestate property. But, because their conservative allies attached greater value to the patrilineage and various forms of gendered familial authority, they also maintained lineage authority and aligned lineage identity largely with its male members by retaining jointly owned family property, devolving such property patrilineally, and restricting women’s access to such property.
    From the 1970s, changes were made in Hindu and commonly applicable matrimonial laws that made membership in nuclear families a more important basis of familial rights and responsibilities, departed from primarily patrilineal constructions of kinship and inheritance, and promoted conjugal autonomy and women’s economic entitlements in various respects. The main changes in Hindu law increased divorce rights based on mutual consent or on a wider range of spousal faults without the need for an initial period of judicial separation, and provided women easier access to family joint property and